In a larger sense, if the critic in these matters affecting the relationship of banks to stockbrokers feels aggrieved at what he thinks is an improper diversion of funds, he must remember that the comparative scarcity of capital to-day--which is at the bottom of his complaint--is not due in any sense to Stock Exchange speculation, for there has been almost no extensive speculation in this quarter from 1907 down to November, 1912. To find the cause of the scarcity of capital--and it is unquestionably scarce--he must consider the immense destruction of tangible wealth in the last decade, and the extraordinary tendency to convert floating forms of capital into fixed and immobile forms. The amount of money expended in State roads since automobiles came into popularity is probably ten times more than it was before; at the election in November, 1912, a fresh total of $50,000,000 was voted for “good roads” by the electorate in New York State. The building of the Panama Canal has cost or will cost about $365,000,000; all over the country large municipal or state works are under construction; here in New York the contract for the Erie Canal calls for $150,000,000, and for the city’s new water-supply system--the Ashokan basin and the Kensico reservoir--$177,000,000, each contributing a share to the depletion of the normal supply of working capital. Meantime, to cite another instance, Congress appropriates $160,000,000 to pensions in a single year, and $40,000,000, as a recent writer puts it, “for that particular form of graft which consists in giving a $30,000 post office to a thirty-cent village.” The railroads of the country alone require to-day sums of money equivalent to the working capital represented by all our bountiful harvests of 1912. Aside from these matters the critic should remember, in fair play, that the currency famines which occur with periodic frequency in our country are due in large measure to the non-elastic nature of the currency, to its persistent absorption by the Treasury, and to the rigid restrictions which these abnormalities impose on the volume of banking credit. Conditions such as these contributed in no small measure to our last great panic, and led to a premium on currency that made us a laughing-stock among the nations. There has been no such money delirium in England since the Napoleonic wars; no such condition in Germany since the empire was founded, and nothing approaching it in France, even in the commune and the war with Prussia. Yet in America we go on wobbling uncertainly under the makeshift act of 1908, with its currency associations and its emergency measures, and with the added fear of what may come when the Act expires in 1914.