ket with
intent to sell at a higher price; and the doctrine applied primarily
to provisions, that is to say, necessaries of life. Precisely the same
thing exists to-day, only we term it the buying of futures, or the
attempt to create a corner. We shall find that the buying of futures,
that is to say, of crops not yet grown or outputs not yet created,
is still obnoxious to many of our legislatures to-day, and has been
forbidden, or made criminal, in many States. "Regrating" is defined
in some of the early dictionaries as speculating in provisions; the
offence of buying provisions at a market for the purpose of reselling
them within four miles of the place. The careful regulation of markets
and market towns that existed in early times in England would not
suffer some rich capitalist to go in and buy all that was offered for
sale with intent of selling it to the same neighborhood at a higher
price. Bishop Hatto of the Rhine, you may remember, paid with his life
for this offence. The prejudice against this sort of thing has by no
means ended to-day. We have legislation against speculation in theatre
tickets, as well as in cotton or grain. "Engrossing" is really the
result of a successful forestalling, with or without regrating; that
is to say, it is a complete "corner of the market"; from it our word
"grocer" is derived. Such corners, if completely successful, would
have the public at their mercy; luckily they rarely are; the
difficulty, in fact, begins when you begin to regrate. But in
artificial commodities it is easier; so in the Northern Pacific
corner, a nearly perfect engrossing; the shares of stock went to a
thousand dollars, and might have gone higher but for the voluntary
interference of great financiers. Leiter's Chicago corner in wheat,
Sully's corner in cotton, were almost perfect examples of engrossing,
but failed when the regrating began. All these tend to monopoly, and
act, of course, in restraint of trade; the broader meanings of these
two latter more important principles we leave for later discussion.

(1285) The Statute of Bakers, or Assize of Bread and Ale, is by some
assigned to the 13th of Edward I. If so, we find all these great
modern questions treated by statute in the reign of the same
great law-making king, Edward I, who well was called the "English
Justinian"; for, in 1305, twenty years later, we have the first
Statute of Conspiracy. This statute only applies to the maintaining
of lawsuits; but t