“Come, ye disconsolate,” then, and if I can’t tell you how to make money, I venture to assert I can interest you in the place where you lost it.
There is no place of business, indeed, so pictorial as Wall Street. Sunk down amid huge buildings which wall it in like precipices, with a graveyard yawning at its head and a river surging at its feet, its pavement teeming with an eager, nervous multitude, its street rattling with trucks laden with gold and silver bricks, its soil mined with treasure vaults and private wires, its skyline festooned with ticker tape, its historic sense vindicated by the heroic statue of Washington standing in majestic serenity on the portico of that most exquisite model of the Parthenon, and with the solemn sarcasm of the stately brown church, backed by its crumbling tombstones, lifting its slender spire like a prophetic warning finger in its pathway—this most impressive and pompous of thoroughfares is at once serious and lively, solid and vivacious. You say to yourself this must be a vast business which is so grandly domiciled; and you wonder if the men live up to the buildings.
The broker, in fact, who fills the eye of pictorial satire and the country press, is not an admirable object. His tall hat and shiny boots are in too obvious a foreground in sketches of race meetings, uptown cafés and flash clubs. He is represented as a maddened savage on ’Change, and a reckless debauchee at leisure, who analyzes the operations of finance in the language of a monte dealer describing a prize fight, and whose notion of a successful career is something between a gambler, a revolutionist and a buccaneer. He is supposed to vibrate in cheerful nonchalance between Delmonico’s and a beanery, according as he is in funds or hard up, and to exhibit a genial assurance that “a member of the New York Stock Exchange, sir,” will prove a pleasant addition to the most exclusive circles.
This happy-go-lucky gentleman, however, to use one of his own delightful metaphors, “cuts very little ice” in the region where he is believed to exert himself most effectively. He is really but the froth, riding lightly on the speculative current. Still, I have placed him, like Uriah, “in the forefront of the battle,” while we draw back a little, because he is the caricature of that stocking-broking man-about-town Wall Street has had the honor to create, and because in popular fancy he is seen standing, like Washington, before the doors of the Stock Exchange, with a gold pencil in one hand and a pad in the other, ready to pounce on the pocketbooks of parsons and schoolmistresses.
Parsons and schoolmistresses actually do come to Wall Street; all the world comes here, incorporates its idioms into its dialect and is infected with its spirit. It is a lounge for men of pleasure, a study for men of learning, an El Dorado for men of adventure, and a market for men of business. It has a habitat and a manner, a character and a vernacular. It bristles with incongruity and contradiction, yet it is as logical as a syllogism.
Superficially, everything is manipulation, chance, accident. Really, every fluctuation is regulated by laws of science, and, with adequate knowledge and just deduction, profit is not speculative but certain. It is this which differentiates it from all mere gambling. And it is this union of impulse and logic which makes it so human, so humorous, so dramatic and pathetic.
Perhaps its most curious incongruity is its combination of secrecy and frankness. The atmosphere about the Stock Exchange fairly palpitates with suspicion and subterfuge. No man knows what another man is about, and every man bends his energy to find out. “Inside information” is the philosopher’s stone that turns every fraction into golden units. The leading firms take the greatest pains to conceal their dealings. Orders are given in cipher. Certificates are registered in the names of clerks. Large blocks of stock are bought, and sold, and “crossed,” for the mere purpose of misleading. A wink or a shrug is accepted as more significant than the most positive assertion. The disposition to “copper a point” is so general that the late Mr. Gould used to say he always told the truth, because nobody ever believed him.
The very penny chroniclers of the market acquire an infelicitous adroitness in the phraseology of deceit. And yet nowhere on earth is ignorance so carefully counseled and so almost ludicrously warned as in this place of trickery and innuendo.
What conceivable enterprise which expected to exist on public patronage would assume as the unofficial metaphor of dealings a pair of wild beasts bellowing and growling over the carcass of a lamb, and make this most helpless and stupid of animals the representation of the customer? To call a trader a lamb is as opprobrious an epithet as it was to call a Norman baron an Englishman.
In any other business the buyer is an honored and privileged patron; in Wall Street he is welcomed with the respect and pleasure that was exhibited to a bailiff serving a writ in 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.