Page:Michael Farbman - Russia & the Struggle for Peace (1918).djvu/72

 60 for their living; newspaper reporters speculated for amusement and fashionable men and women for the sake of adventure. And above all these big and small speculators the Government officials assumed an honourable place as chief speculators.

I once saw in a Russian music-hall an amusing little scene in which two professional dancers made a deal on a consignment of "Hydroquinone"" during a performance of the "tango." The curious thing is that this is scarcely a caricature. It is a fact that deals were made during any time of the day between the most fashionable and the queerest people, in the most incredible articles whose very existence they had probably never heard of before. Speculations were made in cafés, banks, factories, railway stations, theatres, gambling houses, on the streets and in trains. There were speculations in land and grain, speculation in money and the rate of exchange—in fact, in every kind of goods. The speculation in goods-trucks I have already mentioned.

There is no need for me to-day to explain the detrimental economic effects of these transactions. Certainly, they have nowhere grown to such an enormous extent as in Russia, and nowhere else have they appeared in such monstrous and grotesque forms. But they exist in all belligerent countries in Europe. In all countries, people know what it means when a certain article suddenly disappears from the market and reappears after a certain time when the prices have risen considerably higher. By this time people everywhere know what to think of the merchants when the latter suddenly become very patriotic and refuse to sell their goods except in small quantities.

Such speculation is certainly not peculiar to Russia.