tain day at a certain price, of course only upon the receipt of cash. The consumer on the other hand, does not pay down the purchase price, but only agrees to pay it on the day that the goods are delivered to him. This theoretical credit is sufficient however, for the speculator to create for himself, out of nothing, the most scandalous wealth.
Every working man, every one without exception, is tributary to the speculator. All our wants are foreseen, all the necessary articles of our consumption are bought up beforehand by speculators, on credit, and sold to us as dear as possible, for cash. We can not eat a bit of bread, nor lay down to rest beneath our roof, nor invest out savings in stocks, without paying to the speculators in bread-stuffs, in land and buildings and Stock Exchanges, their assessments. The taxes which we pay to the State are oppressive, but by no means so oppressive as those exacted from us by speculation. Certain persons have ventured to defend the Stock and Grain Exchanges as necessary and useful institutions. It is a miracle that they were not suffocated by the enormity of their assertions. What, the Exchanges of the world useful and necessary? Have they ever kept within the limits of their legitimate business? Are they ever simply the meeting place of the bona fide purchaser and the bona fide seller, where honest demand and honest supply can come together and transact their business. The simile comparing the Commercial Exchange to a poison tree, is incomplete, because it only symbolizes one phase of the transactions carried on /there, their effect upon the moral nature of the people. The Exchange is a den of robbers in which the modern successors of the robber knights of the Middle Ages, make their abode and cut the throats of all who pass that way. Like the robber knights they form a kind of aristocracy, which gets a handsome livelihood out of the people.
