STOCK EXCHANGE AND AMERICAN BUSINESS 475

the ways of current thought, both in Wall Street and out of it,
as might at first appear. Every modern man also personifies
the abstract forces of life, of nature, and even of international
politics. Uncle Sam and John Bull are much more real individually
 to millions of people than—say—the Comptroller of
the Currency, or the Chancellor of the Exchequer. And when
it is not as vivid and graphic a matter as international relationship,
 but instead the dim and dreary realm of economic forces,
how natural and inevitable it is that we should all more or less
yield to the old instinctive tendency of personifying the abstract
forces of the shop and the market place which, without hard
and difficult study, would otherwise elude our understanding.
Wall Street, therefore, has its own mythology, and a very
colorful and picturesque mythology it is! The chief demigods
in this modern financial pantheon consist of the imaginary
group of “Men Who Put Prices Up and Then Put Them Down
Again.” For prices certainly rise and fall, and somebody must
be consciously responsible for it! It is useless to point out
that the Exchange is a national market, and that prices established
 there result from the transactions of thousands and
thousands of people all over the country. These thousands of
people cannot be visualized, and so honestly indignant and sincerely
 superstitious individuals heatedly declaim against these
mythical figures, as “a little clique in Wall Street,” or “the
powers that be.” Even the broker’s clerk, who ought to know
better, murmurs as he watches the tape, “I see They are putting
 prices up again.”
It is as useless to talk about supply and demand, or interest
rates, liquidation, or prospective earnings to these simple souls
as it would be to mention the theory of sidereal revolution to
the Greek worshipper of Apollo, or the theory of air currents
and electricity to the Indian worshipping his lightning devil.
And so the Stock Exchange, at least in many men’s minds, is
thronged with a ghostly and devilish company of “insiders,”
“big manipulators,” “operators,” and “scalpers”—lineal descendants,
 all of them, of Satan, Mephistopheles, Beelzebub.