Accidents like diplomatic entanglements, rumors of war, earthquakes, and drought are constantly occurring to upset the plans of bulls and bring fat profits to bears in a hurry, while matters that bring about higher markets are generally things long anticipated, in which the profits that accrue to the bulls come about slowly and laboriously, and always with the attendant risk that a disturbance in any corner of the globe may bring on a sudden smash that will undo the upbuilding of months. In theory, therefore, there should be at least as many bears as bulls in all active markets, but in practice the large majority are always bulls, to whose sanguine and credulous natures the bear is a thing apart--a gloomy and misanthropic person hovering about like a vulture awaiting the carrion of a misfortune in the hope of a profit. Naturally the layman cannot understand him, and would like to suppress him. Despite the fact that the odds seem to favor the bears, there is an old and true saying that no Ursa Major ever retired with a fortune. Wall Street has seen many of them, and with perhaps one exception the records agree that the chronic pessimists have not succeeded. Fortune seems to have smiled on them at intervals; in the country’s early days of construction and development mistakes were made that brought about disaster, but in the long run such tremendous progress has resulted in America as to defeat the aspirations of any man or group of men who stood in its way. The big bears, as a rule, have “over-stayed the market.” Imbued with the hope that worse things were in store, they have been swept away by the forces they sought to oppose. One of them, a power in his day, was so obsessed with the notion that all prices were inflated, that he has been known to sell stocks short “for investment.” One night when a lady at his side remarked on the beauty of the moon, he is said to have replied with that absent-minded mechanical skepticim inherent in the bear, “yes, but it’s too high; it must come down.” One would think the ideal temperament for a speculator would be absolute impartiality, with an open mind uninfluenced by sentiment, ever ready to take advantage of all fluctuations as they occur. The ups and downs of a stock market always show, on average long periods, a practically equivalent swing each way, so it would seem that the speculator most likely to profit by these fluctuations would be one without preconceived prejudices, ready at all times to turn bull or bear as the occasion required. As a matter of fact, this type is the rarest of all, being confined, generally speaking, to the professional “traders” on the large exchanges, necessarily a very small minority of the speculative group, yet withal perhaps the most uniformly successful. These men, it must be understood, are not speculators, but traders, a nice distinction involving “catching a turn,” as opposed to the speculative habit of “taking a position.”