Satan's Bushel by Garet Garrett

Author:Garet Garrett
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: E. P. Dutton and Company

CHAPTER VII

AS a timber looker by walking through a forest and sighting it with his eyes may guess very accurately how many board feet of lumber it will cut, so these crop experts who go ceaselessly to and fro in the wheat, observing its growth, charting its area, comparing its conditions, detecting rust and blight, are believed to be able to estimate the total yield in bushels.

Seldom does it happen that any two of them agree. There is no difficulty in that fact. It is rather better that they should disagree, for then as their reports are received in the wheat pit and telegraphed simultaneously to thousands of offices all over the country where people sit in front of blackboards betting on the rise and fall of prices there is the excitement of contrary opinion; gambling is stimulated. Violent controversies arise. One expert, who last year was right when the United States Department of Agriculture was wrong, says there will be a big crop; rumors of damage have been exaggerated for reasons which he will not demean himself to characterize as they deserve. And the Board of Trade house that employs him swears to this and advises its clients to sell wheat for a fall. Another expert, who does not pretend to be infallible but whose record for five years has been such that one who had bet on his conclusions consistently would have gained all the money in the world—he says the crop will be short, no matter what faked-up estimates to the contrary are put out by whom he forbears to name; and the Board of Trade house that employs him urges its clients to buy for a rise.

Thus speculation in phantom wheat is fomented. That is the main thing. Why else should Board of Trade houses hire experts to estimate the wheat crop?

Those clients who sit in rows before the blackboards are like leaden lumps if you let them alone. They cannot make up their own minds. Act upon them with suggestion and they become golden geese. They neither sow in righteousness nor reap in mercy. Few of them would know a field of wheat from a patch of alfalfa. Yet in the course of a year they will buy and sell twenty bushels of phantom wheat for each bushel of real wheat produced by the labor of two and a half millions of farmers. In order that they shall do this they must be supplied with suggestions. Hence these private crop experts, hired by the proprietors of the blackboards, to keep the speculative mind in a state of futile anxiety.

The Department of Agriculture also estimates the crop. But its reports are issued once a month. That is not often enough. What would speculation do between times? Besides, the private experts always disagree with the government experts, and this adds zest to the blackboard betting.

A more painstaking and very secretive type of expert was new to Dreadwind. He represented neither private speculators in the wheat pit nor the proprietors of blackboards with their little pens of golden geese.

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