300 
Gambling in Faim Produce. 
produce exchanges wlio sell and buy wheat with no intention of 
being connected with the work of moving the crops — speculators 
pui’e and simple. At times, he says, a group of them may sell 
futures furiously, merely for the purpose of depressing prices. 
Should buyers be scarce, this would be likely to result in prices 
going down, when the sellers might, as they frequently do, cover 
their short sales at a profit ; or the intention may fail utterly, as 
is more often the case, unless action is based on the broader con- 
ditions of the market, and aided by special influence or better 
insight into the demand and supply of the near future. But, 
he contends, the volume of trading in futures is not made up of 
transactions of this character — an opinion in which he is dis- 
tinctly opposed to many other authorities. Mr. Steevens 
condemns corners, but contends that men who deal in futures 
are the chief agents in breaking them. 
Mr. Sawyer, of Minneapolis, whose opinion has been pre- 
viously quoted, declares that the Elevator Company of which 
he is the President could not hold the enormous amount of 
wheat which they carry unless they could sell futures against it. 
At the time when he was speaking there were 92,000,000 
bushels of wheat in sight, which he said was evidence of the fact 
that the world could not consume wheat as fast as it came forward. 
The speculator, he added, was the only man who could hold this 
wheat, and, unless he could sell futures against it, he would not 
hold it except at a lower price than he gives under the future 
system. 
Mr. Raymond, of Chicago, made use of similar arguments at 
the Conference of the National Board of Trade, in which Mr. 
Sawyer took part. What surprised him, he said, was that the 
producers of grain who wanted buyers and competition and an 
outlet for their grain should propose to cut off “ the most active 
class of buyers that exist in the world, namely, the speculative 
buyers.” Every short sale that was made, he declared, furnished 
an increased demand for the farmer’s product, and, if you cut oft 
more than one-third of this demand, the farmer would suffer 
the depreciation of the value of his produce to just that amount. 
Mr. Bacon, of Milwaukee, declared that the free selling of all 
agricultural and other products for future delivery without re- ' 
striction or restraint produced a higher average price than would 
be obtained in the ordinary mercantile method of trade. The 
trade in grain and other agricultural products, he said, differed 
from other commodities in that it reached maturity and arrived 
for sale all at once. As soon as the grain is harvested, he added, 
the farmer desires to realise upon it, and his property is con- 
sequently rushed to market, probably two-thirds of the entire 
