SPECULATION
You Can"t Earn Your Board on the Board of Trade
I"ve been riding through the golden wheat belt of Kansas, and estimated the new wealth; for that which grows is the only real profit or wealth.
All else are trades, speculation or bookkeeping accounts.
The farmer plants the wheat. G.o.d makes it grow and we eat it.
But in a big building in an amphitheater in the city, is a crowd of wild men in shirt sleeves, perspiring, shouting, making signs, clawing the air. This crowd never raised wheat, but they raise pandemonium. It"s the board of trade; its job is getting the wheat from the farm to you and me who require it to live.
I"ve recently visited the biggest food market in the world, the Chicago Board of Trade. Below the gallery sat a nice dignified elderly man who wrote a note on a slip of paper, folded it and gave it to a boy.
The boy was off like a shot to the wheat pit; he gave it to another white-haired young-faced man of cultured, refined, even scholarly bearing, so different from the row raisers in the pit.
This nice man was the floor man for a big grain commission house; he read the message, and then did the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde act. He turned red, purple, and green. His neck swelled, he threw back his head and screamed while he held up his hand and five fingers. Each finger meant 5,000 bushels of wheat; five fingers meant 25,000 bushels to sell.
In an instant, like a pack of wolves, the other crazy men raised their hands with bent and twisted fingers, the sign language of the pit.
The old man made a sign, the wheat was sold. He was Dr. Jekyll again; he yawned and was composed once more.
Soon a boy came with another slip, and the old man went mad again. I asked my host if it wasn"t pretty busy today; he said "no, it"s a dull market."
That 25,000 bushels of wheat was sold half a dozen times. Every broker who handled it got a commission. The buying and selling was speculation.
Outside the board were the hangers on, the down-and-outs, the has-beens, who used to be in the pit and throw fits like the nice old man I"ve described.
These has-beens have the speculation bug, and hope they can come back some day and make fortunes out of lucky guesses.
The only ones who make money on the board of trade are the company who rents offices, the cigar man, the lunch man, and the telegraph operators, and the commission men who get one-eighth of a cent a bushel either way the market goes. Some of these commission men get the speculation bug and go broke, and yet there are callow youths and business men and clerks and other outsiders who believe they are smart enough to speculate on the Board of Trade. That belief helps fatten our penitentiaries.
No outsider ever made money on the Board of Trade if he stayed with the game. And the speculators on the inside graduate to the down-and-out cla.s.s if they play long enough. There"s a group of millionaires who control them and all others are pikers.
You can"t beat the Board of Trade; it"s not in the cards.
STARS
A Little Study of the Universe
Tonight I am in the Ozarks and old Mother Earth is pa.s.sing through the belt of meteoric dust, that great mysterious sea in the universe through which we pa.s.s every year about the middle of November.
It is midnight. I will not reach my destination until 1:30 in the morning. Two fellow pa.s.sengers in the car, after cussing their luck, have finally gone to Snoozeland, while I call the pa.s.sing hours opportunity.
I look out into the night and marvel at the countless stars in the infinite black void, and wonder how closely those stars may be connected with humanity.
That they are connected I have no doubt, for truly "the sun, the moon, the stars, and endless s.p.a.ce as well, are parts, are things, like me, that cometh from and runneth by one grand power of which I am in truth a part, an atom though I be."
How many stars are there? Well, let"s get ready to appreciate number. I can see about 3,000; with opera gla.s.ses I could see 30,000.
The late Franklin Adams photographed the whole canopy with 206 photographs. He counted the stars by mathematical plans, and gives the conclusion that there are 1,600,000,000 stars, and that number is just about the number of humans on this earth. So then there is one star for each of us.
Each of those stars, practically speaking, is larger than the earth.
Many have human beings who think and reason like we do. Multiply the 1,600,000,000 population on this earth by any portion of the 1,600,000,000 stars that may have thinking creatures on them; multiply that total by the millions of years and millions of generations that have pa.s.sed out of existence.
Think of these numbers and limitless boundaries and then tell me that one little man, on one little star we call earth, has a strangle-hold on truth, and that his viewpoint, his ism, his little dogma, his narrow creed, is all sufficient, and that he can give me and you and them definite rules and patterns for our belief.
Verily, little protoplasm, you have another guess. We can by experience and tests prove two and two make four. We can by practice and experience prove that love, kindness, help, gentleness, sympathy, cheer and courage bring happiness.
These are tangible things; but when one wee Willie with sober face tells you and me and others that he has the truth about the definite, full workings of G.o.d"s plans and purposes, I think of the greatness of 1,600,000,000 stars each with 1,600,000,000 humans and of the unnumbered generations gone by, and say, verily we must live TODAY and do the best we can today in act and thought and word.
Yesterday is dead, tomorrow is unknown; where we have been, where we will be, we know not. Where we are today we know, and G.o.d in His great plan knows only the final answer as to our future estate.
He will take us and hold us and place us in His keeping and according to His purpose, even though we do not or cannot follow or believe any one of the little man-formed creeds, isms or cults as the measure and rule for our beliefs.
Those stars testify to the certainty of G.o.d, and I believe in Him.
LEADERS
Are Ever Subject to Backbiters
When a man by his brains or by fortunate combination or circ.u.mstances arises to a position of prominence he becomes a target for the envious and a pattern for the imitator.
Emulation and envy are ever alert in trying to steal the fruits of the leader or doer of things.
The man who makes a name gets both reward and punishment. The reward is his satisfaction in being a producer, a help to the world, and the glory that comes from widespread recognition and publicity of his accomplishment. The punishment is the slurs, the enmity, the envy and the detraction, to say nothing of the downright lies which are told about him.
When a man writes a great book, builds a great machine, discovers a great truth or invents a useful article, he becomes a target for the envious few.
If he does a mediocre thing he is unnoticed; if his work is a masterpiece, jealousy wags its tongue and untruth uses its sting.
Wagner was jeered. Whistler was called a mere charlatan. Langley was p.r.o.nounced crazy. Fulton and Stephenson were pitied. Columbus faced mutiny on his ship on the eve of his discovery of land. Millet starved in his attic. Time has pa.s.sed, and the backbiters are all in unmarked graves. The world until its end will enjoy Wagner"s music, Whistler and Millet"s painting will attract artists from all over the world, and inventors will reverence the names of Fulton and Stephenson.
The leader is a.s.sailed because he has done a thing worth while; the slanderers are trying to equal his feat, but their imitations serve to prove his greatness.
Because jealous ones cannot equal the leader they seek to belittle him.
But the truly worth-while man wins his laurels and he remains a leader; he had made his genius and the creature of his hopes and brains known to the world.
Above the clamor and noise, above the din of the rocks thrown at him, his masterpiece and his fame endure.