n a value of seven cents a pound for Rio No. 5."

The commissioner was dismayed. His government had already promised
to take coffee from the planters at about a cent a pound above the
market, and the market then stood at nearly eight cents. The
government would have to dig to make up the difference. Hermann
Sielcken's terms were the best that could be got, however, and the
commissioner accepted them.

From that time forth Hermann Sielcken was the head of the movement.
He approached a few large coffee merchants, including his former
rivals, Arbuckle Brothers, and drew up a contract. The merchants
agreed to advance eighty percent of the sum required to buy two
million bags of coffee at seven cents a pound. If the market went
above seven cents, the government was to make no purchases. If it
fell below seven cents, the government was to make good the
difference to the merchants by cable.

Before the season was well advanced the unexpected happened. Brazil
was reaping the largest coffee harvest in the history of the world.
The two million bags of coffee purchased by the government were as
a drop in a bucket. Financed by Hermann Sielcken, Schroeder, the
great London banker, and a few prominent European merchants, the
government was forced to buy almost nine million bags. Toward the
end of 1907, the government had lifted half of the world's visible
supply of coffee, but the market stood only a trifle above six
cents a pound. The government was practically bankrupt.

Hermann Sielcken now enlisted the Rothschilds on his side, and
shifted the financial burden from the shoulders of the coffee
merchants to those of the Paris bankers and their American
associates. Then the Rothschilds imposed their conditions on the
government of Brazil. A national law was passed determining a heavy
penalty for any one who planted a new coffee tree in Brazil. The
government guaranteed that not more than mine million bags of the
next coffee crop and not more than ten million bags of any
succeeding crop should be exported.

By the end of 1911, the coffee market stood well above thirteen
cents. Here was a rise of more than one hundred percent in two
years, more than sixty percent in six months. Evidently,
valorization coffee in the hands of the bankers' committee had