The caution of French investors is proverbial; notwithstanding the two outbursts of imprudence that have occurred in this generation, it is difficult to induce the Frenchman to place his money in anything not a safe interest-yielding security under French laws. In no other country is investment raised to a higher plane, and speculation confined to a lower one. The political nature of the relationship between France and Russia has resulted from time to time, in patriotic subscription of French funds to Russian government loans, and thence to Russian industrials of all kinds, but the latter have suffered so severely in the demoralization of the autumn of 1912 as to justify the prediction that their popularity with the French has been seriously impaired. As to Russian government loans, the French investor is in a secure position, most of these issues having been endorsed by such powerful banks as the Bank of France, the Credit Lyonnais, the Comptoir d’Escompte, and the Société Génerale, and, indeed, it is to banks such as these and to the myriad smaller institutions throughout the country that investors of the peasantry and the middle classes are accustomed to turn for advice in financial matters. The large speculative clientele, as we know it in America, in England, and in Germany, is a decided minority in France, and those who indulge freely in speculation are canny and shrewd beyond their fellows in other lands. The foresight with which they diagnosed the events of the Boer War in 1899, and the celerity with which they disposed of their large speculative holdings of South African mining shares at top prices, is said by those who witnessed it to have been a prodigy of speculative skill.