CHAPTER IV 



GAMBLING IN WHEAT 



A GREAT part of our wheat, the great food staple 

 of the world, comes from the American Northwest. 

 This is the country's granary. But the farmer does 

 not fix the price of wheat as do other producers 

 of their products. He does not even deal with the 

 buyer. The price of wheat is fixed for the most part 

 quite arbitrarily by the grain exchanges and stock- 

 market quotations in Chicago and MinneapoHs. 

 And although the farmers produced a bOlion odd 

 bushels of wheat in 1916, and although the price 

 reached almost prohibitive figures to consumers, the 

 farmers have not received any war prices as have 

 the munition-makers, steel-mills, coal and copper 

 miners, and other industries stimulated by the war. 

 The war profits of the farmers have gone to specu- 

 lators of the grain exchanges of Chicago and Minne- 

 apolis, which are the price-fixing agencies of wheat, 

 corn, meat, and other staple articles of food. This 

 is one of the strangest anomalies of our life. The 

 price of the chief article of food for a great part of the 

 civilized world is fixed by a group of men in the 

 grain-pits of Chicago and Minneapolis who have no 



interest whatever in wheat except as a commodity 



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