Think a moment. Until the last century property and trade were so insecure that, if a man saved money, he had to hide it, or lend it through money-brokers at such usurious rates as would compensate him for what he lost in bad debts. When Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote his dictionary in 1776 no such word as “investor” was known to the English language in a financial sense. There were pirates by sea in the old days and brigands on land. “Sovereigns and nobles,” says the editor of the _Economist_, “extorted loans only to repudiate them; governments supplied their needs by debasing the coinage, or by issuing worthless money.”[9] To-day all this is changed by banks and Stock Exchanges. Yet, despite these great inventions, capital is and always will be timid, and the small investor particularly must be protected and safeguarded in every possible way. These small investors, no less than the large ones, require great convenience and promptness for their operations; they live in such widely remote parts of the country as to necessitate the placing of full reliance on prices made by the Stock Exchange; they must have the most accurate information; they must know that their brokers are working to obtain the best knowledge of supply and demand; they want prices fixed by the most scientific competition and by the largest possible number of competitors--brokers, speculators, and investors alike; they require a market in which they can sell and get their money at once; above all things they must know beyond peradventure that they are dealing with reputable men who uphold a fine standard of honor. These are added reasons why the Stock Exchange exists.[10] If it did not exist, there would be no standard market for a large part of the country’s material wealth, indeed, as we have seen, a very great deal of this wealth could not have been created at all. At the risk of repetition let me say that the investor on the one hand, and the patent or the railway on the other hand, have nothing in common. Left to themselves, they would never meet; they would be useless, because resources and money must be brought together in order to create wealth. A primary function of the Stock Exchange is to bring them together, and by standardizing prices, create values. Similarly, the investor, without the Stock Exchange to guide him, would have nowhere to turn for a fair price secured by competitive bidding. He might turn to his local banker, or to individual and unorganized brokers, and trust to their honesty to invest his savings for him, but the local banker and the isolated broker would then be in the same position as the commission dealer and the middleman who played such havoc with that peach crop. It is painful to conceive such a situation.