A bank or a finance company is intrusted with sums of money belonging to outsiders on condition that when required, or upon agreed notice, they shall be repaid. Any intelligent clerk in such a firm may be well aware that the profits of the firm are earned by a doubly speculative use of this money which belongs to other people; it is employed by the firm in speculative investments which do not essentially differ from betting on the turf, and the cash in hand or other available assets are kept at a minimum on the speculative chance that depositors will not seek to withdraw their money, as they are legally entitled to do. In a firm which thus lives by speculating with other people's money, is it surprising that a clerk should pursue what seems to him substantially the same policy on a smaller scale? It may doubtless be objected that a vital difference exists in the two cases: the investor who puts his money into the hands of a speculative company does so knowingly, and for some expected profit; the clerk who speculates with the firm's money does so secretly, and no possible gain to the firm balances the chance of loss. But even to this objection it is possible to reply that recent revelations of modern finance show that real knowledge of the use to which money will be put cannot be imputed to the investor in such companies, and that, though some gain may possibly accrue to him, such gain is essentially subsidiary to the prospects of the promoters and managers of these companies. [Illustration: (Group of gamblers commuting)] WHEREIN SPECULATION DIFFERS. It is true that these are not normal types of modern business; they are commonly designated gambling companies, some of them actually criminal in their methods. But they only differ in degree, not in kind, from a large body of modern businesses, whose operations are so highly speculative, their risks so little understood by the investing public, and their profits apportioned with so little regard to the body of shareholders, as fairly to bring them under the same category. In a word, secret gambling with other people's money, on the general line of "heads I win, tails you lose," is so largely prevalent in modern commerce as perceptibly to taint the whole commercial atmosphere. Most of these larger gambling operations are either not illegal or cannot easily be reached by law, whereas the minor delinquencies of fraudulent clerks and other employes are more easily detected and punished. But living in an atmosphere where secret speculation with other people's money is so rife, where deceit or force plays so large a part in determining profitable coups, it is easy to understand how an employe, whose conduct in most matters is determined by imitation, falls into lax ways of regarding other people's money and comes in an hour of emergency to "borrow" the firm's money. This does not excuse his crime, but it does throw light upon its natural history. WHEN IT WILL CEASE.