The truth seems to be that all investment is speculation, differing from it in degree but not in kind. This salient fact was recognized as long ago as 1825, when, despite the comparatively limited field for investment enterprise, McCulloch saw what was coming and grasped the true idea of the part speculation and its handmaiden, investment, were to play in the industrial renaissance. Coming at a time when speculation was new, and subjected, as all innovations are, to widespread criticism and doubt, his words have prophetic significance. “It is obvious that those who indiscriminately condemn all sorts of speculative engagements have never reflected on the circumstances incident to the prosecution of every undertaking. In truth and reality they are all speculations. Their undertakers must look forward to periods more or less distant, and their success depends entirely on the sagacity with which they have estimated the probability of certain events occurring, and the influence which they have ascribed to them. _Speculation is, therefore, really only another name for foresight_; and, though fortunes have sometimes been made by a lucky hit, the character of a successful speculator is, in the vast majority of instances, due to him also who has skilfully devised the means of effecting the end he had in view, and who has outstripped his competitors in the judgment with which he has looked into futurity, and appreciated the operation of causes producing distant effects.”[20] A quarter of a century later we find England’s foremost thinker sounding the same clear note. John Stuart Mill was by no means a hermit philosopher feeding on theories. Traveler, sportsman, business man, statesman, and author, he saw things broadly and wrote for practical men. “Speculators,” he said--and he was speaking of the “greedy” ones who buy and sell for gain--“have a highly useful office in the economy of society. Among persons who have not much considered the subject there is a notion that the gains of speculators are often made by causing an artificial scarcity; that they create a high price by their own purchases and then profit by it. This may easily be shown to be fallacious.” He then shows, what I have outlined elsewhere, that the market is larger than any speculator or group of speculators, and, if this was true in 1848, I think it will not be disputed that it is quite true to-day.