At the moment it is difficult to see how an inflexible rule of 20 per cent. margins could be put in practice without seriously interfering with really sound business. A telegraphic order may be received from a customer of the utmost responsibility who may happen to be in Europe. Any stockbroker, and any business man in mercantile trade, would be glad to execute for such a person all the orders he chose to entrust, regardless of margins. In such a case no question of motive enters into the transaction; it may ultimately prove to be a speculation pure and simple, or the buyer may cable instructions to deliver the securities to his bank, in which case it would seem to be an investment; but, regardless of that, an insistence by the broker on a 20 per cent. margin would be silly, and would merely drive the business elsewhere or prevent it altogether. Numerous instances of a similar sort might be cited to show how difficult it would be to enforce margin prohibitions in all these perfectly legal contracts. Germany tried it in the law of 1896, with disastrous consequences, which I have described elsewhere. It is a matter that will always be a fruitful topic of discussion, yet it differs in no essential respect from the practice of a speculator in real estate who pays down a small percentage of a purchase price and borrows the balance on mortgage. It is similar to what the merchant does when he fills his shelves with goods bought with a fractional payment in cash and the balance at some future date. In all these cases involving property let me repeat that the deposit of a specified sum by the principal and an agreement or contract with the broker is a perfectly valid transaction.[24] That newspaper criticism and attacks by social mentors should go to extreme lengths in deprecating stock speculation by crude, greedy, and unsophisticated people is perhaps, after all, a perfectly useful function, and if such critics err in going to great extremes, that too may be set down as right and proper, for it is perhaps better to go too far than not to go far enough. The interests of the Stock Exchange are the interests of the whole country; its welfare depends upon an intelligent and thrifty people; its aims are public-spirited and patriotic. Whatever it may lose in the way of business from ignorant and silly people who are driven out of blind speculative undertakings leading to losses which they can ill afford, it will gain tenfold in imparting sound information through candor and publicity. On the other hand, unless we are prepared to abolish property altogether, do away with the instruments of credit, and suppress all forms of trading designed to supply our future requirements, we may as well reconcile ourselves to the inevitable and take what comfort we may in the reflection that prudence, thrift, and foresight are not to be eliminated, merely because the proletariat below stairs sometimes indulges in speculation and suffers the consequences of its folly.