The only ones who make money on the board of trade are the company who rents offices, the cigar man, the lunch man, and the telegraph operators, and the commission men who get one-eighth of a cent a bushel either way the market goes. Some of these commission men get the speculation bug and go broke, and yet there are callow youths and business men and clerks and other outsiders who believe they are smart enough to speculate on the Board of Trade. That belief helps fatten our penitentiaries. No outsider ever made money on the Board of Trade if he stayed with the game. And the speculators on the inside graduate to the down-and-out class if they play long enough. There's a group of millionaires who control them and all others are pikers. You can't beat the Board of Trade; it's not in the cards. STARS A Little Study of the Universe Tonight I am in the Ozarks and old Mother Earth is passing through the belt of meteoric dust, that great mysterious sea in the universe through which we pass every year about the middle of November. It is midnight. I will not reach my destination until 1:30 in the morning. Two fellow passengers in the car, after cussing their luck, have finally gone to Snoozeland, while I call the passing hours opportunity. I look out into the night and marvel at the countless stars in the infinite black void, and wonder how closely those stars may be connected with humanity. That they are connected I have no doubt, for truly "the sun, the moon, the stars, and endless space as well, are parts, are things, like me, that cometh from and runneth by one grand power of which I am in truth a part, an atom though I be." How many stars are there? Well, let's get ready to appreciate number. I can see about 3,000; with opera glasses I could see 30,000. The late Franklin Adams photographed the whole canopy with 206 photographs. He counted the stars by mathematical plans, and gives the conclusion that there are 1,600,000,000 stars, and that number is just about the number of humans on this earth. So then there is one star for each of us. Each of those stars, practically speaking, is larger than the earth. Many have human beings who think and reason like we do. Multiply the 1,600,000,000 population on this earth by any portion of the 1,600,000,000 stars that may have thinking creatures on them; multiply that total by the millions of years and millions of generations that have passed out of existence. Think of these numbers and limitless boundaries and then tell me that one little man, on one little star we call earth, has a strangle-hold on truth, and that his viewpoint, his ism, his little dogma, his narrow creed, is all sufficient, and that he can give me and you and them definite rules and patterns for our belief.