under the self-contained village community; but the attempt to suppress it in a great modern complicated society, especially one having a great foreign trade, would be fraught with disaster and chaos.

The alternative is to correct the evils of the existing system; to regulate the currency, especially the paper portion of it, more strictly; perhaps, as Jevons. suggests, to confine the issue of notes to "a single central State department, more resembling a mint than a bank;" to prevent fraud and swindling by Law-by a careful revision of the Companies' Act, perhaps by defining certain malpractices of the speculator, the cornerer, and the company floater, and declaring them criminal. The meshes of law will have to be made finer to catch the fraudulent, and public opinion must punish the shady. Most certainly reform is urgently wanted in this region of business, and most certainly nowhere is it more difficult, as may be seen from the failure of the Lord Chancellor's bill of last year, intended to improve the Companies' Act, and in particular to make the way of the dubious company promoter less smooth. That the public require more protection somehow is clear, as we need only take up any financial journal to see that shameful and seemingly obvious swindling goes on under the head of company floating, and that deception, gross as the "confidence trick" practised on the countryman, and of essentially the same nature, is being perpetually practised on victims perennially renewed. And what is worse, because 1 Jevons on Money," p. 341; see also Sidgwick's "Politica Economy," Book III., ch. iv. § 8.

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it affects much greater numbers, there is much fine financing, evincing superior science of the same doubtful kind, though far more difficult of detection, and against which, perhaps, there can be no effective law.

The prodigious and unparalleled increase of wealth during the past hundred years, which still goes on, and the ever-extending field of investment which is the result of it, has given to the company promoter and many other new types a splendid chance, as well as subjected them to a great temptation; to men of business genius really required, who are benefactors, as well as to noxious growths who trade on the wide prevalence of the speculative spirit, the covetous spirit, the eager desire to make money with a minimum of effort, or on the ignorance, the credulity, and the general gullibility of mankind. There is not only the great field of investment at home, but English capital goes to develop the resources of many foreign countries; and in these various foreign investments there has been found more tempting bait. Here was a golden opportunity, not merely for useful financiers of capacity and character, but also for the dishonest and fraudulent.

For the financiers form a genus with several species, of which the company promoter is one. And besides the company promoter who performs a necessary work, who is a sort of middleman between a few great capitalists and the general mass of investors, who acts in general as midwife and launches the company into life, there are the dishonest and fraudulent, the bubble company floaters, who form companies and wreck them

and form new ones, deriving a profit from all; who form companies to work mines in Mexico, in India, anywhere, the remoter the better; companies to do impossible, sometimes imaginary, things; who may have the shares of the imaginary companies quoted and bought and sold on the Stock Exchange, and who may even, assisted by some friends, realize a handsome thing before liquidation or exposure. By glowing prospectus, containing reports from our working engineer" of the "most favourable results," by a list of respectable directors, managers, bankers, auditors, and solicitors of the company, if any such can be induced to lend their names, above all by the untiring efforts and surprising genius of the financier, money may flow into a bogus scheme. Much more likely it flows into a merely bad business or undertaking; the latter much safer and more respectable for promoters, directors, manager, etc., and more profitable, as the game will last the longer; the shareholders will "bleed" the longer before the inevitable winding up ;-and then there is much chance. in human affairs and in companies' fortunes. The promoter in general is, from natural temperament, a sanguine man; usually he has several enterprises of moment on the stocks concurrently. Having launched a company and got his fees, he is usually not specially interested in its future fate, which is committed to fortune and the managing director. It is not specially his affair. Having launched one concern, he has other schemes incubating, others to mature; other companies to found; "fresh fields and pastures new" to try. His business is to launch companies, not to

make them successful, unless he retains some shares or other special continued interest in the fate of the company, which is sometimes the case if it really promises well. He certainly has not an interest in the health and success of all companies, as it is by the creation of fresh ones that in general he exists and flourishes.

It is satisfactory to know that the Lord Chancellor has been deeply meditating how to "cabin, crib, and confine" the genius of the swindling company floater, as well as to exact guarantees of the bona fides of all the class. But he will have to bring his utmost resources, legal knowledge, and experience to bear, or he will prove unequal to the task, for the man is a genius in his way. Such are the exigent conditions of the problem, that it will task all the ingenuity of the legal profession to check this type, and yet checked he must be. "If Law cannot do it, of what use is Law?" people will be inclined to say. Certainly the Roman lawyers never had so difficult a problem, such complicated conditions, such peculiar or slippery types to deal with. And what makes the peculiar difficulty of the problem is, that it is nearly impossible to strike an effective blow against what may be called the Higher Swindling without impeding or preventing beneficial enterprises.

II.

BESIDES the company, bogus, bubble, or merely bad, in which the shareholders are fleeced and lose their capital, and where the promoter, directors, and managers-chiefly the former, who has a prior

claim on the paid-up capital—have divided the spoil,— there are all degrees of struggling companies, from those that pay zero dividends to those that pay from four to five per cent. Nay, there are companies, and especially some new syndicates, which promise dividends of from seven to twenty-five per cent., and some that actually pay them. How this is possible, and the nature of this latest development of the Company and of the monopolist spirit, for several reasons deserves attention.

These syndicates are phenomena of great interest and significance, both in themselves and in their relation to Socialism. The word may be merely another name for a large company, but is more usually applied to a union or amalgamation of companies in the same business, or perhaps merely to a union of firms under one management. It is always more or less of a monopoly. It aims at merging competition. But it presents some important advantages. In the first place it tends to eliminate unnecessary middlemen, because it frequently combines producer and distributor, e.g. a bread syndicate proposes to grind flour, to make it into loaves, and to distribute the bread through its own shops; thereby saving the profits of the wholesale flour merchant and of the retail shops. There is a further well-known economy coming from the large scale of production and distribution, the greater division of labour and employment of machinery, and from both economies they are enabled to give better wages to the workers than they enjoyed before. The price, owing to these sources of saving, need not even be raised on