MEDIAEVAL AND MODERN PRODUCE MARKETS 837 



as it afforded the possibility of using the various future contracts 

 without the dangers that had been fully revealed by Dutch ex- 

 perience. Finally, in the grain trade of western United States, 

 the term contract was developed into an elaborately developed 

 instrument that seems to represent the final form. 



In the Middle Ages the law of the market insisted upon the 

 physical presence of the goods to be bought and sold. The 

 market could deal only in such supplies as were physically 

 visible. The inconvenience and dangers of such limitations 

 became serious with the rise of wholesale marketing. The 

 essential interdependence of producing and consuming markets 

 could not be recognized adequately until each market was made 

 competent to trade in terms of the whole supply to be found in 

 the entire group of related markets. The stability of the large 

 markets was greatly increased by making it possible to buy and 

 sell not merely the goods physically present, but goods in transit 

 and goods actually in the hands of traders on another market. 

 The significance of this interdependence of markets has become 

 doubly clear since the great improvements in communication 

 have made it possible for dealers to engage in operations simul- 

 taneously in widely separated markets. The full development 

 of this system of trading has been confined to the period subse- 

 quent to the opening of the Atlantic cable, but the origin of the 

 system reaches farther back into the past. This modern system 

 of trading rests upon two types of instrument : the future con- 

 tracts already described ; and symbols of property, such as bills 

 of lading, dock warrants, and warehouse certificates. The early 

 forms of future trading have been discussed already, and the 

 necessity of other instruments can be clearly perceived in the 

 tendency of Dutch speculation to degenerate into gambling on 

 differences. 



The new legal doctrines which were to complete the technical 

 foundation of the modem speculative system appear first in the 

 law merchant and the English decisions associated with it. 

 Neither the bill of lading nor the dock warrant was itself new, 

 but both instruments acquired new legal attributes in the course 

 of the eighteenth centur\'. Originally mere receipts of goods 



