Yet this slandering and mudslinging campaign by representatives of both the great political parties for political effect is none the less injurious and reprehensible because it can never have any substantial result, much less the destruction of Wall Street. It is scandalous abuse of which we may have more before the November election, but it is already high time that it should stop in the interest of truth and justice and the public welfare.
These assailants of the New York Stock Exchange would also abolish all other stock exchanges, and the Chicago Board of Trade, as well as all the other grain and provision exchanges, and all the cotton exchanges in the country that deal in futures. Perhaps they are not aware that the farmers and planters of the West and South derive, or can derive, great benefit from having a free market for “futures” open to them, for it enables them to sell their crops before they are harvested, if the prices are satisfactory and they want to make sure of them. This applies also to the Coffee Exchange and importers of coffee.
To drive dealings in time options from the Produce and other exchanges would be to drive them to Canada, Liverpool, and London, and let the markets there make prices for us, instead of making them for ourselves, all of which shows the absurdity of this clamor against speculation in stocks and speculative commodities. Speculation is thus stigmatized as gambling with no more reason or justice than the inevitable risks of ordinary mercantile trade could be called gambling, for no one can engage in trade of any kind without taking risks.
Now that the storm of the crisis has passed away, and the investigation and prosecutions that have taken place have laid bare the corporate evils that were rife among us, including railway rate rebating and various forms of looting and wholesale graft by controlling capitalists, we have come into a purer business atmosphere. Corrupt, plundering, and law-breaking officers of banks, and railway, insurance, and other large corporations have, in many cases, been exposed and shown the error of their ways, and we have in consequence a higher business morality than we had before we passed through this ordeal of purification. In other words, the house cleaning we have had has done us good, and this of itself is a compensation that can hardly be overrated in its future influence. Banks and trust companies and railways, insurance, and other corporations have been freed from much unsound and dishonest management, and also loose, grafting and speculative practices, and we have in their place that higher moral tone which is safeguarded by greater publicity of accounts and more rigid official examinations under new and stricter laws than ever before.
Thus temptation to chicanery and other corporate wrongdoing, and abuses, by those in control of corporations, is largely reduced, and this is important, for an old proverb tells us that opportunity makes the thief.
Good grounds for an optimistic view of the situation and the future, you will all acknowledge, can be found in our unequaled and immense natural resources and their uninterrupted development. These and the enterprise of our people and our free institutions and popular government, which makes us all sovereigns in our own right, are national blessings. They fortify our national life, and leave our splendid growth and powers of achievement unchecked; and our wonderful progress in the past will no doubt be eclipsed by our still greater and grander future, with the United States of America the foremost nation in the world.
In all this progressive movement the cotton and other mill industries of New England, and the rest of the country, will share; and in this natural and legitimate expansion, gentlemen, you and your successors may look forward to, and find, the potentiality of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, as Andrew Carnegie did in Pittsburg. From such a great American object lesson for manufacturers as Carnegie, you should all derive a vast amount of encouragement, and that hope that springs eternal in the human breast.