of unscrupulous brokers, and
their hard-earned savings are especially often given for stocks which
soon are not worth the paper on which they are printed. Sometimes, to
be sure, this unpractical behaviour of the idealists really results
from an unreasonable indifference to commercial questions. The true
scholar, whose life is tuned to the conviction that he has more
important things to do in the world than to make money, readily falls
into a mood of carelessness with regard to the money which he does
chance to make. In this state of indifference he follows any advice
and may easily be misled.

But it seems probable that the more frequent case is the opposite one.
Just because the teacher and the pastor have small chance to save
anything, they give their fullest thought to the question how to
multiply their earnings, and their mistake springs rather from their
ignorance of the actual conditions. They think that they can figure it
out by mere logic and overlook the hard realities. They resemble
another group of victims who can be found in the midst of commercial
life, the over-clever people who rely on especially artificial
arguments. They feel sure that they see some points which no one else
has discovered, and while they may have noticed some small reasonable
points, they overlook important conditions which the simpler-minded
would have seen. They know everything better than their neighbours,
and whatever their friends buy or sell they at once have a brilliant
argument to prove that the step was wrong. They generally forget that
the listener must be suspicious of their wisdom, as they themselves
have never earned the fruit of their apparent wisdom. They all,
however, may find comfort in the well-known fact that hardly any great
financier has died, not even a Harriman or a Morgan, without there
being found in his possession large quantities of worthless stocks and
bonds. But the variety of intellectual types, the careless and the
uncritical, the over-clever and the illogical thinkers, could easily
protect themselves against the dangers of the shortcomings in their
mental mechanism if their minds had not another trait, which, too, is
more frequent in America than anywhere else in the world--the lack of
respect for the expert.

The average American is his own expert in every field. This is
certainly not a reproach. It supplies American public life with an
immense amount of energy and readiness to help. Above all,
histor