Yankee speculation in securities is not a marker to speculation in London, where the day to day trading vastly exceeds ours, and where the “Kaffir Circus” of 1894–5 and the “Rubber Boom” of 1909–10 exceeded any similar outburst ever known in America. France is the most prudent and thrifty of nations, yet the Panama mania which collapsed in 1894, although followed by a period of the utmost repentance and conservatism, found a parallel in the crazy French speculation in Russian industrials which crashed in 1912. There was an extraordinary speculation in Egyptian land and financial companies in Cairo in 1905–6, which, in proportion to the number of participants, greatly exceeded any boom in New York. China awakens slowly, but, once its political reforms are effected, a field of extraordinary speculation will open there without a parallel in history. The Chinaman is not only a shrewd and competent business man, but he is, Mr. Hirst tells us, “a confirmed and incurable” speculator. “From time to time,” says this writer, “the Shanghai Stock Exchange becomes a scene of the wildest speculation, and it is safe to predict that, when a new China is evolved, Stock Exchanges will spring up in all the large towns. Of this, a foretaste was afforded in the spring and summer of 1910, when Shanghai caught the rubber infection from London. All classes and races took part, but the native Chinaman plunged deepest. When the break in prices came, one Chinese operator was so heavily involved that, on his failure, many of the native banks had to suspend payment, with the result that for months the trade and credit of this great shipping and business centre were disorganized.”[26] I mention these incidents to show that speculation is not confined to geographical limits. It is all a part of the “divine unrest” inherent in each of us, and it develops and grows intense just in proportion with the march of the civilization it serves to benefit. In new countries, as in China, it may often go too far; sometimes in old countries it oversteps the bounds of prudence, but any student of these phenomena knows that, as economic processes become understood by the masses, the intervals of time between the panics that result from over-speculation grow wider and wider. Another mistake of those sections of the country that do not understand the Stock Exchange results from the indiscriminate blending of that institution with Wall Street. Let us hear from Mr. Horace White on this point. He was the chairman of the last committee that investigated the Stock Exchange; he is one of our foremost economists, and he may be assumed to understand his subject: