It will be remarked that the difference between maize meal and wheat flour consists only in a slightly larger proportion of fats and a slightly less proportion of protein, a matter very easily balanced by giving consideration to the other kinds of food which may be used by the bread-eater. Again, it is hardly to be supposed that the Scotchmen who listened to Sir William Crookes admitted in their minds that wheat flour possessed any greater potential energy in the development either of muscle or of mind than the oatmeal to which they have been habituated for so many generations. I doubt if any New England Yankee who had been brought up on the diet of corn (maize) bread and baked beans, the latter supplying the protein element in abundance, would admit any greater development of the muscle or brain by exclusive dependence on wheat for the bread of life. It is not, however, my purpose to deal with the relative food values of wheat and other grains; it is simply to take up this extraordinary delusion of Sir William Crookes in respect to the potential of the wheat-producing area of this country. His theory is salvation by chemistry, and he rightfully calls attention to the necessity for obtaining a cheap and abundant supply of nitrogen. All the other elements for fertilizing the soil are relatively abundant at low cost, especially in this country. Our enormous supply of the phosphates of lime and potash gives assurance on this matter, and our one deficiency, or rather the one element heretofore of high cost, has been the necessary proportion of nitrogen required to maintain an even balance in the soil.
I am surprised that Sir William Crookes should attribute so little importance to the recent discovery of the influence of bacteria, which living and dying in nodules attached to the stalks of the leguminous plants dissociate the nitrogen of the atmosphere, where the supply is unlimited, converting it to the nutrition of the plant, and thence to the renovation of the soil. Sir William deals only with the renovating qualities of clover, having apparently no comprehension of the existence of the cow-pea vine, the soya bean, the alfalfa, and many other types of legumes by which the partially exhausted soil, especially of the South, is now being renovated with great rapidity at a low cost. Sir William's hopes of nitrogen seem to be based on some method being found to save the sewage of cities, but mainly on the conversion of the water power of Niagara and other great falls to the generation of electricity and thence to the dissociation of the nitrogen of the atmosphere.
The point to which I wish to direct attention and inquiry is this alleged nearly complete taking up of the land of the United States capable of producing wheat in paying quantities. The question which Sir William Crookes puts is this: He says there is a deficit in the wheat area of thirty-one thousand square miles which must be converted to wheat-growing in order to keep up with the increasing demand of the world to prevent wheat starvation in less than one generation. It will be observed that the present necessities of the world are computed by Sir William Crookes at 2,324,000,000 bushels, of which this country will supply 600,000,000 to 700,000,000 bushels from an area of land devoted to wheat of 71,000 square miles, a fraction over two per cent of the area of the United States, omitting Alaska.
The problem may then be stated in these terms: Given a demand of the wheat-consuming population of the world for this whole supply of 2,324,000,000 bushels, this country could supply it at the present average per acre by devoting two hundred and fifty thousand square miles to this crop, or less than ten per cent of the area, omitting Alaska. We could supply the world's present demand, but of course such computations are purely speculative.
I venture to say that if a contract could be entered into by the bread-eaters of the world with the farmers of the United States, giving them an assurance of a price equal to one dollar a bushel in London, or a fraction under thirty-three shillings per quarter of eight bushels of sixty pounds each, which would yield to the American farmer from sixty to eighty cents per bushel on the farm, the land now under cultivation in wheat and not required for any other crop or for pasture would be opened in the United States which would be devoted to this service year by year as fast as the consumption called for it. In fact, there are now fully one hundred thousand square miles of land, 64,000,000 acres, fully suitable to the production of wheat at fifteen bushels to the acre, practically unoccupied in any branch of agriculture, which would be devoted to wheat on an assured price of one dollar a bushel in Mark Lane, yielding 960,000,000 bushels. Or, to limit the question yet more: Sir William Crookes states the needs of the people of the United Kingdom at the present time to be 240,000,000 bushels, increasing at a rate of less than two per cent per annum, of which twenty-five per cent is derived from her own soil. If John Bull, in place of building granaries, could offer thirty-three shillings a quarter, or one dollar a bushel, in London as a permanent price for the next thirty years, would not Uncle Sam accept the offer? and if Uncle Sam should then ask for bids among the States, are there not several single States or Territories that would take the contract each for itself?
Having put that question, I now propose to submit an inquiry in due form in order to sustain my own belief that we can supply the whole present and the increasing demand of Great Britain for the next thirty years with six bushels of wheat per head at a dollar a bushel from land situated wholly in the Indian Territory, not yet open to private entry, but which may soon be open when the Indian titles have all been purchased. Or, again, I undertake to say that the State of Texas can meet this whole demand without impairing in the slightest degree its present products of grain, cotton, wool, and meats, and without appropriating the use of more than a small fraction of the area of that single State which has not yet been fenced in or subjected to the plow to the production of wheat.
Perhaps it would be better to put a more simple proposition in order to bring out what would be perfectly feasible. Let it be assumed that the British public should really become so alarmed as to be willing to put up the granaries which have been suggested for storing fourteen weeks' consumption, or 64,000,000 bushels. That would require a very large capital which would yield no income on which there would be a heavy loss of interest and a considerable risk of damage to the wheat during the period of storage. In place of this a feasible plan would be to put up the capital which would be required for building these granaries, invest it in consols, and pledge it as collateral security for the fulfillment of a contract running for thirty years for the annual purchase of 10,000,000 bushels of wheat per month, or say 128,000,000 bushels a year, or twice the quantity proposed to be stored.
There are several large dealers in grain and provisions in the United States who would be ready to take this contract and to put up a sufficient sum of capital invested in United States bonds to serve as security for prompt delivery.
An assured supply of 128,000,000 bushels in addition to the ordinary supply might allay the fear of scarcity and high price of bread. It may here be observed that the low average crop per acre of the United States has been due to the inclusion of wheat grown on land partially exhausted by cropping or not well adapted to this grain. The all-wheat as well as the all-cotton and all-tobacco methods of ignorant farming or cropping year after year are now very rapidly giving place to varied crops coupled with an increase of product per acre. No agency has been of such service in this matter as the Agricultural Experiment Stations, now established in almost every State under the supervision of men of the highest capacity. Under this system wheat, which requires a few days of machine work in the spring and autumn, occupying very little time of the farmer himself, is rapidly becoming the surplus or money crop of farms otherwise maintained on the alternate products. Under such cultivation an average crop of twenty bushels to the acre would be assured, in many sections much more. One hundred and twenty-eight million bushels at twenty bushels per acre would require 6,400,000 acres, or ten thousand square miles. As an alternate with other crops in a rotation of four, this would call for only forty thousand square miles in varied farming. In order to satisfy the anxieties of Sir William Crookes lest land should be taken from other necessary work, this area might be divided among several States and Territories, say five thousand square miles among eight. Oklahoma (38,719 square miles) was opened to settlement only seven years since, and has yet a great deal of unoccupied land. It will this year raise 13,000,000 bushels of wheat from 850 square miles devoted to the crop. Give Oklahoma five thousand square miles, the unoccupied Indian Territory (30,272 square miles) would take all the rest as soon as open; but we may only assign five thousand square miles to that area. Five thousand more might be assigned to the limestone section of Virginia, in the valley of the Shenandoah and its tributaries; five thousand each to Kentucky (40,400 square miles) and Tennessee (42,050 square miles), while the great wheat-growing States—Kansas (82,080 square miles), Nebraska (77,510 square miles), Minnesota (83,365 square miles), and the two Dakotas (148,445 square miles)—would compete for the contract each to open a little patch of five thousand square miles, not yet adjacent to railways. We should thus have exhausted the area called for without regard to the instant competition which would come from California (158,360 square miles), Oregon (96,030 square miles), and Washington (69,180 square miles), and probably from Pennsylvania (45,215 square miles) and other Eastern or Southern States. At a dollar per bushel in London no difficulty would be found in placing this contract even without resort to Texas (265,780 square miles), which could take the whole on but a small portion of its area not yet under the plow.
The only additional measure which would then be required would be one which must come in any event—namely, the neutralization of the ports of export and import of food in the United States and Great Britain and in such other countries as may choose to join, together with the neutralization of a ferry or sea way for the transportation of the food, wherein no hostile shot should be fired and no seizure of private property permitted on the part of any nation, the condition of this understanding being that if any other nation ventured to question or contest this dedication of a neutral way for the conveyance of food to the purposes of peace, the navies of Great Britain and of the United States would be united to force its acceptance, and to sweep from the ocean the fleet of every state or nation which ventured to contest this measure. That would be a suitable measure for beginning to make a right use of navies—for the protection of commerce and for the destruction of every fleet or vessel which did not accept the principle that private property not contraband of war should be exempt from seizure upon the high seas, coupled with a declaration limiting contraband of war so that it may never be made to include customary articles of commerce, especially food, not now contraband.