THE REAPER AND THE WORLD
We shall now see what the invention of the Reaper means to the human
race as a whole. We shall leave behind McCormick and the United States,
and survey the field from a higher standpoint. The selection of wheat as
the first world-food,--its abundance made possible by the Reaper--its
transportation by railroads and steamships--its storage in
elevators--the production of flour--the growth of wheat-banks,
wheat-ports, and exchanges--the new wheat empires--the international
mechanism of marketing--the conquest of famine and the stupendous
possibilities of the future! These are the subjects that group
themselves under the general title--_The Reaper and the World_.
To find a world-food,--that was the beginning of the problem. All human
beings wake up hungry every morning of their lives; and consequently the
first necessity of the day is food. The search for food is the oldest
of instincts. It is the master-motive of evolution. It has reared
empires up and thrown them down. As Buckle has shown, where the national
food is cheap and plentiful, population increases more rapidly. And as
Sir James Crichton-Browne, in a recent book on "Parcimony in Nutrition,"
maintains, the lack of food is a prolific cause of war, disease, and
social misery in its various forms. "Nothing is more demoralizing," he
says, "than chronic hunger."
"For lack of bread the French Revolution failed," said Prince Krapotkin.
For lack of bread the opium traffic flourishes in India and China; the
secret of the prevalence of opium is that the natives use it to prevent
hunger-pangs in time of famine. Once let those countries have cheap
bread, and there may be no more opium sold there than there is to-day in
Kansas. For lack of bread came the war between Russia and Japan; what
the one nation wanted was a seaport for the grain of Siberia, and what
the other wanted was more land for the support of her swarming
population. For lack of bread have come most of the crimes of greed and
violence,--most of the social systems based on sordid self-interest,
most of the ill-humor that has postponed the coming of an era of peace
on earth and good-will among men.
Now, of the three main foods of the human race, flesh, rice, and wheat,
wheat is the best suited to be a world-food. Flesh becomes too expensive
once the wild game of the forests is destroyed; and it is not suitable
for food in tropical countries. Rice, on the other hand, is not a
flesh-forming food, and so is not suited for food in cold countries.
Wheat is the one food that is universal, as good for the Esquimaux as
for the South Sea Islander. It is not easily spoiled, as milk and fruits
are; and it contains all the elements that are needed by the body and in
just about the right proportion.
Wheat, to the botanist, is a grass--"a degraded lily," to quote from
Grant Allen. It was originally a flower that was tamed by man and
trained from beauty to usefulness. We do not know when or where the
prehistoric Burbank lived who undertook this education of the
wheat-lily. But we do know that wheat has been a food for at least five
thousand years. We find it in the oldest tombs of Egypt and pictured on
the stones of the Pyramids. We know that Solomon sent wheat as a present
to his friend, the King of Tyre; and we have reason to believe that its
first appearance was in the valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates, near
where the ancient city of Babylon rose to greatness.
[Illustration: Chart Showing Relative Distribution of Values by
Producing Countries in 1908 of World's Production of Five Principal
Grains. Approximate Value, $9,280,000,000]
[Illustration: Chart Showing Relative Values in 1908 of World's
Production of the Five Principal Grains. Approximate Value,
$9,280,000,000]
Wheat is not a wild weed. It is a tame and transient plant--a plant of
civilization. It could not continue to exist without man, and man,
perhaps, could not exist except in the tropical countries without wheat.
Each needs the other. If the human race were to perish from the face of
the earth, wheat might survive for three years, but no longer. So close
has this co-operation been between wheat and civilized man, that an
eminent German writer, Dr. Gerland, maintains with a wealth of evidence
that wheat was the original cause of civilization, partly because it was
the first good and plentiful food, and partly because it was wheat
that persuaded primitive man to forsake his wars and his wanderings
and to learn the peaceful habits of agriculture.
In any case, whatever its earlier history may have been, wheat is to-day
the chief food of the civilized races of mankind. It is the main support
of 600,000,000 people. It has overcome its natural enemies--weeds,
fungus diseases, insects, and drought,--and attained a crop total of
3,500,000,000 bushels a year. To the intelligent, purposeful nations
that have become the masters of the human race, wheat is now the staff
of life, the milk of Mother Earth, the essence of soil and air and rain
and sunshine.
But, although wheat was known to be the best food for fifty centuries,
it did not until very recently, until thirty or forty years ago, become
a world-food. Every community ate up its own wheat. It had little or
none to sell, because, no matter how much grain the farmers planted,
they could not in the eight or ten days of harvest gather more than a
certain limited quantity into their barns. All that one man could do,
with his wife to help him, was to snatch in enough wheat to feed ten
people for a year. Each family could do no more than feed one other
family and itself. This was the Tragedy of the Wheat. There was never
enough of it. It was so precious that none could be sure of it except
the kings and the nobilities. As for the masses of peasantry who sowed
the wheat and reaped it with hand-sickles, they would almost as soon
have thought of wearing diamonds as of eating white bread.
Then, in 1831, came the Reaper. It was not invented in any of the older
countries, nor in any of the great cities of the world. For five
thousand years neither the peasants nor the kings had conceived of any
better way of reaping wheat than with the sickle and the scythe. The man
who had cut the Gordian knot of Famine was the son of a citizen-farmer,
Cyrus Hall McCormick by name, Scotch-Irish by race, American by birth,
and inventor by heredity and early training.
This new machine, the Reaper, when it was full-grown into the
self-binder, was equal to forty sickles. With one man to drive it, it
could cut and bind enough wheat in one season to feed four hundred
people. In its most highly developed form, the combined harvester and
thresher, it has become so gigantic a machine that thirty-two horses are
required to haul it. This leviathan cuts a fifty-foot roadway through
the grain, threshes it and bags it at the rate of one bag every
half-minute. And the total world production of Reapers of every
sort--self-binders, mowers, headers, corn-binders, etc.,--is probably as
many as 1,500,000 a year, two-thirds of them being made in the United
States.
Because of this harvesting machinery, the wheat crop of the world is now
nearly twice what it was in 1879. The American crop has multiplied six
and a half times in fifty years. Western Canada, Australia, Siberia, and
Argentina have become wheat producers. The cost of growing one bushel in
America, with machinery and high wages, is now about half a dollar,
which is less than the cost in Europe and as low as the cost in India,
where laborers can be hired for a few pennies a day. With a sickle, the
time-cost of a bushel of wheat was three hours; with a self-binder, it
is now ten minutes. And so, because of these amazing results, the rattle
of the harvester has become an indispensable part of the music of our
industrial orchestra, harmonious with the click of the telegraph key,
the ring of the telephone bell, the hum of the sewing-machine, the roar
of the Bessemer converter, the gong of the trolley, the whistle of the
steamboat, and the puff of the locomotive.
Next to the Reaper, the most important factors in this world-mechanism
of the bread, are the Railroad and the Steamboat. These arrived on the
scene just at the right time to distribute the surplus that the Reaper
produced. The Steamboat, and its humble relative, the barge, came first.
The Erie Canal of 1825, the Suez Canal of 1869, and the Sault Ste. Marie
Canal of 1881, were built largely for the carrying of the wheat. By 1856
wheat was on its way from Chicago to Europe; and four years later the
first wheat-ship curved around Cape Horn from California. Ten years ago
an entirely new kind of ship, a sort of immense steel bag called a
"whaleback," was built to carry 250,000 bushels of wheat in a single
load. By this means a ton of wheat is actually carried thirteen miles
for one cent. There are to-day small barges on the canals of Holland,
large ones on the river Volga, and several thousand steamships on the
world's main water-ways, all carrying burdens of wheat. Enough is now
being transported from port to port to give steady work to fully three
hundred steamships and summer work to very nearly as many more.
There was an exciting contest between the ship and the car in the
earlier days of transportation, to see which should carry the largest
share of the wheat. About 1869 the car won. In this year, too, the
United States was belted with a railway, east to west, which meant the
opening up of the first great wheat-empire. Other railways pushed out
into the vast prairies of the West, lured by the call of the wheat. They
were the pioneers of the world's wheat-railways. Wheat was their chief
freight and wheat farmers were their chief passengers. At the outset the
grain was shipped in bags. Then some railway genius invented the
grain-car, which holds as much as twenty or twenty-five wagons. And
to-day one of the ordinary moving pictures of an American railroad is a
sixty-car train travelling eastward with enough wheat in its rolling
bins to give bread to a city of ten thousand people for a year.
The trans-Siberian railway, which is the longest straight line of steel
in the world, was built largely as a wheat-conveyor. So were the
railways of western Canada, Argentina, and India. Ever since the advent
of the Reaper wheat has been the prolific mother of railways and
steamships. While the rice nations are still putting their burdens on
ox-carts and on the backs of camels and elephants, the wheat nations
have built up a system of transportation that is a daily miracle of
cheapness, efficiency, and speed. This system is not yet finished. A new
line of steamships is about to be set afloat between Buenos Ayres and
Hamburg. The Erie Canal is being re-made, at a fabulous cost, so that a
steamer with 100,000 bushels of wheat can go directly from Buffalo to
New York. And an adventurous railway is now pushing its way north from
the wheat-fields of western Canada to the unknown water of Hudson Bay,
whence the wheat will be carried by boat to London and Liverpool.
To-day it is not the long haul of wheat, but the short haul, that is
more expensive. It is cheaper to carry wheat from one country to another
than from the barn to the nearest town. The average distance that an
American farmer has to haul his grain is nine and a half miles, and the
average cost of haulage is nine cents per hundred pounds. Thus it has
actually become true that to carry wheat ten miles by wagon costs more
than 2,300 miles by steamship. Such is the tense efficiency of our
wheat-carrier system that a bushel of grain can now be picked up in
Missouri and sent to the cotton-spinners of England for a dime.
Associated with this transportation problem was the matter of storage.
There was no sort of a building known to man, fifty years ago, in which
a million bushels of wheat might be conveniently kept. An entirely new
kind of building had to be invented. All the wheat barns were
overflowing. All the warehouses were outgrown. The difficulty was to
make a huge building that could be quickly filled and emptied. Then, at
the precise moment when he was needed, an inventor, F. H. Peavey,
appeared with a device for elevating grain--an endless carrier to which
metal cups were fastened. From this idea the _elevator_ was born.
[Illustration: MAMMOTH WHEAT-FIELD IN SOUTH DAKOTA WITH TWENTY
HARVESTERS IN LINE]
The first city that appreciated the usefulness of this new, unlovely
building was Chicago. It became not only the home of the Reaper, but
also the main storehouse of the wheat. It erected one after another of
these mastodonic buildings until to-day thirty-six of them stand along
the water-front, roomy enough to hold the entire crop of Holland,
Sweden, Greece, Egypt, Mexico, and New Zealand. What these immense
grain-bins have done for the prosperity of Chicago would require many
books to tell completely. It was largely because of them that Chicago
outgrew Berlin and became the central metropolis of North America, with
twenty-six railways emptying their freight at her doors and seven
thousand vessels a year arriving at her harbor.
At present Chicago has swung from wheat to corn and oats, and enabled
Minneapolis to become the greatest actual wheat-storage city of the
world. In Minneapolis the owning of elevators has become a profession.
There are not only forty-four elevators in the city itself, but also
forty elevator companies that have built more than two thousand
elevators in the wheat States of the Northwest. The Jumbo of all
elevators is here--a stupendous granary that holds 6,000,000 bushels, as
much as may be reaped by two thousand self-binders from seven hundred
square miles of land.
Of all American cities, there are only five others that can put roofs
over 10,000,000 bushels of grain. Duluth-Superior stands at the head of
these, with twice the storage capacity of New York. This double city,
with the picturesque location, Duluth on her Minnesota hillside and
Superior on her Wisconsin plain, has in recent years overtaken all
competitors and is now the leading wheat-shipping port in the world.
Buffalo comes next as an elevator city, having twenty-eight towering
buildings of steel operated by the energy of Niagara Falls. Even this
famous cataract helps a little in the making of cheap bread. New York
follows closely after Buffalo; with Kansas City and St. Louis running
neck and neck at quite a distance behind. It is an odd fact that there
is not one elevator on the Pacific coast. Because of the rainless
weather, the wheat is put into bags and piled outdoors until the day of
shipment. This is an expensive method of handling, as the bags cost four
cents apiece and no machine has as yet been invented that will pick up
and handle a sack of grain.
The American elevator has now been very generally adopted as the ideal
wheat-bin. Two Roumanian cities, Braila and Galatz, have suggested an
improvement by using concrete instead of steel. And one Russian city,
Novorossisk, on the Black Sea, has introduced a most original feature in
the building of elevators by erecting a very large one a quarter of a
mile back from the dock, because of the better view that this site
affords of the harbor.
London has no elevators, and never has had, although it buys more wheat
than any other city. It has six million mouths to feed, so that the
grain is devoured as fast as it arrives. To give bread to London would
take the entire crop of Indiana or Siberia. Neither are there any
elevators of any importance in Paris, Berlin, or Antwerp. Whatever wheat
arrives at these cities is either hurried to the mill or re-shipped.
Wheat is too precious in Europe to be stored for a year or for two
years, as may happen in Minnesota. Rotterdam has one elevator only and
of moderate size. Neither Odessa nor Sulina have any of the large
proportions, for the reasons that in Odessa the labor unions have an
unconquerable prejudice against elevators, and in Sulina the grain is
held only a short time and then forwarded elsewhere. This Sulina, as a
glance at the map of Europe will show, is the loneliest of all the
wheat-cities. It stands on a heap of gravel at the mouth of the
Danube--an oasis of human life in a vast marshy wilderness. The
children born there have never seen a railway; but 1,400 ships leave the
stone docks of Sulina every year laden with enough wheat to feed London,
Paris, and Berlin. To find the exact reverse of Sulina, we must go to
Buenos Ayres--the premier wheat-city of South America and the gayest of
them all. Built up at first by the cattle trade, and now depending
mainly upon wheat, this superb city has become the topmost pinnacle of
South American luxury and refinement. It has several new elevators,
erected by the railway companies.
After the Reaper, the Railway, the Steamship, and the Elevator, came the
Exchange. This, too, came first in Chicago, in its modern form. There
was one little grain Exchange in the Italian city of Genoa, several
centuries ago, and England points back to 1747 as the year when her
first Corn Exchange was born. But it was the Exchange in Chicago,
started by thirteen men in 1848, that first came into its full growth
and became an arena of international forces.
A wheat Exchange is to-day much more than a meeting-place for brokers.
It is a mechanism. It is a news bureau--a parliament--a part of the
whispering-gallery of the world. It not only provides a market where
wheat can at once be bought and sold, but it obtains for both buyer and
seller all the news from everywhere about the wheat, so that no bargain
may be made in the dark. Before Exchanges were organized there were
times when a farmer would drive twenty miles to the nearest town with a
load of wheat, and find no one to buy it. Even in Chicago, in the early
forties, a farmer ran the risk of not being able to trade his wheat for
a few groceries.
At present, when a buyer or a seller of wheat arrives at an Exchange, he
goes at once to consult the weather map of the day. From here he passes
to a series of bulletin-boards, which inform him of the arrival or outgo
of wheat at many cities. One board tells him the visible supply of wheat
in the world, so that he can easily ascertain, if he wishes to do so,
_how much bread the human race ate last week_. Other boards have
telegrams and cablegrams of disaster--frost in Alberta, hail in
Minnesota, green bug in Texas, rust in Argentina, drought in Australia,
locusts in Siberia, monsoon in India, and chinch bug in Missouri. Good
news is here, too, as well as bad. There may be reports of a
record-breaking crop in Roumania, an opulent rain in Kansas, a new
steamship line from Kurrachee to Liverpool, and the plowing of a million
acres of new land in western Canada. And also there are, of course, the
records of the latest sales and prices in other Exchanges.
Thus the farmer can not only find a ready buyer for his wheat. He can,
by means of a newspaper or a telephone, know what price he ought to
receive, as all the news gathered by the Exchanges is freely given to
the public. Such is the perfection of the news mechanism that has been
built up around the marketing of the wheat, that before a Dakota farmer
starts out for town with a load of grain, he can go to the telephone
under his own roof and learn the prices at various cities and the
world-conditions of the wheat trade.
The paper which best deserves to be called the official journal of the
wheat is the _Corn Trade News_, of Liverpool; and the building which
best deserves to be called the international headquarters of the wheat
business is the handsome new Baltic Exchange, near by the Bank of
England in London. This Baltic market is so practically international,
in fact, that it is never closed. Whoever wishes to buy or sell wheat
may do so here at any hour of the day or night. There are no days in
this building and no seasons, for the reason that it is always noonday
and harvest-time in some part of the world. In this Baltic Exchange,
too, there is now a nucleus for a Wheat Parliament, organized under the
name of the Corn Trade Association. This society has undertaken to put
the wheat business in order, by establishing standard contracts,
collecting samples of all wheats, arbitrating disputes, and condemning
all dishonesties of whatever sort.
As wheat Exchange cities, London, Liverpool, and Chicago outclass all
others. Neither Italy nor France have any central or dominating market.
In Paris, Antwerp, Hamburg, and Amsterdam the Bourses, as the Exchanges
are called, are public buildings, and the members of each Bourse
represent the local situation and nothing more. One of the most
ambitious and speculative of the European Exchanges is the one at
Budapest, which stands beside a dainty little park where the brokers eat
their lunch in fine weather; and the youngest of all Exchanges is the
one that was born in Buenos Ayres in 1908, representing a surplus of a
hundred million bushels a year.
Besides the brokers, in their Exchanges, there must also be inspectors
in the marketing of the wheat. In some countries these inspectors are
government officers, as in Germany and Canada; and elsewhere they are
local officials or private employees, as in the United States. A carload
of wheat, passing from Dakota to New York, will probably have from three
to six inspections.
[Illustration: HARVESTING IN ROUMANIA]
Also, the insurance agent takes his place in the circle of
co-operation when the wheat begins to move from barn to bakery. He
insures the wheat in the elevators, on the cars, or in the steamships.
He may even insure it against hail and tornadoes while it is growing. It
is so precious, this brown seed, that we watch over every step of its
progress.
It is the bankers' busy season, too, when the wheat begins to move. The
marketing of the grain ties up more money than any other yearly event.
"It threatens us with disaster every fall," said one of the Secretaries
of the Treasury, when making a plea for a more elastic currency. "We
ship half a million dollars a day during harvest," said the president of
a Chicago bank. "We drew more than five millions of currency from the
East and sent thirty-eight millions to the country during September and
October of last year," said a third financier, who spoke for Chicago as
a whole. In short, the movement of the wheat means a matter of five
hundred millions to American bankers; and it is the most important
occurrence of the year to the bankers of Russia, Canada, Argentina, and
Australia. Many a bank, as well as many a railroad, was founded upon
the moving of the wheat.
The broker, the banker, the inspector, and the insurance agent--these
four render a useful service to the wheat that has left home; but there
is a fifth man about whose usefulness there is the widest possible
difference of opinion--the speculator. From one point of view, the
speculator is the driving-wheel of the whole wheat trade. By his energy
and his impetus he steadies and equalizes the conflicting forces, and
gives the entire mechanism a continuous movement. From another point of
view, he is a gambler, reckless and parasitical, who interferes with the
natural laws of supply and demand, and snatches an unearned toll from
the wheat bins of the world.
Some of the wheat nations not only permit speculation in wheat, but
practically encourage it by allowing more privileges to the speculator
than to the ordinary business man. Others are resolutely stamping it
out, as a nuisance and a crime. The nations that have voted "Yea" on
speculation are Great Britain, Hungary, Sweden, Norway, France, and the
United States; and the nations that have voted "Nay" are Germany,
Holland, Belgium, Australia, Switzerland, Greece, and Argentina. Canada
has been divided on the question, since the Province of Manitoba broke
up the Winnipeg Grain Exchange by legislation in 1908.
In the end, as organization increases, speculation will decline. Chicago
will try to push prices up and London will try to pull them down; but
there will be fewer violent fluctuations. Better methods of farming and
a more reliable system of news-gathering will eliminate the element of
chance to such an extent that the wheat trade will offer less and less
scope for speculation and no inducements at all to the reckless plunger.
Already the frantic methods of marketing wheat have been outgrown in the
Exchanges of Liverpool and London. In neither of these places is there
any Wheat Pit, or any maelstrom of frenzied brokers. Without any
shouting or jostling or wild tumult of any kind, the English brokers are
buying two hundred million bushels of wheat a year, and controlling the
situation to a greater extent than any other body of men. This, too,
without any restrictive legislation.
Before wheat was made plentiful by the Reaper, it was possible for a
daring man to establish a corner or monopoly; but no one has succeeded
in doing this for more than forty years. The last wheat corner that did
not fail was in 1867. Since then every would-be cornerer has been caught
in his own trap. The wheat-machinery of the world has now become so vast
that no individual can master it. Whoever has tried it has found that he
was being cornered by the wheat; for as soon as he had raised the price
to an artificial level, the grain has flowed in upon him and covered him
up. The price of wheat to-day may be temporarily deflected by schemes
and conspiracies, but not for long. Ultimately it is decided by the
state of the crop and the state of public opinion in the thirty-six
countries that grow wheat and eat bread.
Within the last thirty years, since the Reaper has come into universal
use, the area of the world's wheat-field has doubled. New countries
have arisen, that were only waste places before. The habitable earth has
grown immensely larger. There is more room for both wheat and men to
grow, and less scope for the forestaller and the monopolist. Just as the
Reaper was the advance-machine of civilization across the prairies of
the West, so it is to-day opening up new territories and developing new
resources.
Northwestern Canada, for instance, was a dozen years ago supposed to be
a barren wilderness of snow and ice, in which none but the hunter and
the fur-trader might earn a living. Then several adventurous Minnesotans
went across and planted wheat. It grew--forty bushels to the acre, and
the acres, there were two hundred million of them, were waiting for the
plow and almost to be had for the asking. Since then, more than three
hundred thousand American farmers have swept across the line and joined
in the greatest wheat-rush of this generation. Twelve hundred grain
elevators have been built along the line of the Canadian Pacific; and
Chicago self-binders rattled through the yellow wheat last Summer two
thousand miles north of St. Louis.
In Argentina, too, and Australia, where the wheat ripens just in time to
decorate the Christmas trees, there is to be seen the same conquest of
nature. Desolate plains are being tamed by the plow and exploited by the
harvesters. In the semi-arid belt that lies east of the Rocky Mountains,
new kinds of wheat, less thirsty, are being taught to grow. In Russia
and Siberia a vast tract of twenty-five million acres has been rescued
from idleness in the last fifteen years. And even in the valley of the
Euphrates, where wheat, so it is believed, was born, a new railway is
now being constructed which, when it is finished, will carry oil and
wheat.
By thus opening up new regions to settlement, the wheat-farmer not only
thwarts the monopolist and makes the world a larger place to live in, he
does more: he compels the gold to come out of its vaults in the great
cities and to flow to the outermost parts of the earth. For every
eighteen thousand pounds of wheat that go to the city, there will go
back to the farmer one pound of gold. For every loaf of bread upon a
Londoner's table, there will go a cent and a half to the man behind the
Reaper. And so, the sale of every wheat-crop means that the gold will
come throbbing out into the arteries of business, like the blood from
the heart, and on its way back and forth nourish the whole body of the
nation.
It is in the very nature of the wheat trade to benefit the masses and
not the few. The more wheat that grows, the less danger there is of an
aristocracy of wheat. More wheat means more luxury in the farm-house,
more traffic on the railway, and more food in the slums. It means busier
factories and steel-mills, because the farmer, when he receives his
wheat-money, becomes the customer of the manufacturer. Thus it was not
at all accidental that the wealth of Buenos Ayres came with the
exportation of wheat, or that the commercial awakening of Canada
followed the opening up of her western prairies, or that the industrial
supremacy of the United States dates from the immense wheat harvests
that began in 1880 to push the whole country forward with the power of
$500,000,000 a year. As one of McCormick's competitors, J. D. Easter of
Evanston, once declared, "It seems as though the McCormick Reaper
started the ball of prosperity rolling, and it has been rolling ever
since."
[Illustration: HARVESTING HEAVY GRAIN, SOUTH AMERICA]
If we wish to know what the Reaper will eventually do for these new
wheat countries, we have but to glance back over the short history of
our ten prairie States. Here, by the use of both science and machinery,
the New Farmer has reached his highest level of success. By 1884 these
ten States had twenty million thriving settlers, riding on forty-two
thousand miles of railway, raising as much wheat in a day as New England
could in a year, and storing their profits in twenty-five hundred banks.
Incredible as it may seem to Europe and Asia, it is true that even the
poorhouses in Iowa and Kansas were used last year as storehouses for
wheat. And it is true that in the co-operative commonwealth called
Kansas, at the last assessment, there were found to be forty-four
thousand pianos and six million dollars' worth of carriages and
automobiles. This in a State where there are no Grand Dukes and where
every man works for a living!
If the lords of Siberia wish to know what may be done with that
famine-swept vastitude they may come and see that bed of an ancient sea,
which in thirty years has been transformed into the world's greatest
bread-land--the Red River Valley. Here the banks are not only packed
with millions, but hundreds of millions, belonging to the shirt-sleeved
proprietors of the soil. Here, in the yellow days of August, a man may
travel for days and see no limit to the ocean of waving, shimmering
wheat, that ripples around him in a vast sky-bounded circle.
Wheat--wheat--wheat! Nothing but wheat! It is a Field of the Cloth of
Gold, that adds nothing to the glory of kings, but much to the glory of
the common people. Drop the German Empire down upon this valley and its
expanse of dizzying, swirling wheat, and the wheat would not be wholly
eclipsed. There would still be enough grain around the edges to make a
golden fringe.
The children born and bred in this Red River Valley have never seen,
except in pictures, a sickle or a flail. Their only conception of a
harvest time is that a battery of red self-binders, with reels whirling
and knives clacking, shall charge upon the wheat as though each acre
were a battalion of hostile infantry, and make war until the land is
strewn with heaps of fallen sheaves. Famine, to these children of the
wheat, seems as remote a danger as the cooling of the sun. Even the one
young State of North Dakota, not yet of age, is now growing food for
herself, and for twelve million people besides.
So, the urgent world-problem is to teach other nations the lesson of the
Red River Valley. There is not yet enough bread so that we may put a
loaf at every plate. To feed the whole race according to the present
American standard of living would require ten thousand million
bushels--three times as much as we are raising now; and the demand is
fast outgrowing the supply. Sooner or later the Chinese will learn to
eat at least one loaf a week apiece, and when they do, it will mean
that the world's wheat crop must be increased ten per cent.
More wheat and a more efficient organization of wheat agencies--that is
the programme of the future. Already one unsuccessful effort has been
made to hold an international Wheat Congress; and the second attempt may
end more happily. Now that the world has become so small that a
cablegram flashes completely around it in twelve minutes; now that there
are forty-four nations united by The Hague Conferences and fifty-eight
by the Postal Union; now that war has grown to be so expensive that one
cannon-shot costs as much as a college education and one battleship as
much as a first-class University,--it is quite probable that the march
of co-operation will continue until there is a Congress, and a central
headquarters and a Tribunal, which will represent nothing less than an
international fellowship of the wheat.