“We regard President Roosevelt as not only one of the most courageous, but one of the ablest of all your long line of distinguished Presidents. We admire him for his courage and independence. No wonder the heart of the American people is with him; he is giving you a good housecleaning, and you well need it; and although you are passing through financial storm and stress now, we know something of the wonderful recuperative power of the United States, and it will not be long before America will be forging ahead on the highway of economical progress, cleaner and stronger than ever.”
This opinion is well worth quoting because of its evident sincerity. There is no suspicion of politics or office-seeking about the allusion to President Roosevelt, and if one man more than any other in this great country of ours deserves the resounding applause of a national “Hip! Hip! Hurrah!” for his public services, it is President Roosevelt.
CHAPTER LXXXIII.
WALL STREET AS IT REALLY IS. A VINDICATION.
Many people, and some newspapers, have a false impression that Wall Street is a gambling arena that does a great deal of harm and no good, and that it ought to be, as far as possible, abolished, while Wall Street speculators have been recklessly and unjustly denounced as gamblers.
But those who know Wall Street well have no such impressions of it, or its speculators, or of the Wall Street community of bankers and brokers. They can, on the contrary, testify that there is no more honorable and responsible body of men in the world than its bankers and the members of the New York Stock Exchange, and that nowhere is honesty, integrity, and good faith more resolutely exacted than on that Exchange, as its constitution, by-laws, and rules clearly show; and nowhere is a black sheep, when discovered, more quickly and severely punished than there. The penalties involve expulsion from membership, or suspension for any length of time the Governors may think proper for violations of its rules, and they are rigorously enforced in all cases. The same remarks, I am glad to say, apply substantially to the stock exchanges in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other cities.
During the crisis of 1907, and the exposures of corporate irregularities that preceded it, no members of the Stock Exchange were implicated in the wrongdoing that surprised and shocked the public. The men in control of the life insurance companies that were examined and held up to scorn, for their misuse and misappropriation of other people’s money, were not members of the Stock Exchange, nor were they Wall Street men.
The men who wrecked the Metropolitan Street Railway System were not members of the Stock Exchange, nor were those apostles of unsound banking, the speculative bank promoters who gained control of the three chains of New York City banks to promote their own speculative purposes, and inadvertently paved the way to the panic; nor was a member of the Stock Exchange responsible for the failure of the Knickerbocker Trust Company, or at all involved in that leading event of the panic; nor was a member of the Stock Exchange responsible for any bank, trust company, or corporation failure, or run that occurred anywhere during the crisis, or at any time in the panic year.
Of course there may possibly be undiscovered black sheep in Wall Street as well as elsewhere, for we find them in church pews, and occasionally even in church pulpits; but we should not heap wholesale condemnation upon either Wall Street or the churches on that account.
To call the buying and selling of stocks or bonds, on the Stock Exchange, gambling, is a misnomer, a misuse of the word, due either to ignorance of the transactions there, or malice. It is so whether the purchases or sales are by investors or speculators, for speculation on the Stock Exchange is not gambling. Whether stocks, or bonds, are bought, or sold, by investors or speculators is immaterial between the contracting brokers on the floor of the Exchange. They know no difference whatever. Delivery of the stocks or bonds is made by the one, and received by the other, in every case, and payments made accordingly, at the sale and purchase prices, investment and speculative transactions being treated exactly alike.