138 THE WORK OF THE STOCK EXCHANGE
Taken as a whole, the Stock Exchange system, with its
various units of the board room, the Wall Street commission
houses, their branch offices and correspondents, and the thou-
sands of miles of private leased wires which connect them, has
practically annihilated the considerations of space and time in
the operation of America’s principal securities market. © A San
Francisco customer has access to the board room market prac-
tically as ready and immediate as a customer in William, Nas-
sau, or Broad Street offices—a stone’s throw from the Stock
Exchange building. By the magic of applied science and the
trained skill of the operators, Los Angeles is rendered as close
to the Exchange floor as Boston, or New Orleans as Phila-
delphia. Of course, the private brokerage wires are used to
transmit news as well as orders to buy or sell, and in conse-
quence the system makes for uniform intelligence and knowl-
edge all over the land regarding security values, as well as an
equalized instancy of dealing in the market.
National Character of the Stock Market Today.—One
practical result of this accessibility of the Stock Exchange to
all parts of the United States and to nearby countries has been
that its securities market is vastly less subject than formerly to
local influence. Before the era of the fully developed wire
house, the Stock Exchange was to a considerable extent a New
York institution. There were bull leaders and bear leaders in
Wall Street, and the stock market was to some extent subject
to their personal attitude and operations. But, although the
memory of these. earlier generations of Wall Street men has
given rise to a swarm of modern legends and modern super-
stitions regarding the Exchange, the stock market is today a
national, not a local market, and has long since grown too big
for the operations of yesteryear. An investigation of the Ex-
change market with respect to the origin of the orders com-
ing into it,*® undertaken in 1909 by the Hughes Commission,
showed that on a selected day “52% of the total transactions on
38 See Appendix XVe.
