48 THE WORK OF THE STOCK EXCHANGE
more broadly it enjoys public participation, the more difficult
becomes the attempt artificially to raise or depress its prices.
Professor H. C. Emery, speaking of the failure in Germany to
regulate exchanges by legislation,’ once stated:
The result of this experience was to prove practically what I have
maintained for years from my theoretical study of this subject, that
the most easily manipulated market is the limited market. The market
you cannot manipulate is the big, open, easy, facile market, where
sverybody can trade with the least restriction. . . . There is no man
50 big he can manipulate a market into which the whole public comes.
The idea that a big man can manipulate a market is greatly exaggerated
anyway, but the bigger the market the harder it is for the big man to
manipulate it. If the market is bigger than the man he cannot manipu-
late it. If you have a little market a big man can manipulate it. . . .
The big man cannot manipulate a market into which the public comes
freely. The public determines the price of the stock in the long run,
and the more easily you let the public come in the harder it is for the
big man to manipulate.
An experience of over a century in maintaining America’s
largest and most important organized market has taught the
members and governors of the New York Stock Exchange
the vital necessity of keeping their great market free and open
In fact, this very phrase—‘‘a free and open market”’—is con-
stantly on the lips of Stock Exchange men as an ideal for which
they must invariably strive.
Meaning of “Free and Open Market.”—By a “free” mar-
cet, the Stock Exchange members and officials mean one which
is not dominated by any single man, or any single group or
class of men, in defiance of natural supply and demand. Stu-
dents of the exchanges all recognize that a national and highly
organized market, where the full force of the buying and sell-
ing orders of a nation is constantly reflected, cannot be manipu-
lated nearly so easily as a non-speculative, unorganized market.
A combination of wholesale dealers in fountain pens or shaving
soap, for example, could easily adjust the price of the article to
6 See testimony of Professor H. C. Emery in “Regulation of the Stock Exchange,”
n. 330.
