THE MANIA FOR SPECULATION.
More than 247,000,000 shares of stock have been sold “on ‘Change’” in this city since Jan. 1. Two more business days will raise the year’s total close to a quarter of a billion shares. At $100 per share, the property thus sold is twenty-five billions. It is a sum inconceivably great, expressible only in comparisons. It is twenty-five times the total interest-bearing debt of the United States; it would dig 3,000 tunnels to Brooklyn at $8,000,000 each; it would build a $100,000 library for every 300 inhabitants of the whole country. Amazing total! Besides the speculation in bucket-shops, in the Consolidated Exchange, in the Produce Exchange, in land, this single mart of a single city has sold in a single year $1,666 in shares for every family in the United States! These enormous totals do not mean investment; the best dividend stocks are often least active in the trading. They mean that shares of uncertain future value have been sold over and over again in the mad mania for speculation. It is no wonder that a seat in the Stock Exchange is worth $50,000 when the brokers’ fees alone for the year have mounted to more than $30,000,000, and the “lambs” still come to the shearing-pen in droves.—New York World.