Now, of course, there is no moral reason why a farmer should not speculate if he chooses, but what touches us on the raw is his Phariseeism in doing for himself what he professes to abhor and condemn in others. One is tempted to say unkind things to the farmer at such times, to remind him, for example, that he is to-day the most backward and unprogressive factor in American business life. Despite the fact that the Department of Agriculture has spent $100,000,000 on his education in the last twenty years, he has not yet begun to learn what the German, Dutch, and French farmers learned years ago in intensive farming, nor has he mastered the art of cattle-raising in anything like the degree it is understood in the Argentine. Nature has smiled on him; he waxes fat with her bounty, but he does not keep pace with the growth of the country. Although enhancing prices are paid him for his product, he is unable to raise a crop proportionate in any degree to the facilities put at his disposal in the way of fertilizers and machinery. One would like to “rub it in” on the farmer, but one doesn’t, “because” as a recent writer puts it, “the farmer is a farmer, and therefore not a person to be lectured like a mere banker or broker in Wall Street.” To the farmer, the politician, and the layman generally, short sales of cotton or grain are understood, approved, in fact, if the grower happens to be the one who profits by them. But substitute stocks and shares for wheat and cotton, and talk of “operations for a fall,” and the layman thinks he smells a rat. He sees the bale of cotton or the carload of wheat actually moving; it is a concrete thing; it appeals to his senses, it is comprehensible. But talk to him of bits of paper called stock certificates, and by a curious process he concludes that a short sale has no basis of reality and is therefore menacing and improper. He persuades himself that short selling ought to be prohibited by law, and, since Wall Street harbors the chief offenders, he finds in the nearest politician a handy ally to assist him. These gentlemen, who obstinately refuse every other medicament, could be cured of their ailment by a strong diet of economics. They become subjects of medical, rather than financial, interest. They should dip themselves into Conant and Leroy-Beaulieu; they should cool off in the pages of Bagehot and Emery; and, by the time they have got into the soothing columns of the Hughes Commission’s report, they will be ready for new points of view.