Page:Hints About Investments (1926).pdf/18

 is to make the risk as small as possible while getting from his investment the largest and most rapidly expanding income that he can, and being able to get his money back with the greatest possible addition to it.

Incidentally, whenever we invest we are increasing the world's capital fund, and so making economic progress possible. We may not act with that intention, but the fact remains that if everybody spent all that they earn or receive, there would, as the world is at present organized, be no fund out of which industry, commerce and transport could be maintained and expanded, and the rising tide of production, into which we all have to dip for life and comfort and luxury, would grow stagnant and then begin to ebb. The "functionless" shareholder, as he is called by Socialists who find it easier to beg questions than to answer them, in fact provides industry with the sinews of toil without which it would wither into impotence, and in doing so risks the loss of money that he might have spent comfortably on satisfying self-indulgence.

This he does, whether he takes up new securities as offered, or whether he adopts the usually safer system of buying existing securities in the market. If he subscribes to new issues he evidently hands over money to