Now here is a strange thing. After a man has said, “Wall Street did it” over and over again, he believes it, just as he believes or takes for granted a similar tedious reiteration by the humble katydid. To such a man, the thing he _wants_ to believe, when stated over and over again, comes by repetition to fix itself in the mind as a demonstrated truth, notwithstanding an utter absence of proof or of reasoning. He says “Wall Street,” or “the Stock Exchange,” until he can think of nothing else. It is a catch-phrase, short and sweet, which he hammers home to his own ineffable satisfaction, and he thinks it and broods over it to his heart’s content. The politician then comes along with his cures for all the ills of society, and, finding Wall Street a convenient means of perpetuating his accidental notoriety, his voice joins the harmony. The indictment is then complete. Take the panic of 1907 as the last and most conspicuous example. The financial losses involved, and the extent of the disturbance of the machinery of credit, made it the worst panic of this generation. As it burst upon the country at a period when to the outward eye prosperity reigned throughout the land, men were at a loss to explain it. They could not understand how such appalling conditions could occur in such apparently cheerful surroundings. As everybody was affected by it in greater or less degree the whole country was full of people with a grievance. They were themselves directly to blame for it, but they looked elsewhere for the responsibility for their folly. That sinister influences were at work was, in the popular mind, undeniable; and by that same token we are pretty close to “Wall Street” when we talk of things sinister. At about that time a member of Congress made a speech in which he asserted, with all the art of katydid repetition so dear to the heart of the true believer, that the Stock Exchange was the cause of the panic. Rich men broke the market and “held the bag,” he said, while panic-stricken owners of property poured the invested savings of a lifetime into that capacious receptacle. Nothing could be simpler. Newspapers must print such things, and the public found what it wanted on the first page. Even to-day, five years after the fact, this delightful explanation of the 1907 panic blossoms like the rose as a political campaign progresses. The voice of the hustings “knows its business.”