After a severe commercial collapse, like that of 1866 for instance, all securities are low in price, holders of them have been compelled to realize through the _debacle_ which has for the time destroyed credit, turned profits into losses, and frightened everybody into hoarding the precious metals. When things are beginning to mend, and a resurrection of industries takes place, the tide of the national profits begins to turn, and, rippling back into innumerable channels where securities of all sorts have laid high and dry and neglected, again floats them into notice. Just as when there is no use for the plough the oxen are idle, so when the great industries of a nation are stagnant, floating capital lies idle, and is cheap. In such times the speculator of good judgment, with ten or twenty thousand pounds can make money without much risk if he is satisfied to watch the general recovery of prices up to a certain level, and then realize. We will suppose money at 3 per cent., and the best English railway stocks some thirty per cent. below the value they will reach when the country is in the full tide of prosperity. He selects one hundred thousand pounds worth of the leading stocks, yielding at the price at which he purchased them, 6 per cent. At different banks where he keeps accounts for the purpose, he pawns the stock, and gets loans within 10 per cent. of the market value, which amount to eighty thousand pounds. The ten thousand pounds he has himself, which enables him to take the stock off the market. In this way he is virtually the possessor for the time of this amount of stock, and he profits by the rise in value at the rate of one thousand pounds for every one per cent. Apart from this advantage he benefits to the extent of the difference between the yield on the money value of the stocks, and the interest with which the bankers debit him on the eighty thousand pounds; and so long as circumstances are favourable and the value of money does not rise and remain above the rate which the stocks yield, he enjoys an income from that source with a fair prospect in a year or so of doubling his ten thousand pounds. Very large amounts of money are known to have been made in 1870, 1871, and 1872, in English railway, and also in various other stocks, in this way in the London market, when money was poured in from France and the Continent generally on the outbreak of the Franco-German war. Bankers, moreover, were aware that the large amounts placed with them for safe keeping might be called for at any time, and sound Stock Exchange securities, upon which loans could be made from fortnight to fortnight, were very much in favour. In consequence of such operations as that referred to, prices were found upon several occasions to be very much inflated, resulting in some mischief and not a few failures. [Sidenote: WHEN TO BEGIN AND WHEN TO LEAVE OFF.]