152 Corn and Corn Products Trades 



In the second place, they are speculators. "They assume the com- 

 mercial risk for the privilege of making any profit that may arise from 

 a change of price in harmony with their predictions."^ They pay at 

 one market a price and the producer has an immediate return. They 

 specialize in estimating future prices or prices elsewhere: in either 

 case, time or places are equalized in supplies, and the prices become 

 more stable over periods of time and more uniform among inter- 

 communicating parts. Calculabihty of prices gives business confi- 

 dence and increases the volume of business done. 



FACTOR. 



Factors are agents of their principals. They do not assume the 

 entire commercial risk as the corn-buyers and jobbers and merchants 

 do. Their function is not speculation. Their earnings are not the 

 profits, the difference between a cost and a selling price, be it high or 

 low. Their function is to effect exchanges of commodities by bring- 

 ing buyer and seller together. Special training and experience put 

 them in a position to aid both buyer and seller: they build up an 

 acquaintance and correspondence with both classes, and ease the way 

 for transactions between them. They are salesmen and buyers for 

 others on the accounts of these others. 



Corn-factors arose very early. x\s buyers of corn in local markets, 

 they were treated under the head "Broggers."^ A large consumer or 

 exporter of corn, being a large buyer, would employ a brogger or 

 factor to assist at buying. As the corn trade developed, factors set 

 up at each considerable market or port and established a correspond- 

 ence with factors at other markets and ports, and were ready to buy 

 or sell on that market for any who might need their services. As the 

 "New Agriculture" spread in the eighteenth century, the "Engross- 

 ing Farmer"^ — the landed gentleman who threw together several 

 estates and made large-capital farms, or the renter who rented sev- 

 eral farms situate adjacent — began to employ factors to do his selling. 

 The fact, therefore, that corn factors were quite well distributed over 

 England, must not be overlooked while this study deals particularly 

 with the London group. 



London possessed two great corn markets. Bear Key and Queen 

 Hithe. The latter had been the chief landing place of the upper 



1 "Mod. Bus.," II, 41. 

 - See treatment above. 



^ See "Considerations on the Present," 7-10; "The Prices of Provisions," 16; 

 "Flour Trade and Deamess," 19-20; "Abuses Relative to Provisions," 4. 



