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Hardy, with his wife and children, was strolling down in the cool of the evening to look with pleasure upon the bright green of their healthy and valuable crops, Hubert said: "Isn't Indian corn, papa, the great yallow heads covered with grain-like beads one sees in corn-dealers' shops in England?" "Yes, Hubert."
Their chiefs formerly drapers or corn-dealers, retired soap-boilers or suet-refiners, warriors of circumstance created officers for their money or the length of their moustaches, heaped with arms, flannels, and gold lace talked loudly, discussed plans of campaign, and gave you to understand that they were the sole support of France in her death-agony; but they were generally in terror of their own soldiers, men "of the sack and cord," most of them brave to foolhardiness, all of them given to pillage and debauchery.
Thus are at one blow destroyed all the inducements formerly existing for corn-dealers to "hold" their foreign corn, in the hopes of forcing up the price of corn to starvation-point, viz., the low duty, every inducement being now given them to sell, and none to speculate.
The corn-dealers are a most energetic class of men, well educated, and often employing large capital in their business. They are perpetually travelling, and often attend two markets a day. Having struck a bargain, the farmer and the purchaser adjourn to the hotel, and have a glass of spirits, without which no transaction seems complete.
In some places they rose against the manufacturers, and destroyed their machines, to the recent introduction of which they attributed their want of employment. In others, still more senselessly, they even set fire to the stores of grain in the corn-dealers' warehouses, aggravating by their destruction the most painful of their own sufferings.
The summer of 1766 had been unusually wet and cold, both at home and abroad, and the harvest had, in consequence, been so deficient as to cause a very general apprehension of scarcity, while rumors were spread that the high prices which the shortness of the crops could not fail to produce were artificially raised by the selfish covetousness of some of the principal corn-dealers, who were buying up all the grain which came into the market, and storing it, with the object of making an exorbitant profit out of the necessities of the consumer, not only at home but abroad.
It lay with him to drive prices down as low as he chose. In Brazovics' café there was angry talk every evening among the assembled corn-dealers. He scatters money like chaff, and squanders his goods as if they were stolen. If only he would come among them they would get him by the throat! But he does not come; he goes nowhere and seeks no acquaintances.
He further told them, "As we see corn-dealers sell their whole stock by a few grains of wheat which they carry about with them in a dish, as a sample of the rest, so you, by delivering up us, who are but a few, do at the same time unawares surrender up yourselves all together with us."
The Arabians do not like and seldom eat them even on board their ships, where they bake their unleavened cake every morning in those small ovens which are found in all the ships of every size that navigate the Red Sea. Salt is sold by the corn-dealers. Sea-salt is collected near Djidda, and is a monopoly in the hands of the sherif.
Secret emissaries, armed bands, went amongst the towns and cities where markets were held, and there disseminated the most alarming reports, provoking the people to tax grain and flour, stigmatising the corn-dealers as monopolists the perfidious charge of monopoly being a sure sentence of death.
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