ed currents it rolled on its way
to ocean ports. Here, according to the novelists, frantic men were
sucked into the golden eddies, their cries strangled and their fate
forgotten even as they were engulfed by the Leviathan with which they
adventured; or they emerged with eyes bloodshot, voices gone and
clothes torn, successful speculators of a day. Perhaps the general
reader is more familiar with these mad scenes of "The Pit," as the
trading floor is called, than with the steadily turning marketing
machinery of which they are but a penumbra.

The modern grain exchange is much more than a mere roulette wheel for
the speculator. Its real purpose is to provide a centre for the
legitimate trader. It is a great information bureau of world
happenings where every item of news concerning the wheat in any way is
gathered and classified--drouth, rain, frost, rust, locusts, hail,
Hessian fly, monsoon or chinch bug. In every corner of the earth where
the wheat streams take their rise, from green blade to brown head the
progress of the crop is recorded and the prospects forecasted--on the
steppes of Russia, the pampas of the Argentine, the valley of the San
Joaquin, the prairies of Western Canada and the Dakotas, the fields of
India, Iowa, Illinois and Kansas. Good news, bad news, the movements
of ships, the prices on the corn exchanges of London and Liverpool, at
Chicago, on the bourses of Paris, Antwerp and Amsterdam--all are
listed. With such a Timepiece of International Exchange ticking out
the doings of nations, both buyer and seller can know what prices will
govern their dealings. In office or farmhouse an ear to a telephone is
all that is necessary.

A grain exchange, then, is the market-place where grain dealers meet to
secure information and maintain regulations for the prompt performance
of contracts. The exchange organization does not deal in grain, but
has for its sole purpose the protection of those who do and the
facilitating of transactions; in other words, it is on the ground to
see that the grain trade is carried on in an honest and capable manner
and to punish offenders against proper business ethics and established
rules.

Its membership is composed of grain dealers doing business in the
exchange's territory--milling companies, exporting companies, line
elevator companies as well as independent dealers and "commission men."
Besides seeking a supply of wheat to keep their mills busy for the
season, the