ADVOCATE AND GUIDE. 23 



their services. That price is high enough to not only keep 

 themselves and families in luxury, but to provide the money 

 for all their improvements. 



Will it pay you wheat raisers to unionize so you, too, can 

 secure better wages for your services to enable you to have 

 as good conditions as city people? It is for you to say, and 

 unionize if you desire it. 



Put a Bottom to the Wheat Price. 



There being no one, or combination, to put a Bottom to 

 wheat prices except the big speculators, it is to their interest 

 to sell the price down to the lowest possible notch before 

 loading up with cash wheat and options for expected higher 

 prices when the bulk of the wheat is out of the producers' 

 hands. 



These speculators make a secret agreement among them- 

 selves to force the price down to a certain figure before they 

 begin loading up, as big speculators do in other farm prod- 

 ucts. When options are the highest for the future months, 

 when the farm deliveries are made, they sell for delivery 

 millions of bushels. As the new crop begins to move freely 

 they make concerted bear raids on the market to sell it down. 

 Every item of bullish news and lots of lies about bumper 

 crops and over-supplies are dished up in the daily papers 

 until the producer begins to feel he will be lucky if he can 

 sell his wheat at all. As the price of wheat goes down the 

 mills, bakers, foreign buyers and other dealers in wheat and 

 its products refuse to stock up through fear the prices have 

 not reached their lowest point of the delivery season. They 

 dispose of surplus stock and buy only their daily needs, hop- 

 ing for ever lower prices before laying in supplies. Small 

 gamblers, seeing the fortunes " bears" have made in the 

 decline of prices, now come in on the selling side. The big 

 speculators in the bear combine, though not having raised 

 a bushel of wheat, now openly flood the boards of trade with 



