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.
[CHAPTER XIII]
GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD
WE have now seen the machinery by which the wheat is cut, moved, stored, financed, and marketed. Its next and last step, as wheat, is to the Flour-mill, whence it goes to the bakeries, the groceries, and the homes of six hundred million people. Here, too, there have had to come new methods since the advent of the Reaper.
In the Dark Ages of the sickle and the flail, two flat stones did well enough for a flour-mill. Even the bread that was found in the ruins of Pompeii had been made of wheat that was merely crushed. Later came the mill run by horse-power or by the energy of a little stream. Such were the first American mills. The mill that was operated by George Washington at Mount Vernon, for instance, was run by water-power and produced flour that sold for thirteen dollars a barrel. Rochester, N. Y., was the first American "Flour City"; but the modern flour-mill did not come until it was compelled to come by the deluge of Reaper wheat that flooded the markets in 1870.