“If you like.”
But before Jadwin could reply, Cressler and Aunt Wess’ who had been telling each other of their “experiences,” of their “premonitions,” of the unaccountable things that had happened to them, at length included the others in their conversation.
“J.,” remarked Cressler, “did anything funny ever happen to you—warnings, presentiments, that sort of thing? Mrs. Wessels and I have been talking spiritualism. Laura, have you ever had any ‘experiences’?”
She shook her head.
“No, no. I am too material, I am afraid.”
“How about you, ‘J.’?”
“Nothing much, except that I believe in ‘luck’—a little. The other day I flipped a coin in Gretry’s office. If it fell heads I was to sell wheat short, and somehow I knew all the time that the coin would fall heads—and so it did.”
“And you made a great deal of money,” said Laura. “I know. Mr. Court was telling me. That was splendid.”
“That was deplorable, Laura,” said Cressler, gravely. “I hope some day,” he continued, “we can all of us get hold of this man and make him solemnly promise never to gamble in wheat again.”
Laura stared. To her mind the word “gambling” had always been suspect. It had a bad sound; it seemed to be associated with depravity of the baser sort.
“Gambling!” she murmured.
“They call it buying and selling,” he went on, “down there in La Salle Street. But it is simply betting. Betting on the condition of the market weeks, even months, in advance. You bet wheat goes up. I bet it goes down. Those fellows in the Pit don’t own the wheat; never even see it. Wou’dn’t know what to do with it if they had it. They don’t care in the least about the grain. But there are thousands upon thousands of farmers out here in Iowa and Kansas or Dakota who do, and hundreds of thousand of poor devils in Europe who care even more than the farmer. I mean the fellows who raise the grain, and the other fellows who eat it. It’s life or death for either of them. And right between these two comes the Chicago speculator, who raises or lowers the price out of all reason, for the benefit of his pocket. You see Laura, here is what I mean.” Cressler had suddenly become very earnest. Absorbed, interested, Laura listened intently. “Here is what I mean,” pursued Cressler. “It’s like this: If we send the price of wheat down too far, the farmer suffers, the fellow who raises it if we send it up too far, the poor man in Europe suffers, the fellow who eats it. And food to the peasant on the continent is bread—not meat or potatoes, as it is with us. The only way to do so that neither the American farmer nor the European peasant suffers, is to keep wheat at an average, legitimate value. The moment you inflate or depress that, somebody suffers right away. And that is just what these gamblers are doing all the time, booming it up or booming it down. Think of it, the food of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people just at the mercy of a few men down there on the Board of Trade. They make the price. They say just how much the peasant shall pay for his loaf of bread. If he can’t pay the price he simply starves. And as for the farmer, why it’s ludicrous. If I build a house and offer it for sale, I put my own price on it, and if the price offered don’t suit me I don’t sell. But if I go out here in Iowa and raise a crop of wheat, I’ve got to sell it, whether I want to or not at the figure named by some fellows in Chicago. And to make themselves rich, they may make me sell it at a price that bankrupts me.”
Laura nodded. She was intensely interested. A whole new order of things was being disclosed, and for the first time in her life she looked into the workings of political economy.
“Oh, that’s only one side of it,” Cressler went on, heedless of Jadwin’s good-humoured protests. “Yes, I know I am a crank on speculating. I’m going to preach a little if you’ll let me. I’ve been a speculator myself, and a ruined one at that, and I know what I am talking about. Here is what I was going to say. These fellows themselves, the gamblers—well, call them speculators, if you like. Oh, the fine, promising manly young men I’ve seen wrecked—absolutely and hopelessly wrecked and ruined by speculation! It’s as easy to get into as going across the street. They make three hundred, five hundred, yes, even a thousand dollars sometimes in a couple of hours, without so much as raising a finger. Think what that means to a boy of twenty-five who’s doing clerk work at seventy-five a month. Why, it would take him maybe ten years to save a thousand, and here he’s made it in a single morning. Think you can keep him out of speculation then? First thing you know he’s thrown up his honest, humdrum position—oh, I’ve seen it hundreds of times—and takes to hanging round the customers’ rooms down there on La Salle Street, and he makes a little, and makes a little more, and finally he is so far in that he can’t pull out, and then some billionaire fellow, who has the market in the palm of his hand, tightens one finger, and our young man is ruined, body and mind. He’s lost the taste, the very capacity for legitimate business, and he stays on hanging round the Board till
