300 REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONER OF AGRICULTURE. 



sliovdng the crop prospects, probaWe surplus or deficiency, of sncli 

 European products as suffer competition from the surplus of the 

 United States. 



SPECULATION AND CROP REPORTING. 



With increased public appreciation of the utilities of statistics, and 

 resulting enlargement of statistical facilities, come organized efforts 

 to turn to personal acconnt the information, and practical benefits of 

 statistical collection. This is natural and proper if legitimately done. 

 A trade guild, a company, or an individiial has a natural and moral 

 right to obtain early, even exclusive, information, to use as buyers or 

 sellers rather than for general or for public use, but not the right to 

 distort, color, or falsify the apparent or obvious truth for x)uri)oses 

 of deception, mystification, and robbery of producers or others. Yet 

 such selfishness will be exhibited in the use of crop-reporting ma- 

 chinery, and attempts to mislead and plunder the public will follow, 

 while greed of gain and crooked dealing have foothold in the marts 

 of trade. 



The false estimates of approaching harvests are put forth with 

 more than the energy of conviction, which brooks no denial or ques- 

 tion; and unfortunately they readily gain publicity through promi- 

 nent daily and weekly journals. They serve their purpose like any 

 stock-jobbing canard, and are apparently forgotten by the public. 

 They may live through one season by persistent assertion, but never 

 till the next. Careful and intelligent people are not deceived by 

 them, but the great masses are not experts, and often accept a state- 

 ment that is vigorously uttered, and are thus deceived. There is 

 no necessity for such self-deception, as the official reports of this 

 Department, and those of the State statistical organizations, and of 

 newspapers and other crop-reporting agencies, that are honestly seek- 

 ing accurate information, are sufficiently uniform, while unequal in 

 facilities and accuracy of interpretation, to give substantially correct 

 views. These several sources of information would be much more 

 uniform if the returns were properly averaged with reference to 

 quantity represented in each return. An average made from the 

 number of returns, without regard to the grea^t difference in the 

 cpiantity of product represented by each, is worthless, and in ex- 

 treme instances may be 50 per cent, out of they way; and yet most 

 of the averages published are inaccurate and a misrepresentation of 

 the reports of which they are a consolidation. 



The efforts of speculators to profit by crop reports assume various 

 phases. In some cases they claim to have superior or exclusive in- 

 formation by some prescience or system of crop researches of their 

 ovv^n, and so large a philanthropy withal that they hasten to make it 

 known with telegraphic celerity. In others they seek authoritative 

 information in advance of its promulgation. Another class, with 

 greater facility and at less expense, invent estimates, claiming them 

 to be official and exclusive, for instant use at the exchange. Rarely 

 they may be good guesses; generally they bear little resemblance to 

 the results they assume to present in advance; always they are con- 

 scienceless falsehoods in their pretense of origin. Not unfrequently 

 on the 9th of the month some one in speculative circles attempts to 

 trade on data assumed to represent the tenor of the report of the 

 Statistician of this Department on the 10th. Never have any such 

 data been obtained from this office within the knowledge and belief 



