The brokers cordially welcome such a visitor. Now and again they carry a hundred shares of stock for him. He is a kind of private news agency. The dull office gets ready to laugh when he comes in; and his tips, whispered merely out of friendship, of course, to the customers, add many a credit entry to Commission Account. It may be said, without any hysterical exaggeration, that he represents the worst of Wall Street; and that the worst of Wall Street is very bad. But among his virtues are a merry mind and an abiding faith that a “board member” is the most distinguished of associates.
The broker, indeed, if he is not always that most elevated of human spectacles, a Christian gentleman, is a highly pictorial and interesting person. He is the creature of his business, and is half host and half business man. His habitual chatty intercourse with all kinds of men of means gives him the easy nonchalance of the town, and the nervous strain he is constantly under to protect himself and his clients against those impulses of greed and fear so fostered by Wall Street, creates that keen, rapid concentration for which he is so remarkable.
Where everybody is liable to lose his wits any instant, it is necessary those in authority should be cool. This constant state of high tension, these perpetual changes from extreme concentration to frivolity, produce, in the end, the Wall Street manners, and the desire for exciting, highly colored amusements.
Every day in Wall Street is a completed day. It is a cash business. Your broker likes to talk about his trades over his after-dinner cigar, and to tell you, in the horsy, professional jargon of the Street, how he “pulled a thousand out of ‘Paul,’ and went home long of ‘little Atch.’”
He is, like all nervous people, a social animal. He is gregarious by instinct and interest. Accustomed all day long to his exciting pursuit and his club-parlor office, he seeks society for amusement and profit. He wishes to chat with his friends and to increase his following. He has no wares to display. He has no monetary advantage to offer over any of the other seven or eight hundred commission men in the Exchange. All members must charge one-eighth of one per cent, per hundred shares, each way. Interest charges can’t be very much reduced.
Every broker in Wall Street has inside information of some kind. His appeal, therefore, for commissions must rest on acquaintance and personality. He must know how to stimulate cupidity and create confidence. He must impress himself on as many people as possible as successful, honest, jolly, shrewd, well informed; a capital fellow and a first-rate business man. It is only fair to him to remark that whatever his faults, he almost invariably is a capital fellow and a first-rate business man. But is it extraordinary that this individual should become a man’s man, a man about town?
Whether he is the blatant, vulgar wretch of the caricaturist, or the cultivated, polished person who justifies Wall Street’s boast of being the aristocracy of trade, depends, of course, not on his being a broker, but on his being a gentleman.
His completed portrait, however, would be a too ambitious performance for the limits of my sketch, and I have made this little office study of him, as he leans against his ticker pinching the tape, with bits of board-room paper falling off his hat and a cigar between his teeth, simply to show the influence of his vocation on himself and on his companions.
The flavor of speculation permeates Wall Street like soot, and settles on the professional and the public alike. It is a sporty business. It appeals to the idle, the reckless, the prodigal and the déclassé. In the quickness and uncertainty of its evolutions, it is unfortunately so analogous to racing and gaming that their terms are interchangeable, and to the thoughtless the stock market is the ranking evil in that unholy trinity.
“Stocks, papers and ponies,” is the ringside slang for Wall Street, cards and horses. The sporting man finds it a no less hazardous, but an equally congenial and more respectable, means of money making, and he drifts into a broker’s office as naturally as the broker relaxes his nerves—similia similibus curantur—spending half an hour over a roulette wheel in his client’s “place.”