company flourishes. Provincial Stock Exchanges have been created by it, and some of them have long lists of local stocks which are dealt in at all hours of the day. No attempt has ever been made to appraise these local stocks, but it may be taken as a safe conclusion that their aggregate far exceeds the corresponding class of stocks quoted in London. The latter amount, roughly speaking, to 50 millions sterling. Provincial companies of all kinds will be estimated within the mark at 200 millions, and the probability is that we are a good deal under the real total. The various classes of securities indicated may now be summarised thus: –
Paid-up Capital.
1700 stocks officially quoted in London, £3,437,000,000 Foreign stocks held, say, 216,000,000 Syndicates and unquoted companies in London, 250,000,000 Provincial companies, 200,000,000
£4,103,000,000
Out of 8720 millions sterling of national capital in the United Kingdom (less the 900 millions of public debt), very nearly one-half exists in the form of securities, which are daily passing from hand to hand, and are subject to all the fluctuations of a sensitive market. This fact is one of the neglected keys to the problem of depressed trade, over which economists and politicians are now exercising their troubled brains. Depressed trade, as Mr Bright takes every opportunity of impressing on us, comes in spasms, and it should, he thinks, be sufficient consolation for us in our present experience of it that we are no worse off than our neighbours. But it is odd that so shrewd and practical a man should be such an emphatic teacher of fatalism in a matter of this sort. Bad trade may, as he says, come in spasms; but it must always have a cause, or a combination of causes, and these causes are never the same on two occasions. The present depression is as different in all its essential features from the collapse of 1873, as that differed from the financial crisis of 1866, and the crisis of 1866 differed from the crash of 1857. In 1857 it was overtrading that strained the delicate fabric of commercial credit, and brought ruin on the offenders. That was a sharp crisis and a severe one while it lasted; but it spent itself within a comparatively narrow circle, and was followed by a speedy recovery. In 1866 it was speculative finance that brought its votaries to grief. The Joint-Stock Companies Act of 1862 had given great facilities for the application of limited liability to financial enterprise. It created the company promoter, the guinea-pig director, and all that costly brood of vampires who have since fed on the innocent investor. In 1863 there were nearly seven hundred companies registered under it. In 1864 the number rose to nearly nine hundred. In 1865 it turned the nine hundred; and in 1866 it was advancing merrily towards the thousand a year, when Black Friday came and blighted its untimely blossoms. This time the collapse was more severe than in 1857, and its effects wider spread, but the recovery was again very rapid. Two years later Mr Gladstone was able to boast that the prosperity of the country was advancing by leaps and bounds.
It bounded into the crash of
