If you were to go around Wall street and ask various classes of traders who They are, you would get nearly as many different answers as the number of people interviewed. One would say, “The house of Morgan”; another, “Standard Oil and associated interests”—which is pretty broad, when you stop to think of it; another, “The big banking interests”; still another, “Professional traders on the floor”; a fifth, “Pools in the various favorite stocks, which act more or less in concert”; a sixth might say, “Shrewd and successful speculators, whoever and wherever they are”; while to the seventh, They may typify merely active traders as a whole, whom he conceives to make prices by falling over each other to buy or to sell. Indeed, one writer of no small attainments as a student of market conditions believes that the entire phenomena of the New York stock market are under the control of some one individual, who is presumably, in some way or other, the representative of great associated interests. It seems obviously impossible to trace to its source, tag and identify any sort of permanent controlling power. The stock markets of the world move pretty much together in the broad cyclical swings, so that such a power would have to consist of a world-wide association of great financial interests, controlling all of the principal security markets. The average observer will find it difficult to masticate and swallow this proposition. The effort to reduce the science of speculation and investment to an impossible definiteness or an ideal simplicity is, I believe, responsible for many failures. A. S. Hardy, the diplomat, who was formerly a professor of mathematics and wrote books on quaternions, differential calculus, etc., once remarked that the study of mathematics is very poor mental discipline, because it does not cultivate the judgment. Given fixed and certain premises, your mathematician will follow them out to a correct conclusion; but in practical affairs the whole difficulty lies in selecting your premises. So the market student of a mathematical turn of mind is always seeking a rule or a set of rules—a “sure thing” as traders put it. He would not seek such rules for succeeding in the grocery business or the lumber business; he would, on the contrary, analyze each situation as it arose and act accordingly. The stock market presents itself to my mind as a purely practical proposition. Scientific methods may be applied to any line of business, from stocks to chickens, but this is a very different thing from trying to reduce the fluctuations of the stock market to a basis of mathematical certainty. In discussing the identity of Them, therefore, we must be content to take obvious facts as we find them without attempting to spin fine theories.