This raising of the price cut off a large portion of the market,--and that had not been anticipated. Virtually all consumption of henequen except for binder twine ceased. At 19 cents Manila hemp could compete--and it is far better hemp. At 19 cents jute cord can compete, and jute cord is soft and pleasant to handle, and where previously henequen cord had been used for big bundles of newspapers and magazines and mail, jute was substituted--and now the men who handle the bundles of newspapers and magazines and mail refuse to go back to the rasping henequen cord which cuts their hands so uncomfortably. The consumption of henequen was actually reduced to half by this deliberate destruction of its market. In spite of the new low prices to-day, this condition in the general fiber market combines with the cutting off of the Russian and some of the other European demand to reduce the world consumption of the Yucatan fiber to about 70 per cent of what it was prior to 1914. All this loss the Reguladora had to take up, in addition to the stores which it laid aside to push up the price. Economic law was at work, and all the contentious statements that the price was going up only in proportion to the rising costs the world over was answered by the fact that henequen was driven out of the general fiber market by other hemps which had increased in price, to be sure, but had never approached the geometrical progression which henequen assumed under the lordly sway of Alvarado’s corner. When all is said and done, however, it was Mother Nature and Gresham’s law which finally broke the corner. Corners in the products of Nature have a way of piling up unexpected responsibilities and finally loosing unexpected forces which swamp the unwary juggler. So it was in Yucatan. With about a year’s supply of fiber in storage in the United States and Mexico, more than half of it mortgaged to American bankers, and with about $10,000,000 in Reguladora currency in circulation with nothing but photographs of gold stores to guarantee it, Alvarado’s henequen corner went the way of all the corners of history. That was in the spring of 1920 when, after a year of price fluctuation, Nature and the eternal laws of economics began gently wafting the prices downward until they reached the lowest level in fifteen years. Then it was that the banking syndicate, which had loaned money against henequen shipments, foreclosed on 250,000 bales in storage in New York, marking the final chapter in the story of Alvarado’s Reguladora experiment.