n Alsatia. Should he stroll
guilelessly into the Exchange he proposes to benefit, he is set upon,
mobbed, hustled, mussed and finally ejected from the door with a
battered hat and torn coat collar. Every other broking office in the
Street has a pictorial caricature hanging over its ticker of his
hesitancy and timidity, his rash venture, his silly and short-lived
hilarity, his speedy and inevitable ruin, and his final departure,
with his face distorted by rage and grief, and his pockets turned
inside out.

The air is thick with signs and evil portents: Stop-loss orders,
breaks, raids, slumps, more margins, are in everybody's mouth. The
path to fortune is emphasized as slippery by every adjective of peril,
and is hedged with maxims, over each of which is dangling, like a
horrible example, the corpse of a ruined speculator.

A too subtle analyst might suggest that this presentation of
opportunity and restraint, while apparently incongruous, is the most
fascinating form of temptation. But subtlety, except in manipulating
stock values, is not a Wall Street characteristic. The Stock Exchange
is an arena where men fight hand to hand, head to head. Beneath the
conventions of courtesy, each man's fists are guarding his pockets and
his eyes are on his neighbor. Such a vocation breeds courage,
quickness, keenness, coolness. Weak men and fools are weeded out with
surprising celerity and certainty.

Wall Street men are frank because they have learned it is wisest. The
average commission broker secretly regards his clients with a feeling
of benevolence delicately tinctured with contempt. Experience teaches
him to use a favorite professional phrase, that there are times when
"you can't keep the public out of the market with a club," and that
when engaged in stock operations they usually display the judgment of
a child picking sweets out of a box. His first care, naturally, is to
protect himself, financially and otherwise, against the losses which
ensue. Hence he surrounds their transactions with every legal and
friendly restraint. But his existence depends on their success, or in
replacing them. The broker, therefore, is quite as anxious for his
clients to make money as they are themselves. More profit, more
margin; more margin, more commissions and less risk. There you have it
in a nutshell.

The stockbroker says to the public: "My dear sir, here is an open
market. Nowhere else can you get such large and quick returns on so
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