The Tines' correspondent declares that all France has given itself
up to speculation, as in the days of John Law. The peasantry, with their vast aggregate savings, are buying risky shares on the Baurse, till "tile Rue Quinca,mpoix (where the Boursiers of the Regency used to gamble) now extends from one end of France to the other." Men buy and sell shares the very meaning of which they do not know, a broker, for example, doing a heavy transaction in " Les Alpines," which he at first thought was -a railway, then fancied was a mine, and finally, discovered to be a "reorganised" ironfouudry. Prices have gone up till " good " shares yield only three per cent., and speculations have been floated till the aggregate shares on the market, apart from Reutes and public loans of all sorts, reach a thousand million pounds. Including the Debt and the city loans, the bonds dealt in are estimated at two thousand million pounds English. The writer is evidently frightened by his figures, but the danger does not lie in the totals. France is richer than England, and the total nominally dealt in on the Stock Exchange is supposed to reach three thousand millions, but the ground of alarm in France is the preposterous belief in finauciug schemes which never can yield solid returns. They are sustained in various ways, the soundest one being the real demand for capital in central and eastern Europe at high rates of interest; but the crash must come, and any serious political occurrence would precipitate it. When it arrives, there will be a bad quarter of an hour on all Ex- changes, and anybody who is out of speculation may con- gratulate himself. An angry word spoken by M. Gambetta, or Prince Bismarck, or even Count Kalnoky, the new Austrian Chancellor, might be followed by a "Black Friday" all over Europe.
