Wall Street is a morbid excrescence. Plainly it’s a thing that has grown out upon the social body rather like — what do you call it? — an embolism, thrombosis, something of that sort. A sort of heart in the wrong place, isn’t it? Anyhow — there it is. Everything seems obliged to go through it now; it can hold up things, stimulate things, give the world fever or pain, and yet all the same — is it necessary, Irwell? Couldn’t we function economically quite as well without it? What real strength is there in a secondary system of that sort? It’s secondary, it’s parasitic. It’s only a sort of hypertrophied, uncontrolled counting house which has become dominant by falsifying the entries and intercepting payment. It’s a growth that eats us up and rots everything like cancer. Financiers make nothing, they are not a productive department.… They just watch things in order to make speculative anticipations. They’ve got minds that lie in wait like spiders, until the fly flies wrong .… It is an a...
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