“To the manufacturer it is virtually a policy of insurance. It enables him to keep his mills running and his hands employed, regardless of bad weather or insect pests or other uncertainties. The same principles apply to the miller who wants wheat, to the distiller, the cattle-feeder, and the starch-maker who wants corn, to the brewer who wants hops and barley, to the brass founder who wants copper, and so on indefinitely. Insurance is one of two redeeming features of such speculation; and the other, which is even more important, is the steadying effect which it has on market prices. If no speculative buying of produce ever took place, it would be impossible for a grower of wheat or cotton to realize a fair price at once on his crop. He would have to deal it out little by little to merchants who, in turn, would pass it on, in the same piecemeal way, to consumers. It is speculative buying which not only enables farmers to realize on their entire crops as soon as they are harvested, but enables them to do so with no disastrous sacrifice of price. When buyers who have future sales in view compete actively with each other, farmers get fair prices for their produce.”[32] And, it may be added, the same satisfactory result is attained when bears who have sold the farmer’s crop short come to cover their short sales by buying in the open market; their buying steadies the market if there is a tendency to decline; if the market is strong, their buying helps make it stronger. In either case they are the farmer’s best friends, because the farmer profits as prices advance. Speaking of farmers, it is well known that much of the opposition to short selling and dealing in futures in the large markets finds its chief advocates among the Western and Southern politicians whose constituents are the agricultural classes. These gentlemen fulminate strongly against the New York Stock Exchange and the grain and cotton exchanges, and in currying favor with their bucolic supporters they do not hesitate to condemn margin trading, short selling and every other phase of speculative markets. Yet it does not occur to them, or, if it does, they dare not refer to it, that in forming pools and combinations to hold back their wheat and cotton their constituents are doing the very thing which they so strongly condemn in speculative centres. The farmer is, of course, richer than he ever was before, but nevertheless he grows his wheat to sell, and only a few can carry it for any length of time without borrowing from the banks. The farmer who goes into one of these pools with wheat valued at $10,000 and who borrows $8000 on it from his local bank, is nothing more nor less than a speculator in wheat on a 20 per cent. margin, and the same horrid appellation describes the cotton-planter who resorts to similar practices.[33]