These three important additions to the Stock Exchange machinery have met all the objections thus far encountered. They are broad and sweeping; they are rigidly enforced and they have come to stay. Sooner or later they must be adopted and enforced by all exchanges elsewhere. I think it may be said that having gone so far, the Exchange has tasted the fruits of a great moral victory and finds it good. It follows that new problems as they arise will be met in the same spirit. All plans can be improved, all work can be better done. The main thing is to get started on the right path. After that the task is easy. And it is immensely satisfying to feel that the Exchange has definitely chosen to hew its path along new lines of business ethics. A few years must pass no doubt before the public recognizes the importance of these reforms, but in the end they must be recognized and appraised at their real value. Is it too much to hope, when that day dawns, that public sentiment will force the demagogue and the notoriety-seeking critic into the background, and cheerfully give the Stock Exchange a hand? Is it unreasonable to predict that if we keep our house in order, talk of incorporation and supervision by Albany and Washington must cease? I feel strongly that this is to happen. I know it ought to happen, and those of my colleagues who have worked so loyally to bring about these reforms will be mighty proud and happy when it does happen. CHAPTER VIII THE DAY ON ’CHANGE, WITH SUGGESTIONS FOR BEGINNERS The stockbroker’s praises are never sung; if he has good qualities, one seldom hears of them. Doctor Parker once defined the Stock Exchange as the “bottomless pit”: Doctor Johnson said a broker was “a low wretch”; politicians vie one with another in painting him a parasite and a social excrescence. Impatient idealists who would take a short cut to perfection assert that he is of no real economic value, and would enact laws to restrain him. In the novels and on the stage he becomes sleek, cunning, convivial, and slippery, while there is ever about him a rank smell of money and a Machiavellian sublety that enables him to get something for nothing. Without understanding him and without comprehending his devious ways, we feel somehow that he lacks what Lord Morley calls “original moral impetus,” and that in some mysterious way there is a stratagem lurking in all his actions. When he enters the stage or the story we say: “By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes.”