Cyrus Hall McCormick: His Life and Work

by Herbert Newton Casson

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.

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.