But this 3647 millions sterling of joint-stock capital is far from being a complete total. In London there are swarms of small companies, private and semi-private, which have no quotation. For every mining company on the official list there are possibly three that would not be admitted on it because of being either too small, or doubtfully constituted, or little dealt in. Many large trading establishments are also, in fact, joint-stock companies, though their shares may be confined to a very small circle of the actual managers and their friends. The capital controlled by these unquoted companies is vastly larger than would be supposed, but we may take it at only 200 millions sterling. Of late years "Syndicates" have become an important agency in the more speculative region of finance. Some of them develop into regular companies, while others keep their good things to themselves. In one way or another, they influence a considerable amount of capital, which will not be over-estimated at 50 millions sterling. So far we have been speaking of London only; but outside of London there is a wide field of joint-stock enterprise, which is year by year extending. It requires only a glance at the commercial intelligence of our leading provincial newspapers to discover that the great industries of the country are passing rapidly out of private hands into the maelstrom of joint-stock management. Birmingham, Sheffield, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Glasgow, Dundee, and even Aberdeen, are centres of limited liability enterprise. One by one the merchant princes of a generation ago are either retiring from the field, or are converting themselves into companies. Of the old race of historic firms, which added factory to factory, and piled up million on million, as the profits of all the markets in the world flowed into their coffers, hardly a single specimen now remains. When Henry George and his Socialist friends start the hunt for bloated capitalists, it is not in commerce that they will find their prey, any more than among the landowners. The bloated capitalist has been wise in his generation: having got the cream off the Anti-Corn Law milk, he has left the skim for company promoters to fight over. Satisfied, as he well ought to be, with his prizes, he has gracefully retired from the lottery-box to give his fellow-citizens a chance at the blanks which he leaves behind him. For a dozen or fifteen years back they have been drawing blanks, with most exemplary patience and assiduity, in all the great industries which they were accustomed to consider the foundations of national wealth. They have pertinaciously sunk money, which they will never see again, in coal-mines, in ironworks, in cotton factories, in ship-building, in warehouses, in hotels, and in every other kind of business that used to yield fortunes, but now barely pays directors' fees.
On the London Stock Exchange there are companies to the number of 276, classified as Commercial and Industrial, Iron, Coal, and Steel, Investment and Financial, and Shipping, which represent an aggregate capital of between 80 and 90 millions sterling. Thirty years ago nine-tenths of these would have been private establishments, and their profits or losses would have affected a mere handful of people compared with the thousands of families whose comfort, if not their actual subsistence, depends on them now. But it is in the provinces that the industrial and commercial joint-stock
