made rapidly the process must be attended with a proportionately large risk, are observed, as time goes on, to be less exposed to the headlong financial panics such as that in which the speculation at Vienna lately culminated. Commercial revulsions of one sort or another, and of greater or less violence, will probably occur during all time at intervals, wherever commerce is carried on, but the gradual fashioning of laws with the view to confine the injurious effects of over-speculation and over-trading within limited areas, as for instance the limited liability acts, will more and more render it possible to stand between the dupe and the financial sharper, and also to observe the gathering together for harm of the dangerous influences, so that they may be provided against in time, or checked at an early stage of the disease. Among the operators at younger commercial centres there is a more feverish desire to gain, but the efforts to satisfy it are not kept in check in the same degree as in places where memories of disaster cluster in traditions among the people, and inspire the growth of prudence, almost as if it were an instinct. Farther on we shall call attention to the way in which an outside speculator on the Stock markets is handicapped with turns, commissions, and contangoes.[5] Very few persons, if any, will be found to dispute the statement that speculation on the Stock Exchange is gambling. The highest mathematical authorities maintain that there are but two conditions under which gambling can be prudently followed as an amusement, viz.: small stakes, and equal play. The ordinary gambler in the Stock market is no better off, as regards his chance of winning, than a player against a bank, which can only make certain of winning against all comers in the long run by the protection of a mathematical advantage. In the case of a bank established as a gaming-house the initial condition of existence has always been in the long run either bankruptcy to itself, or ruin to the individual players. As the banks have always flourished, the players, in the long run, must always have been losers. A gaming-bank is an institution with limited means offering to play all who enter; or, in other words, it is limited means against unlimited means. The Stock Exchange occupies a parallel position to that of the bank, and the operators[6] in the markets are protected in such a way that the outside player at speculation must in the long run lose, or no one would be found to take up his challenge. It must be obvious that supposing an outside speculator had any advantage when speculation in stocks and shares were first practised, and through such an inequality of terms he was on the average the gainer, experience would soon show the necessity of rectifying such a state of things, and what would be tantamount to the mathematical advantage secured to the gaming-bank would be speedily arrayed against him.