By a healthy tradition reaching deep into the dark folk recollections of the race, the trader for profit is suspect. Along the dusty, chaffering path leading backward from the New York Stock Exchange to the first caravan peddler who swapped, with a plainsman, jade for skins in far Mesopotamia, the trader immemorially has been regarded as a sly fellow, fraught with guile and never under any circumstances to be trusted in fixing his own profit.
A rascally crew, by all accounts, for centuries jeered at, proscribed and preyed upon and, for a millenium and a half of the Christian era, in lively danger of hell’s fire. The money vendors and hucksters who keep shop in Wall Street in this depressed year 1932 inherit the historic aversion to their guild.
Wall Street, moreover, is heir to another antipathy of natural man. The great banks which huddle in close order in the narrow highways of lower Manhattan represent that universally opprobrious character, the creditor.
Under the terms of the standard economic theory, which places debt first, productivity second, all borrowers from the hog-raising farmer in Nebraska to the New England railroad, the South American government as well as the Ohio plow manufacturer, are in debt to Wall Street. Having arranged the loans, Wall Street is now the bailiff, the landlord’s agent, the collector inveterately feared and hated by the debtor class.
Contents:
- WHIPS FOR ROGUES
- TULIPS AND WAR DEBTS
- PIRATES, SLAVES AND STOCK BROKERS
- HUZZAH FOR HAMILTON
- THE IRON HORSE
- THE WESTERN BLIZZARD
- PIRACY, NEW STYLE
- ERIE, HARLOT OF THE RAILS
- PRAIRIE EMPIRE LOOTED
- GOULD ASTRIDE THE “L”
- GIANTS SHAKE THE EARTH
- FAREWELL TO THE TITANS
- THE NEW JERUSALEM: 1915-’29
- AN END TO FRONTIERS
- SHORT-SELLERS’ HOLIDAY
- RECOVERY: WAR OR FAMINE?
- 1947 A. D.