Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1905-07-09

| Always at the beginning Of any substan-
tial advance in prices the cry Of manipula-
ton Is raised by those who do not take
are not taking an active part in the bull
campaign. To the public this talk of ma
nipulatien is full Of dimly understood men
ace. the one thing clear being the convic-
ton that such manipulation Is necessarily
a species Of thimbe-rgging designed to
lure the public on and in the end part that
public from Its money. The desire for such
a separation may not be absent, but stock
manipulators are not necessarily thimble-
riggers or thieves working under the pro-
lection that the dollar always bring.
However, any suspicious the public may
entertain are natural enough, for every
outsider who has lost money in stock spec
ulation firmly believes himself the victim of
deliberate plot. He does not know how
he came to lose in week what it took him
a month or year to earn, and he biameS
the men who, according to the veracious
newspapers, have made millions at the
game in Wall street. 1t is on a par with
| the notion that the favored few must have
made exactly as much as the unfortunate
many have lost But to hear veteran Wall
street men misuse the word manipulation
| and misinterpret its meaning is surprising.
Yet from none does one hear so much
about the dangers of a manipulated mar
ket as from commission brokers. who per-
sist in considering the manipulative process
fraught with grave per4iS-So long
as their own customers are not trading
actively and paying enough commissions to
induce more kindly feelings toward the rest
of the world, including stock man. puiators..
This is no eXaggeration. Eliminating the
traders and chronic dyspepticS and people
who have minds of their own ana 90 their
own thinking and their own observing, you
will find hundreds OF men in Wall street,
commission brokers. who will tell you: Il
don't like the market because there is too
much manipulation, and the public isn't
coming In They really mean that the
public isn't coming in-yet 1t all depends
in their minds upon whether the sucker
| public is caught or not but at the begin
ming they will shake their heads and pre-
dict disaster. 1t comes at times; at 9TH
ers 1t does not. But at all times there are
sound reasons for either the success or
the failure. The curious delusion that the
manipulation is unsuccessful and therefore
q danger because at a certain stage OF the
game the public is not promptly filled up
with a few hundred millions OF securities,
persists in spite of all that the experience
of the past has taught these professional
Wall street men. The reason is prooapiy
one not so much of technical knowledge or
the lack of it as of the scarcity OF accurate
analysis in all walks Of life. The average
business mind drops into certain attitude.
slow and steady decline or a prolonged
period of dulness may make these commits
son brokers imagine that turn IN the
nal ket tide can come only from some spec
tacular change in general conditions or
some sudden event of Importance. And IL
all that happens is a slow and quiet accu-
mutation of securities by the large money
ed interests and after time the moneyed
interests become aggressive on the upward
side, the average mind in Wall street and
out of 1t finds it impossible to get out of
the rut until 1t is forced to do SO by the
development of public buying on such
large scale as to make it obvious that a
different state of affairs prevails
The average Wall street man will ac-
knowledge readily enough that manipula-
ton is necessary, and that no big bull mar
ket, with it's thousands of bleating lambs,
was ever started by the bleating lambs
themselves None the less halt OF them
find the manipulation disturbing They do
not remember that the Flower boom of 1898
was started by Manipulation by the late
Roswell p. Flower and his enormously rich
and extremely shrewd and courageous asso-
ciates. They remember Instead that in De-
cember of 1893 the late William c. Whitney
and other very rich and adro1t stock OPP
orators manipulated the stock market with
such signal unsuccess that we We're treated
to what APPLY called rich mans
panic" They forget that in the fail of
1900 they shrieked for months at the glar-
ing manipulation of j. p. Morgan q Co,
Kuhn Loeb & Co, Speyer & Co, the Ber-
wind pool in Atchison, the Philadelphia
crowd in Pennsylvania Norfolk and Western
and Chesapeake and Ohio, etc, and later by
James p. Keene in United States Steel,
which eliminated in the widest boom in
our history in 1901. But they remember
that when John w Gates and his clustering
pals year more later manipulated stocks
in their uncouth western way, by putting
up prices by main force. they came a crop
per which served as text for many a DAY
afterward for stock moralists
These reflections are prompted by the fact
that during the past three weeks stocks
have risen very sharply. emerging from
utter stagnation into what many profess
SIGNALS are pleased to term fictitious activ-
ity. Since the public did not realize that
United States Steel preferred was cheap
last month at 93 and did not buy enough
to make the price sell above par and so on
through the list, the fact that somebody
else did, and criminally did it with blare
Of trumpets, so as to wake up the sleepers