y with which the speculator starts. When once
the public has learnt to distinguish between a speculation and an
investment, and has also learnt honesty enough to be able to know
whether it wants to speculate or invest, it will have gone much
further towards checking the activity of the fraudulent promoter
than any measure that can be recommended by the most respectable and
industrious of committees. At the same time, it must be recognised
by those responsible for our finance, that it is their business,
and their interest, to keep the City's back premises clean; because
insanitary conditions in the back yard raise a stink which fouls the
whole City.

In the meantime, if gossip is to be believed, some of the members of
the Government have the most disquieting intentions concerning the
kind of regulations which they wish to impose on the activities of the
City, especially in its financial branch. It is believed that some of
the bright young gentlemen who now rule us are in favour of Government
control over the investment of money placed at home, and the
prohibition of the issue of foreign securities; and it is even
whispered that a fantastic scheme for controlling the profits of all
industrial companies, by which anything earned above a certain level
is to be seized for the benefit of the nation, is now a fashionable
project in influential Parliamentary circles. Every one must, of
course, admit that a certain amount of control will be necessary for
some time after the war. It may not be possible at once to throw open
the London Money Market to all borrowers, leaving them and it to
decide between them who is to be first favoured with a supply of the
capital for which there will be so large a demand when the war is
over. Certain industries, those especially on which our export trade
depends, will have to be first served in the matter of the provision
of capital. If it is a choice between the engineering or shipbuilding
trades and a company that wants to start an aeroplane service between
London and Brighton for the idle rich, it would not be reasonable,
during the first few months after the war, that the unproductive
project should be able, by bidding a high price for capital, to
forestall the demand of the more useful producer. And with regard
to the issue of foreign securities, there is this to be said, that
foreign securities placed in London have the same effect upon foreign
exchange as the import into England of goods