(a) You have been sent to buy, if possible and as cheaply as possible, a majority of the stock in a given company.  You find that many of the stockholders distrust or dislike the president and are willing to sell.  Some of these ask only $50 a share for their holdings; the owners of 100 shares want as much as $92; the average price asked is $76.  By buying out all the president’s enemies, which you can now do beyond question, you would secure a bare majority of the stock.  But $92 a share seems to you excessive; that is, you think that by working quietly among the president’s friends you can get 100 shares at $77 or thereabouts and thus save approximately $1500.  On the other hand, should your dealings with the friends of the president give him premature warning, he might stop the sales by these friends and himself begin buying from his enemies, and thus make your purchase of a majority of the stock impossible.  Is the $1500 you would save worth the risk you would be obliged to take?  You call for instructions.

(b) You are telegraphing a metropolitan paper the results of a Congressional election.  Philput, the Republican candidate, leads in the cities, from which returns are now complete.  Wilkins, the Democratic candidate, leads in the country, from only certain districts of which—­ those nearest the cities—­returns have been heard.  If the present proportionate division of the rural vote is maintained for the total, Philput will be elected by a plurality of three hundred votes.  Philput asserts that the proportions will hold.  Wilkins points out, however, that he is relatively stronger in the more remote districts and predicts that he will have a plurality of seven hundred votes.  Smallbridge, an independent candidate, is apparently making a better race in the country than in the city, but he is so weak in both places that the ballots cast for him can scarcely affect the outcome unless the margin of victory is infinitesimal.

7.  Compress 6a and 6b each into a telegram of not more than ten words.

8. (Do not read this assignment until you have composed the night letters and telegrams called for in 6 and 7.) Compare your first night letter in 6 and your first telegram in 7 with the versions given below.  Decide where you have surpassed these versions, where you have fallen short of them.

Night letter: Two factions in company I can buy from enemies president bare majority stock at average seventy-six but hundred of these shares held at ninety-two I could probably get hundred quietly from friends president about seventy-seven but president might detect move and buy majority stock himself wire instructions. (Fifty words.)

Telegram:  Wire whether buy safe or risk control saving fifteen hundred. (Ten words.)