476 THE WORK OF THE STOCK EXCHANGE
and every other pleasing personification of the forces of evil
that mankind has ever evoked in order to shudder at. Par-
ticularly villainous in this demonic financial company is the
“bear raider,” who in the popular mind combines the daring
bloodthirstiness of Captain Kidd with the grisly hideousness
of Fi-fo-fum. Such conceptions are an immemorial heritage
of the human imagination. After the bear raider has changed
his smart metropolitan attire for a tropical costume, the West
Indian negro voodoo-worshipper is waiting to sacrifice his
white cock to him. And so it goes.
The Human-Interest Factor in News.—If these supposed
personal factors in the stock market are to such a degree mythi-
cal and imaginary, it might well be asked why the papers con-
tinually give this personal flavor to what should be a cold, im-
personal, and statistical account of the stock market. The
younger and less experienced reporters and editors can hardly
be blamed if they quite sincerely believe some of the commoner
myths of Wall Street, particularly when it is realized that even
members of the Exchange themselves occasionally lapse into
this almost instinctive and yet fallacious mode of thought. The
older financial writers, as a matter of fact, are well aware of
the impersonal economic forces which really create Stock Ex-
change prices. Nevertheless, they help more or less to keep
alive these superstitious myths which haunt the market place,
because after all they have to write in a language which the
great mass of people can understand. If an editor states that,
“The short interest having been depleted by previous covering,
liquidation and short selling found little resistance, and lower
prices resulted,” he might in a given case quite accurately
describe the factors in the market making for a price decline.
But lest such technical abstractions prove “caviar to the gen-
eral,” he will usually garnish his report with an inaccurate but
vastly more appealing human-interest motif. He will hint at
“a prominent bear raider” to whom the decline may be attrib-
ated, or suggest that the “Waldorf crowd” or the “Palm Beach
