anters, may at times require advances from the commission merchant;
and in proportion to the prices obtained, are his profits increased; nor
does any one censure the merchant for selling at the highest price he
can. Dealers, or speculators, if you please, are always censured for
raising the price of guano. Is not the same thing done every day, and
every hour in the day, by the purchase and sale of flour, wheat, corn,
and tobacco--and is not the price of almost every article of commerce
regulated in a great degree by the supply and demand? Most certainly;
and so long as there is a probability of profit by the purchase and sale
of this article, and just so long, and no longer, will the 'trade in
second hands' continue. If the present supply is inadequate to the
demand, by an almost undeviating rule in commerce, the price is
enhanced, until at a point to drive the consumer from the market. This
however, is not quite so soon attained with guano, under the present
excitement, as with many other things. I have viewed this matter in a
different light from some others, though erroneous as some may suppose,
and do not think that censuring the dealers will cover the true ground
of complaint, or at all tend to remove the existing difficulty. Their
agency is, if I may use the term--but in no offensive sense--a kind of
necessary evil; for the importer will not retail, and it suits but few
of the consumers comparatively, to club together, and purchase in large
quantities. The price of guano is owing mainly, if not entirely, to this
monopoly in the import trade; and it would be the same thing, and a
monopoly still, whether in the hands of English or American merchants;
with also, about the same amount of liberality to be looked for, from
one as from the other."

Is there anything so unfair in this, that we should cry out "wicked
monopoly." The Peruvian government, after the revolution, finds itself
deeply in debt, and greatly in want of money, and in possession of one
of the most valuable fertilizing substances in the world, which the
people of other governments are in want of, or rather, may profit by the
use of, which she offers to sell at what she deems a fair price; and for
the purpose of enabling her to borrow money for immediate necessities,
as well as to pay the war debt, she has given some of her citizens--rich
merchants, who can advance money, certain privileges and advantages in
the guano trade, upon condition that they will