UNITED STATES' WHEAT-GROWING CAPACITY. 159 



Cost of Shipping Wheat per Bushel from Moorhead, an Inferior Point in Minnesota, to 



Liverpool. 



On Septem- 

 ber 17, 1888. 



Rate, Moorhead to Duluth 



Duluth elevator and inspection charges 



Lake freight, Duluth to Buffalo 



Elevator charges and commission at Buffalo 

 Canal freight, Buffalo to New York. . . 

 Elevator charges, etc., in New York. . . 

 Ocean freight, New York to Liverpool. 



Totals 



Ct». per bu. 

 8.70 

 0.80 

 1.75 

 1.00 

 2 . 50 

 2.00 

 6.00 



22.75 



General average, 22.525 cents per bushel. 



It will be remarked that Mr. Powers says I am wrong in not 

 asserting a sure continuation of the decline in the price of wheat 

 which I predicted in 18 SO. In setting up one dollar a bushel in 

 London as the standard of this inquiry, I had no thought that our 

 farmers could be made happy for the next thirty years by any hope 

 of securing so high a price. In my predictions in 1880 I said that 

 the time was not then far off when the farmers of the Mississippi 

 Valley would secure as large a remuneration from their wheat at 

 thirty-four shillings per quarter in London as they had been gaining 

 from a previous average of fifty-two shillings. I might then have 

 fixed the lessened price at twenty-eight shillings, and at the present 

 time I have a greater expectation of a reduction in the price of wheat 

 in Mark Lane to less than twenty-eight shillings a quarter, or eighty- 

 five cents a bushel, than I had in 1880 that it would so soon reach 

 thirty-four shillings. I merely adopted a dollar a bushel as an arbi- 

 trary standard on which an abundant supply of bread at low cost 

 would be absolutely assured to the people of England. 



In fact, as I stated before the Royal Commission on Depression of 

 Agriculture, it is not probable that a reduction in the price of wheat 

 to forty cents a bushel on "Western farms or sixty-five to seventy 

 cents a bushel in England would stop the growth of this grain, 

 although it might check an increase. When the price went 

 down to a very low point on the last excessive crop it is probable 

 that 100,000,000 bushels of wheat were fed to swine and to cattle. 

 It proved to make better pork and beef than maize or Indian corn, 

 and, as the price of meat did not decline in anything like the propor- 

 tion to the price of wheat, the farmers who thus fed their excess 

 secured a profit which the sale of the crude grain might not have 

 given. 



In this comment Mr. Powers deals with the reduction in the 

 number of foreclosures in Minnesota. Attention should be called to 



