Sometimes and in some respects, it is true, outside observers may have a clearer vision than those who are qualified by many years of experience, practice and routine.
If there be any measures which can be shown clearly to be conducive towards the better fulfilment of those purposes which the Stock Exchange is created and intended to serve, I am certain that the membership would not permit themselves to be led or influenced by hidebound Bourbonism, but would welcome such measures, from whatever quarter they may originate.
Is the Exchange Merely a Private Institution?
Question:
Do I understand you to mean, then, that the Stock Exchange is simply a private institution and as such removed from the control of governmental authorities and of no concern to them?
Answer:
I beg your pardon, but that is not the meaning I intended to convey. While the Stock Exchange is in theory a private institution, it fulfills in fact a public function of great national importance.
That function is to afford a free and fair, broad and genuine market for securities and particularly for the tokens of the industrial wealth and enterprise of the country, i.e., stocks and bonds of corporations.
Without such a market, without such a trading and distributing centre, wide and active and enterprising, corporate activity could not exist.
If the Stock Exchange were ever to grow unmindful of the public character of its functions and of its national duty, if throughIs the Exchange merely a private institution? inefficiency or for any other reason it should ever become inadequate or untrustworthy to render to the country the services with constitute its raison d'être, it would not only be the right, but the duty of the authorities, State or Federal, to step in.