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ing wheat and pork on the Chicago Board of Trade, mining on the San Francisco Stock Exchange, building railroads in Wall street, sinking oil wells in William street, and picking cotton in Hanover Square. While the text-books of the science of exchange are describing in infantile prattle the imaginary trade of prehistoric trout for pre-Adamite venison between the "first hunter" and the "first fisherman," the industry of the cotton plantation, the oil fields, and the farm, is being overlaid by an apparatus of Exchanges which will prove an extremely interesting study to the Ricardo of, say, the twenty-fifth century. These Exchanges are the creameries of the world of labor. The prices of the speculative wheat and the spectral hog of the Board fix those of the real wheat and the actual hog of the field. The negro planter of Georgia who raises his bale and a half must sell it for what the Cotton Exchange says it is worth. The man who works in the ground must take the price fixed for him by the man who works in the air. No one can understand the "corner" who does not comprehend the development and reach of the Exchanges of our time.

The manufacture of prices, like other modern industries, is being concentrated into vast establishments, and these are passing under the rule of bosses and syndicates. The markets, like political parties, are run by the Machine. The people are losing the power of making prices as well as nominations. The "Free Breakfast Table" pays tribute to some clique, whether railroad pool, trades-union, match monopoly, coal combination, pottery tariff infant, or Board of Trade corner, on pretty much everything upon it. The coffee market of the country has lately gone out of the region of unorganized supply and demand into the hands of a Coffee Exchange, with all the modern improvements for speculation. A price factory to make the quotations of butter and cheese has just been established in New York. It deals in brokers' eggs as well as hens' eggs, and has all the approved facilities to enable it to count and sell the chickens that are not yet hatched out of eggs that are not yet laid.

The concentration of news, capital, and middle-men, in a focus; steam, electricity, and credit; the specially modern means of finding out the "statistical situation"; the development of the corporation; the multiplication of huge private fortunes and their union in syndicates; and the lupine standard of

business morality, make the modern market a thing new in development if not in kind. These Exchanges are cosmopolitan legislatures. Their enactments are prices, and their jurisdiction extends beyond that of Congress, Parliament, the Assembly, and the Reichstag. They are more than negative registers of prices determined by a conflux of forces external to them. Under the manipulation of cliques they have become positive agencies of mighty influence, and are the scenes of operations that menace the lives and happiness of nations. The "strong man" now builds corners instead of castles, and collects tribute at the end of a telegraph wire instead of a chain stretched across the Rhine. Money, knowledge, and energy are nearing the boundaries of exploration, and are turning back to monopolize the provinces. The whole world is platted. Such appliances as ours for exchange have never co-existed before, in the history of business. The criminal rich,—those who appropriate the labor of others in one age by brute strength, and in another by brute wealth,-who are to-day degrading competition into a rivalry of adulteration, are seizing upon them for peculative purposes. The control of the machinery of the Exchanges is the control of prices, and the control of prices is the control of property. In markets where the cotton crop, and the wheat crop, and the pork product of the whole country can be turned over half a dozen or a dozen times in a year, it is an easy thing for a combination to get hold of the marketable surplus and dictate its price. The "fittest" in the trade world are those who have learned the magic art of the manufacture of prices, and the Exchanges are shifting the property of smaller men into their hands.

The greatest of these price factories is the Chicago Board of Trade. Thirty years ago, its thirty-eight members were scouring the country back of them to persuade the farmers to send their stuff to Chicago for sale. Cheese, crackers, and ale were spread out in the Board room to induce the members to attend, but for days in succession the minutes of attendance read "none." Last year, the Board received and paid for, in cash, three hundred and eighty-two millions of dollars' worth of farm produce; and the total of its transactions was not less than three thousand million dollars. It has become not only the chief of the food markets, but "the greatest speculative market in the world," as an authority on speculation testified last winter before the

New York Legislature. It is the only market to which all the world goes to trade. Orders to buy and sell come to it daily from London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dublin, Cork, Bordeaux, Marseilles, Zurich, Havre, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Berlin, Hamburg.

No other farmer has such a market as this which mobilizes and cashes the crops of the Mississippi valley. Its scores of railroads fetch and carry. Its banks, stretching from the Zuyder Zee to the Yellowstone, bring the capital of the Bank of England and of the Hopes of Amsterdam to meet the farmer when he drives up to the country station with a wagon-load of grain to sell. Its telegraph wires inform him of the prices, the weather, the supply and demand of the world. Its every opinion of value is substantiated by cash. Its warehouses will hold two days' rations for every man, woman, and child in Europe and America. Packing-houses that can, singly, kill ten thousand hogs a day in summer and twenty thousand a day in winter, are there to receive all the live-stock that the prairies may forward. A cargo of grain lately sold in Liverpool on Chicago account had to be disposed of on six months' time. Chicago, whether in harvest-time or midwinter, will any day buy all that any one may wish to sell, and sell all that any one may wish to buy. Liverpool is, in comparison, an awkward country market, where every consignment of grain must be handled and sold as a separate parcel. But here the State inspects all the grain that arrives at Chicago, and gives a ticket of quantity and quality which is a negotiable security, and passes into commerce to be sold and bought, and borrowed upon, while the wheat itself is run with more of the same kind into the graded bins of the elevators.

Farmers and country grain buyers who want to take advantage of high prices, but are too busy to ship their wheat to market, can telegraph a broker on the Board to sell for future delivery. The miller, if wheat looks cheap, can buy for future delivery. These contracts are "futures." It is by their agency alone that the strain on the banks for money to move the crops is so distributed that we do not have a commercial crisis every fall. The fellah of Egypt and the slav of Bulgaria habitually sell their growing crops while green in the field. The distance between their misery, at the mercy of their own ignorance and

the greed of the usurer, and the affluence of our own farmer is as good a measure as any of the unapproachable superiority of the market which fate has given to the American farmer alone of all the tillers of the soil, but which the greed of the cornering syndicates threatens to destroy.

Wheat Adam Smith declares to be the least liable of all commodities to be engrossed "by the power of a few great capitals which buy it all up," because "its owners can never be collected in one place." But that, impossible once, is easily done now by the Board of Trade. By the perfection of its apparatus and the magnitude of its transactions, it is now possible for a clique, almost in one day, to obtain speculative possession of the surplus of a crop, and to insist that it all be delivered to them within an impossible time under a ruinous penalty, or to put it out of reach, and then demand an impossible delivery under a ruinous penalty. Every "future" bushel sold must be made good by the delivery of a real bushel when the buyer calls for it, and every purchaser of a "future" bushel must take and pay for a real bushel when the seller brings it to him. In olden times, when it was a prison offence all over Europe to buy wheat to sell again, it was the buyer who was mobbed and jailed. Nowadays, by a strange reversal of public sentiment, it is the seller who is treated with violence-that is, the "future" seller, the man who, in order to realize present prices, sells the wheat that he is holding in the country awaiting shipment, or which he expects to receive in the regular course of trade. It is obvious that, in the debate on prices on the Boards and Exchanges, both sides must be represented. There cannot be cash buyers without cash sellers; there cannot be buyers of "futures" without sellers of "futures"; there cannot be prices made, stocks accumulated, and crops moved without both, and without all this there could be no Board of Trade. Cornering commodities is only half the modern corner. The better half is cornering contracts. Most of the profit of corners is made up of the damages extorted in the shape of fictitious prices from the country shippers and from the traders on the Board, for not fulfilling contracts which the syndicates have made with them, intending to render them impossible of performance. And every such fictitious price so made within the Board is a real price to the consumers in the world beyond the Board.

The market is in these days no longer the mystery of the few; it is the mystery of the many. After giving men crop reports, market advices, banks, telegraphs, and brokers, it is too late to tell them not to try to use them for their legitimate profit. If the buyer helps the farmer, the seller helps the consumer, and in the world of commerce the consumer is just as good a man as the producer. The "future" seller is the offspring of the modern facilities for business. It is only in a highly organized market, with its supplies of commodities steadily flowing to him, that he could live. A highly organized market could not exist without him. No aspect of the corner is more ominous than that it aims at crippling the seller as well as the bread-eater, and with them the market in which they are as important personages as the farmer.

The "wealthy criminal classes" have been quick to seize on the Exchanges, at the risk of breaking them down, as the best of all instruments for depredation. With the machinery of the Liverpool Cotton Exchange a year ago they stopped fifteen million spindles and took away the livelihood of thousands of men, women, and children. Hardly a month passes on the New York Produce Exchange, one of the witnesses said before the Legislative Committee investigating corners, without a corner or a squeeze. But it is the Chicago Board of Trade which offers the largest and the favorite field for the cornerer. It is willing to give or take unlimited quantities at the figures it makes. It can put the combination of rich men in instant possession of the crop that is in market and of contracts for all that is to come. The morale of the Board permits the millionaires who have solicited these contracts, and "forestalled" the market for the purpose of making others break them, to put prices to any height in order to exact fatal damages from their victims. It is the code of honor among wolves that no high-minded lamb will squeal. The same class that administers trusts for the trustee, runs corporations to wreck the small capitals they were intended to consolidate, and finds only a private use in public franchises, is burrowing into the Board of Trade to kill trade. The passion for enslaving, forbidden by a squeamish civilization to buy men, finds a vent in capturing the raw material of human life.

Corners used to come on the Board of Trade once in a year or two. Now there are corners almost all the time. The Chicago corner used to be the venture of some local Titan, and was felt

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