y prevail without any longing for the rewards
of the gambler. It seems doubtful whether this adventurous longing for
unusual risks belongs to the Anglo-Saxon mind. At least those
vocations which most often involve such a mental trend are much more
favoured by the Irish. It is claimed that they, for instance, are
prominent among the railroad men, and that the excessive number of
accidents in the railroad service results from just this reckless
disposition of the Irishmen. It tempts them to escape injury and death
only by a hair. Where this desire to feel the nearness of danger, yet
in the hope of escaping it, meets the craving for the excitement of
possible gain, a hazardous investment of one's savings must be
expected.

Yet it would be very one-sided and misleading if this group of
emotional features were alone made responsible for the lamentable
recklessness in the market. We must first of all necessarily
acknowledge the tremendous powers of suggestion which the whole
American life and especially the stock market contains. The word
suggestion has become rather colourless in popular language, but for
the psychologist, it has a very definite meaning. Suggestion is always
a proposition for action, which is forced on the mind in such a way
that the impulse to opposite action becomes inhibited. Under ordinary
circumstances, when a proposition is made to do a certain thing
through the mechanism of the mind, the idea of the opposite action may
arise. If some one tells the normal man to go and do this or that, he
will at once think of the consequences, and in his mind perhaps the
idea awakes of the dangerousness or of the foolishness, of the
immorality or of the uselessness of such a deed, and any one of these
ideas would be a sufficient motive for ignoring the proposed line of
behaviour and for suppressing the desire to follow the poor advice.
But often this normal appearance of the opposite ideas fails. If they
arise at all, they are too faint or too powerless to offer resistance,
and often they may not even enter consciousness. They remain
suppressed, and the result is that the idea of action finds its way
unhindered, and breaks out into the deed which normally would have
been checked. If this is the case, the psychologist says that the mind
was in a state of increased suggestibility.

The degree of suggestibility, that is of willingness to yield to such
propositions for action and of inability to resist them, is indeed