Not at all. He should say, “Prices _have risen_ to the extent represented by these increased earnings, unless this effect has been counterbalanced by other considerations. Now what next?” It is a sort of automatic assumption of the human mind that present conditions will continue, and our whole scheme of life is necessarily based to a great degree on this assumption. When the price of wheat is high farmers increase their acreage because wheat-growing pays better; when it is low they plant less. I remember talking with a potato-raiser who claimed that he had made a good deal of money by simply reversing the above custom. When potatoes were low he had planted liberally; when high he had cut down his acreage—because he reasoned that other farmers would do just the opposite. The average man is not blessed—or cursed, however you may look at it—with an analytical mind. We see “as through a glass darkly.” Our ideas are always enveloped in a haze and our reasoning powers work in a rut from which we find it painful if not impossible to escape. Many of our emotions and some of our acts are merely automatic responses to external stimuli. Wonderful as is the development of the human brain, it originated as an enlarged ganglion, and its first response is still practically that of the ganglion. A simple illustration of this is found in the enmity we all feel toward the alarm clock which arouses us in the morning. We have carefully set and wound that alarm and if it failed to go off it would perhaps put us to serious inconvenience; yet we reward the faithful clock with anathemas. When a subway train is delayed nine-tenths of the people waiting on the platforms are anxiously craning their necks to see if it is coming, while many persons on it who are in danger of missing an engagement are holding themselves tense, apparently in the effort to help the train along. As a rule we apply more well-meant, but to a great extent ineffective, energy, physical or nervous, to the accomplishment of an object, than analysis or calculation. When it comes to so complicated a matter as the price of stocks, our haziness increases in proportion to the difficulty of the subject and our ignorance of it. From reading, observation and conversation we imbibe a miscellaneous assortment of ideas from which we conclude that the situation is bullish or bearish. The very form of the expression “the situation is bullish”—not “the situation will soon become bullish”—shows the extent to which we allow the present to obscure the future in the formation of our judgment. Catch any trader and pin him down to it and he will readily admit that the logical moment for the highest prices is when the news is most bullish; yet you will find him buying stocks on this news after it comes out—if not at the moment, at any rate “on a reaction.”