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."
HARVESTING HEAVY GRAIN, SOUTH AMERICA