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 he gets to be--all of a sudden--an old
man. And then some day some one says, 'Why, where's So-and-so?' and you
wake up to the fact that the young fellow has simply disappeared--lost.
I tell you the fascination of this Pit gambling is something no one who
hasn't experienced it can have the faintest conception of. I believe
it's worse than liquor, worse than morphine. Once you get int