only within the then provincial jurisdiction of the Board. Now, it is often the cosmopolitan work of the combined capitalists of half a dozen cities, and its effects, as the London "Times" said of the pork corner of 1880, are felt in advancing prices all over the world. When six million bushels of wheat were handled by a syndicate, ten years ago, it was felt in predatory circles that the civilization of the nineteenth century had about reached its grandest heights; but sixty million bushels of corn and twenty million bushels of wheat are now pocketed almost without exciting remark. Corners generally used to fail; but the accumulated experience of many collapses has not been in vain. Such mistakes are not now made as that of the wheat corner of 1872, which was begun in the face of the harvest and was drowned out by the rush of wheat from the farmers, who dropped all other work and dried their green wheat in stoves, pots, tin cans, anything in which it could be heated, with the result of forcing down prices on themselves forty-seven cents in twenty-four hours. Now, while the farmers are selling the markets are kept down. It is after the crops are out of their hands that the manipulators put prices up. The corner of last July followed upon the smallest surplus the farmers have had in their hands for many years. The Board has sometimes had rules to prevent corners, but with the beginning of this year the corner rule was abolished through the influence of the wealthy operators. The radius of the combinations of capital to corner the crops is lengthening year by year. The great corner is still to come.

The late disastrous shortages of the crops of Europe caused the machinery of the Board to be promptly set in motion. A series of corners in wheat, pork, and other articles began, which have not yet ceased, and have produced almost every kind of evil. The wheat corner of 1879 was commanded by a New Yorker. It began with an inspired chorus of prophecies of low prices, which continued as long as the clique were buying of the farmers. The price was run down to eighty-one and a half cents a bushel. When all the wheat and wheat contracts to be had were obtained, the price was raised to one dollar and thirty-three cents. In every way the results of this corner were deplorable. The markets were crazed. The cliques held, according to their own statement, twenty million bushels, and, according to the estimate of close observers in the trade, seventy million bushels.

At one time, their wheat was piled up in the elevators and on the railroad tracks, intentionally stopping the way, so that no other wheat could be got to market by the farmers and dealers. Wheat was refused to exporters at prices they could afford to pay. The English buyers went to Bombay and Calcutta; and the East Indies, which sent their first sample to Liverpool not ten years ago, have, in consequence, taken a place next only to us in supplying the British market. During the winter, four hundred vessels lay for months in New York harbor, the owners pleading for wheat, even at ruinously low rates. Many of them ran into debt, and the majority of them finally had to sail away to seek cargoes elsewhere. When the time came to despatch this wheat from Chicago and New York to Europe, to put it out of the way, the head of the clique said to the railroads: "I will give you so many million bushels to carry; if you do not take it at my rate, I will ship it all by lake in the spring." The cutting of rates which ensued was one of the irritating causes of the war that followed among the trunk lines. In the same way syndicates have repeatedly forced the navigators of the lakes to take such rates as they chose to pay, for there was no one to compete with the engrossing shipper. Transportation, overtasked at one time and at another idle, is hopelessly deranged; and all the banking and other business that must attend the movement of the crops goes by fits and starts. Three out of every four flouring mills of the country were kept idle for over two months. One of the oldest members of the Produce Exchange prepared for the Legislature an estimate that this syndicate, by not selling, and by not letting others sell, and by fleecing those who had been inveigled into dealing with them, and by the injury that had been done to the millers, the shipping interest, the exporters, and the consumers of flour, had caused a loss to the country of not less than three hundred million dollars.

The pork corner, which came at the same time as this in wheat, was described as follows by the London "Times": "Amid the turmoil of the Presidential election, there has been closed one of the largest and most successful speculations which has ever excited the brain of Chicago-the Armour pork corner. fluence in advancing prices was felt in every part of the world. A Chicago dispatch of November 5th, says: 'In July, 1879, after one member of the firm of Armour & Co. had returned from

Europe, where he had been taking observations of the pork market, the firm began buying pork (at eight dollars a barrel), and in December, when it had risen to fourteen dollars a barrel, closed out, making a profit of two million dollars. Not satisfied that it had reached the highest price, they continued buying until pork had dropped to nine and a quarter dollars a barrel, absorbing their profit and an additional million. In April of this year they again began buying at ten dollars a barrel, and bought up three hundred and fifty thousand barrels of pork, and one million two hundred and fifty thousand barrels of 'futures.' For the last three months they have been closing out their gigantic purchases at prices ranging from sixteen to eighteen and a half dollars. They cleared over seven million dollars on this deal, and are winners on the two deals to the extent of six million dollars.'" There are giants in these days, and their caves are in the Exchanges.

The price of pork was more than doubled, flour was put up an average of two dollars a barrel, and beefsteak at least one cent a pound, as the result of these manipulations. This increase in the cost of living has not subsided. Pork and meat continued to advance. They were higher the next year and higher still last year, when pork sold for twenty-four dollars and seventy-five cents a barrel. Wheat, too, though it has fluctuated violently, has remained in the hands of the manipulators, and every year since the corner of 1879, the average price the miller has had to pay has been higher than that of the year before. The universal strikes into which the laboring people have been forced in the last two years are traceable directly to the increase in the cost of living, which these corners have done so much to produce. The loss from these strikes has been incalculable. That at Pittsburg alone is estimated to have cost us at least ten million dollars. The following sentence is from a petition to Congress to which a member of the Produce Exchange personally obtained the signatures of "a thousand substantial men": 66 As only men of large means or extensive credit are capable of engaging in these enterprises, they become essentially an array of capital against the industrial classes, wherein the banks and moneyed institutions are almost invariably drawn to the support of the former against the latter."

This is the communism of the syndicate, and it is the only communism the United States have yet produced.

One summer afternoon, a year ago, as a party of Chicago business men were idling in their yacht over the cool waters of Lake Michigan, one of them pointed out a great lake propeller shouldering its way eastward. "There goes some of our 'corner' wheat to Liverpool," he said. Propellers, sailing vessels, railroad cars were hurrying millions of bushels away from Chicago to put it out of the reach of the millers, the exporters, and the traders on the Board. It must, at any cost, be made scarce and dear for everybody. It was wanted for flour and as the stock-in-trade of the Board. But, as far as the bread eaters and the traders of this country were interested, it was thrown away, as the Dutch threw away the spices of the Moluccas. Such of it as Liverpool would take was sold at an average loss of ten cents a bushel, in order to extort twenty cents a bushel from the American consumer. Much of it lay for a long while stored in England unsold, while the working men and women from one end of the United States to the other question whether it is better to work for wages on which they cannot live, or not to work at all. One of the "business men of New York testified before the Corner Committee, that he sold corn to go to Europe for twenty-five. cents a bushel less than he made the buyers in New York pay him. Another member of the New Produce Exchange said that he had seen the agents of the cornering cliques standing at the doors of the flour-mills bidding away the wheat that was needed for bread. None but a free people would submit to such wrongs.

A great many, perhaps a majority, of the farmers believe that to them, at least, corners are beneficial. They see only the high prices, though these usually are made after the grain has left their hands, or when they cannot get it to market because the wheat of the clique stops the way. During the Chicago wheat corner of 1872, the elevators combined to rent out their bins and keep them empty in order to prevent any more of the farmers' crops from coming to market to embarrass the cornerers. High prices were paid during a short-lived excitement, but they were more than offset by the break that followed. The men most injured in that corner, aside from the consumer, were, as in most corners, those who buy from farmers at the country stations and make up car-loads to ship to the city. These men had bought large quantities of wheat, which they had sold for "future" delivery at prices that would have paid them only a fair profit. The

collapse of the corner inflicted upon them a loss of thirty and forty cents a bushel, and swept away in a moment from hundreds of them the accumulations of years of patient trading, during which many of them had never made a speculative deal, though they were often "future" sellers. The commercial reports of the Chicago papers show that, during the corner of 1881, shipments were stopped, elevators gorged, the lake marine paralyzed, sailors and laborers thrown out of work, and a blockade of the entire grain business threatened. Receivers of grain were ruined, and so lured into speculation. "Some of the houses which have bought and sold most heavily for speculative customers," said a Chicago journal at the beginning of 1882, "have been those who, previous to last midsummer, had done very little except in buying and selling for actual exchange between the producer and the consumer."

The commercial editor of one of the leading New York dailies, who had been on the Produce Exchange for eleven years, says: "Since these corners began, there is a large proportion of merchants who had a good receiving business who are now simply brokers in options and get all their business from the cliques. At the time I went on the Exchange, there was not a broker in the grain trade, except those who bought and sold actual stuff for export. Now there are a few of these, and, I should judge, over one-half or three-fourths of the members engaged in the grain trade are men who were once engaged in legitimate business out of which they have been driven by corner operations." If there was any advantage to the farmer from such operations it would not be a natural advantage, but there is no advantage. These corners put prices down when the farmers want to sell, and put them up when the miller needs to buy. They exaggerate gambling by intensifying the fluctations of price and they cripple legitimate business. They derange the rail, lake, and ocean transport of the farmers' crops to market. They drive away the foreign buyers to patronize the Hindoo ryot, who is happy, our Consul at Calcutta says, if he can earn ten cents a day. They convert the exporters and legitimate dealers on the Board into brokers and claquers for the syndicates. They will surely, if unchecked, destroy the Board, which, with all its faults, is the finest piece of mechanism commerce has yet invented, and without which the American farmer could not retain his command of almost antipodal markets. The farmer who thinks cor