THE ECONOMIC OUTLOOK. 461 



by using the cob of one ear to shell the corn from another. In this 

 way about five bushels in ten hours could be shelled, and the laborer 

 would have received about one fifth of the product. The six great 

 corn States arc Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Iowa, Ohio, and Kansas. 

 They produce more than one half the corn raised in the country. These 

 States, by the census of 1880, had 2,056,770 persons engaged in agri- 

 culture, and it would have been necessary for this entire community 

 to have sat astride of shovels and frying-pans for one hundred and ten 

 days out of three hundred and sixty-five to have shelled their corn- 

 crop for tlie year 1880 by the old processes. 



In 1790, before the grain-" cradle " was invented, an able-bodied 

 farm-laborer in Great Britain could with a sickle reap only about a 

 quarter of an acre of wheat in a day ; at the present time a man with 

 two horses can cut, rake, and bind in a day the wheat-product of 

 twenty acres. 



Forty years ago a deficient harvest in any one of the countries of 

 EurojDe entailed a vast amount of suffering and starvation on their 

 population. To-day the deficiency of any local crop of wheat is com- 

 paratively of little consequence, for the prices of cereals in every coun- 

 try readily accessible by railroad and steamships is now regulated, not 

 by any local conditions, but by the combined production and consump- 

 tion of the world ; and the day of famines for the people of all such 

 countries has passed forever.* The extent to which all local advan- 

 tages in respect to the supply and prices of food have been equalized 

 in recent years -through the railway service of the United States, is 

 demonstrated by the fact that a full year's supply of meat and bread 

 for an adult person can now be moved from the points of their most 

 abundant and cheapest production, a thousand miles, for a cost not in 

 excess of the single day's wages of an average American mechanic 

 or artisan. 



The same conditions that one hundred, or even fifty, years ago 



* It is not a little difBcult to realize that the causes which were operative to occasion 

 famines a hundred years ago in Western Europe, and which have now apparently passed 

 away forever, are still operative over large portions of the Eastern world. The details 

 of the last great famine in China, which occurred a few years ago, indicate that over five 

 million people died of starvation in the famine district, while in other portions of the Empire 

 the crops were more abundant than usual. The trouble was that there were no means of 

 transporting the food to where it was needed. The distance of the famine area to the 

 port of Tientsin, a point to which food could be and was readily transported by water, 

 was not over 200 miles ; and yet when the foreign residents of Shanghai sent through the 

 missionaries an important contribution of relief, it required fifteen days, with the employ- 

 ment of all the men, beasts, and vehicles that could be procured, to effect the transporta- 

 tion of the contribution in question over this comparatively short distance. Relief to any 

 appreciable extent to the starving people from the outside and prosperous districts was, 

 therefore, impracticable. Contrast these experiences with the statement that when 

 Chicago burned up in 1871 a train loaded with relief contributions from the city of New 

 York, over the Erie Railroad, reached its destination in twenty-one hours after the time of 

 its departure. 



