Trading in grains was light, price fluctuations small, on the St. Louis Merchants Exchange during the Saturday session, January 23, 1915. The brokers, as they stood in small groups around the sample bins and the quotation boards, had opportunity to discuss the sensational venture on which one of their Exchange members had embarked. The newspapers that morning carried the story that the W. L. Green Commission Company, one of the oldest and most respected firms on the Exchange, had the day before shipped a cargo of foodstuffs on board the steamship Wilhelmina from New York, bound for Hamburg. This was reported to be the first food shipment from America to Germany since the war began, and would furnish a test case involving the British “blockade”.