A YAZOO AFTERNOON
There were no difficulties of any consequence to contend with after _The
Last of the Flatboats_ entered the Yazoo. The boys’ guests were well
now, and joined them in their long talks on deck. These talks covered
every conceivable subject, and the planter, who proved himself to be an
unusually well-informed man, added not a little to their interest.
“I say, Ed,” said Phil one day, holding up one of his newspapers, “you
were all wrong about the crops.”
“How do you mean, Phil?”
“Why, you put corn first, as the most valuable crop produced in this
country.”
“Well, isn’t it?”
“Not if this newspaper writer knows his business and tells the truth.”
“Why, what does he say?” asked Ed, with an interest he had not at first
shown in Phil’s criticism.
“He says that in Missouri, which I take to be one of the great
corn-growing states--”
“It is all that,” answered Ed. “What about it?”
“Why, he says that in Missouri the eggs and spring chickens produced by
what he calls ‘the great American hen’ sell every year for more money
than all the corn, wheat, oats, and hay raised in the state, twice over.
And he gives the figures for it too.”
“That is surprising,” said Ed, “but it is very probably true. The
trouble is that we have no trustworthy statistics on the subject. No
ordinary farmer keeps any account of his crops of that kind. Not one
farmer in a hundred could tell you at the end of a year how many dozens
of eggs or how many pairs of chickens he had sold. Still less could he
tell you how many of either his family had eaten. So it must all be
guess-work about such crops, while practically every bushel of wheat,
corn, and oats and every bale of cotton or hay, and every pound of
tobacco is carefully set down in official records.”
“That reminds me,” said Irv, “of the remark a farmer once made to me,
when deploring the poverty of himself and his class.”
“What was it?” asked Will.
“Why, he said that lots of men in the cities got two or three thousand
dollars a year for their work, while he never yet had got over five
hundred dollars for his. I questioned him a little, and found that he
didn’t take any account of his house rent and fuel free, or of all the
farm produce that his family ate. He thought the few hundred dollars he
had to the good at the end of the year, after paying for his groceries
and dry goods, was all he got for his labor.”
“Speaking of these unconsidered crops,” said the planter, “I fancy it
would astonish us if we could have the figures on them. It is said, for
example, that more than a million turkeys are eaten in New York City
alone every winter. Now, if we count all the other great cities and all
the little ones, and all the towns and all the country homes where
turkeys are eaten, it will be very hard to guess how many millions of
these fowls are raised and sold and eaten in this country every year.”
“It’s hard on the turkeys,” moralized Will Moreraud.
“Well, I don’t know,” answered Phil. “I remember reading a story by
James K. Paulding called ‘A Reverie in the Woods.’ He tells how he fell
half asleep and heard all the animals and birds and fishes holding a
sort of congress to denounce man for his cruelties to them. After a
while the earthworm got so excited over the matter that he wriggled
himself into the brook. Thereupon the trout, who had also been one of
the complainants against man’s cruelty, snapped up the worm, and
swallowed him. Seeing this, the cat grabbed the trout, and the fox
caught the cat, and the eagle caught the fox, and the hawk made luncheon
on the dove, and so on through the whole list. I imagine that that is
nature’s way. Everything that lives, lives at the expense of something
else that lives. It is all a struggle for existence, with the survival
of the fittest as the outcome. And as a man, or even a commonplace boy
like me, is fitter to live than a turkey, I think the slaughter of those
innocents is all right enough.”
“You are entirely right, Phil,” said Ed. “A pound of boy is certainly
worth fifty or fifty thousand pounds of turkey, because one boy can do
more for the world than all the turkeys that were ever hatched. And
when a boy eats turkey he converts it into boy, and it helps him to grow
into a man.”
“Precisely!” said Irv Strong. “It cost the worthless lives of many pigs,
turkeys, chickens, sheep, and cattle to make George Washington. But
surely one George Washington was worth more than all the pigs, turkeys,
chickens, sheep, and beef-cattle that were killed in all this country
between the day he was born and the day of his death. But pardon us,”
added Irv, turning to the planter, “you were going to say something more
when we interrupted.”
“It was nothing of any consequence,” answered their guest, “and your
little discussion has interested me more than anything I had thought of
saying. But I was going to say that according to a New York newspaper’s
careful calculation, that city pays more than a million dollars every
spring for white flowers for Easter decorations alone, while its
expenditures for flowers during the rest of the year is estimated at not
less than five millions more. Then there is the peanut crop. Who ever
thinks of it? Who thinks of peanuts in any serious way? Yet it was the
peanut crop that saved the people of tidewater Virginia and North
Carolina from actual starvation during the first few years after the
Civil War. And every year that crop amounts to more than two and a half
million bushels!”
“What luck for the circuses!” exclaimed Will Moreraud.
“But the circuses do not furnish the chief market for peanuts,” said
Irv, who was somewhat “up” on these things.
“Where are they consumed, then?” asked Will.
“Well, the greater part of them are used in the manufacture of ‘pure’
Italian or French olive oil--most of it ‘warranted sublime,’” said Irv.
“Are we a nation of swindlers, then?” asked Phil, whose courage was
always offended by any suggestion of untruth or hypocrisy or dishonesty.
“I don’t know,” said Irv, “how to draw the line there. The men who make
olive oil out of peanuts stoutly contend that their olive oil is really
better, more wholesome, and more palatable than that made from olives.”
“Why don’t they call it peanut oil, then, and advertise it as better
than olive oil, and take the consequences?” asked upright, downright,
bravely honest Phil.
“Men in trade are not always so scrupulous about honesty and
truthfulness as you are, Phil,” said Ed. “But sometimes--they excuse
their falsehoods on the ground--”
“There isn’t any excuse possible for not telling the truth,” said Phil.
“Men who tell lies in their business are swindlers, and that’s the end
of the matter. If they are making a better article than the imported
one, they ought to say so, and people would find it out quickly enough.
When they offer their goods as something quite different from what they
really are, they are telling lies, I say, and I, for one, have no
respect for a liar.”
“You are right, Phil, of course,” said Ed. “But there is a world of that
sort of thing done. The potteries in New Jersey, I am told, mark their
finer wares with European brands, and they contend that if they did not
do it they could not sell their goods.”
“A more interesting illustration,” said the planter, “is found in the
matter of cheeses. Cheese, as at first produced, is the same the world
over. But cheese that is set to ‘ripen’ in the caves of Roquefort is
one thing, cheese ripened at Camembert is another, and so on through
the list. Now of late years it has been discovered that the differences
between these several kinds of cheese are due solely to microbes. There
is one sort of microbe at Roquefort, another at Brie, and so on. Now
American cheesemakers found this out some years ago, and decided that
they could make any sort of cheese they pleased in this country. So they
took the several kinds of imported cheeses, selected the best samples of
each, and set to work to cultivate their microbes. By introducing the
microbes of Roquefort into their cheeses they made Roquefort cheeses of
them. By inoculating them with the Brie microbe, or the Camembert
microbe, or the Stilton or Gruyère microbe, they converted their simple
American cheeses into all these choice varieties. And it is asserted by
experts that these American imitations, or some of them at any rate, are
actually superior to the imported cheeses, besides being much more
uniform in quality.”
“That’s all right,” said Phil. “But why not tell the truth about it?
Surely, if their cheeses are better than those made abroad, they can
trust the good judges of cheese to find out the fact and declare it.
And when that fact became known they could sell their cheese for a
higher price than that of the imported article, on the simple ground of
its superiority. How I do hate shams and frauds and lies--and especially
liars!”
“What bothers me,” drawled Irv, “is that I’ve been eating microbes all
my life without knowing it. I here and now register a solemn vow that
I’ll never again eat a piece of cheese--unless I want to.”
“Oh, the microbes are all right,” said Ed, “provided they are of the
right sort. There are some microbes that kill us, and others that we
couldn’t live without. There are still others, like those in cheese,
that do us neither good nor harm, except that they make our food more
palatable. For that matter the yeast germ is a microbe, and it is that
alone that makes our bread light. Surely we can’t quit eating light
bread and take to heavy baked dough instead, because light bread is made
light by the presence of some hundreds of millions of living germs in
every loaf of it while it is in the dough state.”
“Coming back to the question of crops,” said the planter, “does it occur
to you that there would be no possibility of prosperity in this country
but for the absolute freedom of traffic between the states?”
“Would you kindly explain?” said Ed.
“Certainly. The farmers of New York and New Jersey used to grow all the
wheat, and all the beef, mutton, and pork that were eaten in the great
city, and they made a good living by doing it. But the time came when
the western states could raise wheat and beef and all the rest of it
much more cheaply than any eastern farmer could. This threatened to
drive the New York and New Jersey farmers out of business, and
naturally, if they could, they would have made their legislators pass
laws to exclude this western wheat and meat from competition with their
crops. This would have hurt the western farmer; for what would in that
case have happened in New York would have happened in all the other
eastern states. But it would have hurt the people of the great
cities--and indeed all the people in the country still more. It would
have made the city people’s food cost them two or three times as much as
before. That would have compelled them to charge more for their
manufactured products and for their work in carrying on the foreign
commerce of the country. That would have crippled commerce,--which lives
upon exceedingly small margins of profit,--and the prosperity of the
country would have been ruined. It was to prevent that sort of thing
that our national government was formed, with a constitution which
forbade any state to interfere with commerce between the states.”
“What became of the New York farmer, then?” asked Irv.
“When he found that he couldn’t raise wheat, corn, etc., as cheaply as
the western farmer could sell them in New York, he quit raising those
things and produced things that paid him instead.”
“What sort of things?”
“Fruits, poultry, milk, butter, eggs, cheese, vegetables, buckwheat,
honey, etc., and in producing these the New York farmer grew richer than
ever. Since New York quit raising on any considerable scale the things
that we commonly think of as farm products, that state has become the
richest in the country in the value of its agricultural production,
simply because the New York farmer raises only those things for which
there is a market almost at his front gate.”
“That is very interesting,” said Will. “But how is it that the far West
can furnish New York and Philadelphia and the rest of the eastern cities
with bread and meat cheaper than the farmers near those cities can sell
the same things?”
“The value of land,” said the planter, “has much to do with it. The
value of a farmer’s land is his investment, and first of all, he must
earn interest on that.”
“Pardon me,” said Ed, “but that, it seems to me, is a very small factor.
The value of good farming lands in the East is not very different from
that of similar lands in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and the other great
farming states of the West.”
“What is the key to the mystery, then?” asked Irv.
“Transportation,” answered Ed. “The western farm lands, with an equal
amount of labor, produce more wheat, corn, pork, and the like, than
eastern lands do, and it costs next to nothing to carry their wheat,
corn, pork, etc., to the East.”
“What does it cost?” asked Will.
“Well, I see that the rate is now less than three mills per ton per
mile. At three mills per ton per mile, ten barrels, or a ton, of flour
could be carried from Chicago to New York for three dollars, or thirty
cents a barrel. Even at half a cent per ton per mile it would cost only
fifty cents.”
“While the railroads are engaged in transporting that flour to the
hungry New Yorkers at that exceedingly reasonable rate,” said Irv,
slowly rising to his feet, “it is my duty to go below and convert a few
insignificant pounds of the flour on board into a pan of biscuit, while
you, Ed, fry some salt pork, the only meat we have left, and heat up a
can or two of tomatoes.”
This ended the long chat, for besides the preparation of supper there
was much else to do. There were the lights to be hung in their places,
and more occupying still, there was the difficult task of tying up the
boat for the night. For experience had taught Phil caution, and he had
decided that until _The Last of the Flatboats_ should again float upon
the broad reaches of the Mississippi, she should be securely moored to
two trees during the hours of darkness. With the Yazoo ten feet above
its banks, it would have been very easy indeed for the flatboat to drift
out of the river into the fields and woodlands. And Phil had had all the
experience he wanted of such wanderings.