full information and that many avenues by which it may safeguard its interests are always open.[52] It has long been known that investors and speculators in America enjoy vastly more safety in their market operations through these various avenues of publicity than do investors and speculators abroad. There are no tickers worthy of the name across the water, and the daily list of business done, as published in our newspapers, with bid and asked prices and total transactions in detail, is unheard of among all the Bourses of Europe. The eminent French economist, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, speaks very earnestly of the superiority of our New York Stock Exchange system in this matter; he says the need for a similar method in France is “very urgent,” that the information thus spread broadcast is “very instructive,” that the pledge of publicity “is better assured in the United States than in any other country of the world,” and that an immediate reform along these lines is “absolutely necessary” in Paris in the interest of the public.[53] This leads to another word of caution suggested by the fact that the public, despite what is done for it, does not always avail itself of these safeguards. Men buy worthless mining stocks without bothering to inquire into their bona fides. They put their savings into new and untried enterprises and they neither read the balance sheets nor attend the meetings. A thousand stockholders will attend a meeting in London and they will have their questions answered whether the majority in control likes it or not. In New York almost nobody attends these meetings. The stockholder’s right to information is absolute, but he does not go and get it, and so finally when something goes wrong he writes angry letters to the newspapers and damns both Wall Street and the Stock Exchange because he has been burned, although the fire escape and the extinguisher were always at his hand. “It is all very well” says the _Wall Street Journal_, “to talk about what the law, the newspaper press, and the Stock Exchange can do to protect the investor, but the investor himself can do more than all his protectors put together. His investment, however conservative and secure, carries responsibilities as well as privileges, and it is his duty to discharge the one in order to safeguard the other.”[54] He must learn to make inquiries, to discriminate, to use his wits, to read mortgages, to study sinking funds and operating ratios. He must eschew the financial columns of questionable newspapers and confine his attention to those of established probity. He must not put all his investment eggs into one basket. The Stock Exchange cannot do all this for him, but it is always ready to help him, and the information he requires may be had for the asking.