As a natural result, organization followed. Capital was consolidated, the rights of owners were established, a great impulse was given to various new forms of inventive genius and powerful commercial enterprises of all kinds sprang into being. With this development the market-places or Stock Exchanges without which capital could not have been enlisted kept pace. It was found that transactions in the securities which represented the people’s money should be rendered easy, quick, and safe, and that the very essence of the Exchange’s functions consisted in protecting the people who were the actual owners of the enterprises by rules that would insure this result. If we look about us to-day we find in all the great centres of the world Stock Exchanges at work in this important field. We find that just in proportion to the confidence which a country feels in the strength and uprightness of such a market, so enterprise goes forward with vigor, and so the national wealth increases. The success of one enterprise in its appeal to public credit through the medium of the Stock Exchange invariably leads to another; thus commerce and industry develop. Securities in America alone, aggregate the enormous total of forty-three billion dollars.[7] Now, as our country’s entire physical properties are valued at one hundred and thirty billions, it is apparent (after making allowances for securities that are held by holding companies and hence are duplicated in the foregoing estimates) that the nation’s securities represent more than a third of the nation’s wealth. Again, almost two million people are owners of these securities. The _Journal of Commerce and Commercial Bulletin_ published Dec. 26, 1912, official statistics for 247 of the large corporations. This tabulation revealed the fact that the stock of these 247 corporations alone was owned by more than a million stockholders, and it is therefore quite safe to infer that the number of shareholders in all American companies approaches, if it does not exceed, two million. I think it will not be disputed that where two million people own a third of the nation’s wealth, they are entitled, just as the farmer is, to a perfectly constructed price-making machinery that will enable them to invest their savings, or sell their holdings. Having learned the difficult lesson of saving their money and the still more difficult one of increasing their surplus capital by judicious investments, are not these people entitled to the safeguards afforded by a Stock Exchange? “There is no other way in which true prices can be made,” says Mr. Horace White. “If the quotations so made are not precisely the truth in every case, they are the nearest approach to it that mankind has yet discovered.”[8]