[96] The celerity and accuracy of the cable service between New York and foreign centres, as perfected in arbitraging, has no parallel elsewhere. Twenty minutes are often required to complete a cable transaction between the London Stock Exchange and the Paris Bourse, and so it frequently happens, where speed is required, that messages between those two centres are cabled by way of New York.
[97] Consult “The World’s Wealth in Negotiable Securities,” by Charles A. Conant, Atlantic Monthly, (July, 1908).
[98] Hopkinson Smith, in the World’s Work (August, 1912).
[99] “They are like unto children sitting in the market-place and calling one to another, and saying, ‘We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept.’”
[100] July, 1912, p. 94.
[101] “Worry, the Disease of the Age,” by C. W. Saleeby, M. D., F. A. Stokes Co. (New York, 1907).
[102] The English Exchequer has left a permanent impression on the language no less than on the world’s finance. Such words as “cheque,” “tally,” and “stocks,” in the sense of securities, possess an interesting history easy to trace. If one lent money to the Bank of England down to so comparatively recent a period as one hundred years ago, tallies for the amount were cut on willow sticks just as they were cut at the Exchequer in the time of the Crusades; the bank kept the “foil,” and the lender the “stock”—the earliest “bank-stock” on record. Very recently a bag of Exchequer tallies was found in a chapel of Westminster Abbey.
[103] The first Stock Exchange book was published in 1761—“Every Man His Own Broker, or a Guide to Exchange Alley,” by J. Mortimer. Mortimer, Mr. Hirst tells us, had been British Consul in Holland, and had seen the workings of the Amsterdam Bourse and the arbitrage business between London and Amsterdam, which was considerable in the middle of the eighteenth century. The book shows that many phases of speculation were already in vogue before the Stock Exchange was formally organized.
[104] “The (London) Stock Exchange,” Francis W. Hirst, London, Williams and Norgate, 1910. The attention of the reader is invited to this book. As a short study of investment and speculation in England it is exceedingly instructive, doubly so in that it comes from the pen of the editor of the Economist.
[105] The Quarterly Review, July, 1912.