The kind of speculation which is of benefit to the community may be termed corrective speculation, as implying a restoration of prices, through its agency, to a reasonable relative level. Such speculation would come from buyers who had good reason to know that what they bought they would be able again to sell, and that its purchase speculatively was simply the supply of their ordinary requirements in anticipation, owing to a favourable opportunity having presented itself. In proportion as speculation proceeds from simply time-bargain operators will the price be driven up or down, according to circumstances to an injurious degree, as compared with a corrective degree, the influence of the one set of speculators doing good and that of the other set harm. [Sidenote: THE THREE CLASSES INTO WHICH SPECULATORS MAY BE DIVIDED.] Speculators may be divided into three classes which about embraces all the phases of speculation. First, we have the legitimate speculator who spends all or some of his surplus capital in taking off the market what he believes will give him a gain by holding it for some time. That is the legitimate speculator who is a benefit to the community as a leveller up of prices. Then we have the legitimate speculator of the same stamp, with a difference that he is a leveller down of prices, and is equally of service to society by immediately throwing on the market all the stock of a certain article he may hold of be able to get for the purpose, when it rises to a price above what he calculated on being able to obtain, and which his experience told him was an unusually high figure. Such speculators as these not only do not hurt themselves, but directly benefit themselves by speculating, and in so doing protect the interests of their neighbours and the community at large. Such as these this book is not written for. We are concerned with those who, classified as illegitimate speculators, and reckless speculators, which, second term may have to be moved a point or two according to circumstances, are over the border-line, whose _dictum_ is “Heads I win, tails you lose.” The illegitimate speculator is the one who starts with a small capital and with some method, with the idea of increasing it upon a system of incurring risks which, in the ordinary course of the market he may operate in, will enable him in case he has wrongly calculated the course of prices, to pay his losses and go on again. His intention is never _bona fide_ sale or _bona fide_ purchase. The reckless speculator is the man who with little more than he stands up in makes a great pretence, imposes upon the weak and credulous, enters the Stock markets and operates to right and left up to the hilt so far as he may be trusted. So long as he may enjoy a run of luck he rakes in the coin; when it turns he leaves his dupes to pay and goes up the country, as they say of the native Indian merchants when the telegraph announces to them that the