Life, 1905-06-08 · page 17 of 26
Life — June 8, 1905 — page 17: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This appears to be a satirical commentary on Wall Street financial speculation, using anthropomorphic animals as metaphors. The top panel shows human businessmen; the middle panels feature a bull and bear—traditional symbols of rising and falling markets. The bottom panel depicts these animals herding something together under a city skyline. The text parodies a nursery rhyme, replacing "blackbirds" with "lambkins" (investors/victims) and "pocket full of rye" with "pocket full of dough." The joke criticizes how easily speculators ("an easy bunch") are manipulated—"bleating" when markets close, suggesting they're passive followers led by larger market forces (the bull and bear). This likely satirizes early 20th-century market volatility and investor vulnerability to manipulation by powerful financial interests.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
A pocket full of dough; Two-and-ten wee lambkins Standing in a row. & When the Market closed, The lambs began to bleet, Wes not that an easy buneh, Ly To try to do the Bue? comicbooks.com