It should not be forgotten, in studying the question of
re- grating, that behind the Syndicates who are actually operating stand armies of small speculators who follow them. The Ameri- can correspondents say the whole West is alive with men staking small sums upon the rise in corn. The Times' corre- spondent, writing in Iowa on the 5th inst., declares that during the month of August they ran up No. 2 red wheat at Chicago from $1 10 c. to $1 40 c., a profit of nearly 30 per cent. Specu- lative manias of that kind double the chances of the monopo- lising "rings," who, when crops are bad, can almost regulate the true price, and, therefore, deal with the public upon what is very nearly a certainty. The temptation to the great specu- lators must be enormous, and will one day culminate in a deter- mined effort to control all wheat for an autumn. A chemist writes to tell us, among other things, that so far from the opium of medicine being exempt from the regraters, an Anglo- American Syndicate worries the chemists to death. We do not know the fact for ourselves, but we are told ou undoubted authority that it may be true, no opium suiting the chemists but the Turkish. The Indian drug is too weak.
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