TEE ECONOMIC DISTURBANCES SINCE 1873. 585 



in the purchasing power of the classes engaged in or connected with 

 British agriculture, for the single year 1885, as having amounted to 

 42,800,000 ($214,000,000) ; and as the losses for several preceding 

 years are believed to have been equal or even greater than this, an es- 

 timate of a thousand million dollars decline in the value of British 

 farming capital since 1880, from depreciation of land-values, rentals, 

 and prices for stock and cereals, is probably an under rather than an 

 over-estimate. Wheat-growing, which was formerly profitable in Great 

 Britain, is reported as not having been remunerative to the British 

 farmer since 1874 ; a fact that finds eloquent expression in the ac- 

 knowledged reduction in British wheat acreage from about 4,000,000 

 acres in 1869 to 2,528,905 in 1886. That the agricultural populations 

 of the interior states of Europe, which have hitherto been protected in 

 a degree by the barrier of distance against the tremendous cheapening 

 of transportation, are also at last beginning to feel the full effects of 

 its influence, is shown by the statement (United States consular re- 

 ports, 1886) that farming land in Germany, remote from large cities, 

 where the demand for milk and other perishable products is small, can 

 now be purchased for fifty per cent of the prices which prevailed at the 

 close of the Franco-German War in 1870-'71. And yet such startling 

 results, in the place of being prime factors in occasioning a depression 

 of British trade and industry, are really four removes from the original 

 causes, which may be enumerated in order as follows : First, the occu- 

 pation and utilization of new and immense areas of cheap and fer- 

 tile wheat-growing land in the United States, Canada (Manitoba), 

 Australia, and the Argentine Republic. Second, the invention and 

 application of machinery for facilitating and cheapening the produc- 

 tion and harvesting of crops, and which on the wheat-fields of Da- 

 kota (as before pointed out) have made the labor of every agricultur- 

 ist equivalent to the annual production of five thousand five hundred 

 bushels of wheat. Third, the extension of the system of transporta- 

 tion on land through the railroad, and on sea through the steamship, 

 in default of which the appropriation of new land and the invention 

 and application of new agricultural machinery would have availed but 

 little. Fourth, the discovery of Bessemer, and the invention of the 

 compound (steamship) engine, without which transportation could not 

 have cheapened to the degree necessary to effect the present extent 

 of distribution. Now, from the conjoined result of all these different 

 agencies has come a reduction in the world's price of wheat to an 

 extent sufficient to make its growing unprofitable on lands taken at 

 high rents, and under unfavorable climatic conditions ; and legisla- 

 tion is powerless to make it otherwise. In short, the whole secret of 

 the recent immense losses of the British and to a lesser extent also of 

 the Continental agriculturist, and the depression of British trade and 

 industry, so far as it has been contingent on such losses, stands re- 

 vealed in the simple statement that American wheat sold for export 



