white in the picture of the market
situation, the glowing story of the probable successes with the
bewildering hints of special privileges, must increase the
suggestibility of the untrained mind and reenforce powerfully the
suggestive energy of the proposition to buy. The whole technique of
this procedure has nowhere been brought to such virtuosity as in our
country. The fact which we mentioned, that the new industrial and
mining enterprises can offer shares small enough to be accessible to
the man without means, has evidently been the chief reason for
developing a style of appeal which would be unthinkable in the
countries where the investors are essentially experienced business
men.

But the skill of the prospectus with its sometimes half fraudulent
features would, after all, not gain such influence if suggestion were
not produced from another side as well, namely, through the instinct
of imitation. The habit of making risky investments is so extremely
widespread that the individual buyer does not feel himself isolated,
and therefore dependent upon his own judgments and deliberations. He
feels himself as a member of a class, and the class easily becomes a
crowd, even a mob, a mob in which the logic of any mob reigns, and
that is the logic of doing unthinkingly what others do. It is well
known that every member of a crowd stands intellectually and morally
on a lower level than he would stand if left to his spontaneous
impulses and his own reflections. The crowd may fall into a panic and
rush blindly in any direction into which any one may have happened to
start and no one thinks about it, or it may go into exaltation and
exuberantly do what no one alone would dare to risk. This mass
consciousness is also surely a form of increased suggestibility. The
individual feels his own responsibility reduced because he relies
instinctively on the judgment of his neighbours, and with this
decreased responsibility the energy for resistance to dangerous
propositions disappears. Men buy their stocks because others are doing
it.

But finally, may we not call it suggestion, too, if the individual
even tremblingly accepts the risks of perilous deals, because he feels
obliged to grasp for an unusually high income in order to live up to
the style of his set? Of course there is no objective standard of
living if we abstract from that where the income simply secures the
needs of bare existence. Above that, everything depends upon the
ha