The farmers sitting in the gallery, watching the speculators buy and sell “paper” corn, by shaking their fists and nodding their heads, feel that the Board of Trade is a gambling institution. So firm is this conviction that several of our largest farmers’ organizations have gone on record as being opposed to the speculative system as a method for registering prices of farm products. So far as the business world is concerned, the system of buying and selling future contracts employed by the Board of Trade is in the nature of risk insurance. A feed concern may have sold to farmers twenty carloads of their feed at a price based on $1.20 corn. They have not bought this corn as yet, and do not have room to store it. They therefore buy a contract for future delivery at $1.20, in order to protect themselves against corn going up in the meantime. This feed concern is in the manufacturing game; it can not afford to take a risk, and for that reason buys a future on the Board of Trade. When this feed concern accepts the actual corn, it sells the contract. It may make or lose money on the purchase and sale of the contract, but in either event the net result is that the actual corn cost $1.20 per bushel plus the commission charge of a fraction of a cent per bushel. The speculator takes the risk, and the spirit in which he approaches the game is often the gambling spirit, pure and simple. But, like all shrewd gamblers, he takes his risks as shrewdly as possible, and after a time becomes expert in judging the probable effects of weather, political news, transportation difficulties, etc., on corn prices. And these factors are more real than some of our agitators would have us believe. But while speculators perform a real service to society, there is nothing angelic about them. They are concerned with a profit, not with service. The professional speculator is generally either “long” or “short” of the market; that is, he has corn bought or sold for future delivery. The man who has December corn bought for future delivery at $1.20 per bushel is hoping with all his energy that the corn crop is short and price will therefore advance, that transportation difficulties will materialize, that an unusual demand will spring up from Europe for foodstuffs, that something will happen to send up the price. He is favorable to the promulgation of any kind of news which will help him to sell his corn at a profit. While the Board of Trade has regulations against the dissemination of false news, nevertheless these men at times seem to be able to color the crop news very effectively. Situations develop where most of the professional speculators are on one side of the market, and where they are apparently able to use propaganda to force prices very rapidly either up or down, at the expense of the amateur speculators.