and collectively they constitute a national institution of
great importance and great power for good or ill.

They are officers of the court of commerce in the same sense in which
lawyers are officers of the court of law. They should not be satisfied
with things as they find them, they should not take the way of least
resistance, they should ever seek to broaden their own outlook and
extend the field and scope of the Stock Exchange's activities.

[Sidenote: _American opportunity for foreign trade_]

One of the reasons for London's financial world position is that its
Stock Exchange affords a market for all kinds of securities of all
kinds of countries. The English Stock Broker's outlook and general or
detailed information range over the entire inhabited globe. It is
largely through him that the investing or speculative public is kept
advised as to opportunities for placing funds in foreign countries. He
is an active and valuable force in gathering and spreading information
and in enlisting British capital on its world-wide mission.

The viewpoint of the average American investor is as yet rather a
narrow one. Investment in foreign countries is not much to his liking.
The regions too far removed from Broadway do not greatly appeal to him
as fields for financial fructification.

Yet, if America is to avail herself fully of the opportunities for her
trade which the world offers, she must be prepared to open her markets
to foreign securities, both bonds and stocks.

If America aspires to an economic world position similar to England's,
she must have amongst other things financial [such as, first of all, a
discount market] a market for foreign securities.

[Sidenote: _We are at a turning point in American History_]

In educating first themselves and then the public to an appreciation of
the importance and attractiveness of such a market, with due regard to
safety, and to the prior claim of American enterprise in its own
country, the members of the Stock Exchange have an immense field for
their imagination, their desire for knowledge and their energy.

We all of us must try to adjust our viewpoint to the situation which
the war has created for America, and to the consequences which will
spring from that situation after the war will have ceased.

As Mr. Vanderlip so well said in a recent speech: "Never did a nation
have flung at it so many gifts of opportunity, such inspiration for
achievement. We are like the heir o