A word should be said about the methods of London stockbrokers in carrying stocks for their customers, because this also is quite different from the practice in New York. Here the strongest houses rarely loan stocks, unless attracted by unusual rates of interest; in London it is the common practice of even the best houses to carry-over, or as we term it, loan, a great part of the commitments entered into during the account. One reason for this is that in London customers buy their stocks outright more frequently than is done here. Scalping small profits is not practised on anything like the New York scale. Most of the stocks dealt in do not pass from hand to hand like American stocks, but must have a transfer form with the name and address of the buyer and seller attached to the certificate. There is also a government stamp-tax of ½ per cent. on the money involved, which tax must be paid by the buyer when the stock is transferred to him. When the buyer sells this stock he may not have immediate use for the proceeds, and so, instead of delivering the stock standing in his name, he instructs his broker to borrow it from account to account, thus receiving interest on his money. The tax is a heavy one--figured in American money it amounts to $50 per hundred shares at par--and the Englishman very naturally resorts to methods such as these to recoup at least a part of it. Again, from the stockbroker’s point of view, if he buys securities on margin for a customer, he (the broker) must either carry them with the jobber or with another broker, or he will have to pay the government tax himself. Naturally he hastens to loan them, because, should the client sell the securities in the course of the next account when they would have to be delivered, the broker would lose the tax. He avoids this loss by instructing a jobber to contango or carry-over the securities until the following account day. On the other hand, if the broker is certain that his client has purchased his securities for a long pull on a margin basis, he will often pay for the stock himself, transfer it to his own name, and willingly submit to the government tax, knowing that he can recover the outlay from the handsome rate of interest charged the client. Another vital point of difference between the London and the New York Stock Exchange lies in the nature and volume of the business done. Americans are prone to think of their foremost Exchange as one which, in the volume and extent of its transactions, compares favorably with the great Bourses of the world; they like to think of New York as the financial centre of the universe, and they paint rosy pictures of America as a great creditor nation. But they err in each of these ambitious dreams. The New York Stock Exchange, with all its magnitude, cannot compare with its London prototype; New York is by no means the financial centre of the world, and America is not a creditor, but a debtor nation.