“A period of collapse followed this episode. After various minor upheavals there came in 1910 the rubber boom, which, perhaps with the Kaffir Gamble, more nearly recalls the excitement of 1720 than any other. The rubber boom had not, indeed, the same noble backing which the South Sea Company boasted; but clergymen and ladies were prominent operators as ‘bulls,’ ‘stags,’ or both.”[117] The thought will no doubt occur to an American who reads these pages, whether the day will come when American banking will extend, as in England, to every quarter of the globe, and whether the New York Exchange, like its London prototype, will become a centre of the world’s commercial activities. This is a far cry, of course, and the answer will not be known in our generation. But it may be said without fear of contradiction that when a great nation like ours, in which the spirit of enterprise is manifest, has reached the point where its own domain has been developed, when it has perfected a sound banking and currency system, when it has recovered its lost shipping and mastered those economic lessons that the future has in store, it may confidently be expected to push out into new lands and supply their demands for capital. Already we have in America a world’s storehouse of necessary commodities, with wealth and intelligence that increases by leaps and bounds. No nation stands a better chance of escaping the horrors of war and its ruinous losses. China remains a fertile field for commercial endeavor in the years to come, and our neighbors on the south may one day know us more intimately. The retrospective eye, surveying commercial and financial America in the sixties and contrasting it with America of to-day, sees clearly that progress has been made, and looks beyond toward progress to come. In any case civilization must advance and trade expand, and American energy must advance and expand with them. I wish I might visit Wall Street and the Stock Exchange a century hence.[118] CHAPTER X THE PARIS BOURSE; A MONOPOLY UNDER GOVERNMENT “Patriotism makes it a duty for us to acknowledge the fact that the Bourse represents one of the live forces of France,” wrote Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu in one of the finest tributes ever paid to a Stock Exchange. “It has been for France an instrument of regeneration after defeat, and it remains for us a powerful tool in war and in peace. Let us recall the already remote years of our convalescence, after the invasion, years at once sorrowful and comforting, when with the gloom of defeat and the suffering of dismemberment, mingled the joy of feeling the revival of France. Whence came our first consolation, our first vindication before the world? Whether glorious or not, it originated on the Bourse.”