OUR FOREIGN TRADE; ITS CHANGES 411 



Conditions Facing the United States. In the production of 

 the staple " bread-and-meat " crops wheat, corn, hogs, beef cattle 

 we face the competition of the newer and fast-developing coun- 

 tries of all the world. While there are many areas of this kind of 

 much significance, yet the following three are of the most imme- 

 diate and outstanding importance, namely, Canada, Argentina, 

 Russia. These bread-and-meat products compete in the markets 

 of the world. Rapid transportation has largely neutralized the 

 effects of distance. Prices respond according to these world-wide 

 conditions, in which the United States is clearly not an isolated 

 unit, but an integral part. The following diagram illustrates this 

 truth for the wheat crop. As we affect prices in these other 

 regions, so must they affect prices in our country. Hence it is 

 easily conceivable that in the course of agricultural evolution or 

 revolution we may at no distant date see the American consumers 

 eating bread and meat from foreign lands. Would this be a good 

 thing or a bad thing for the country? In the case of the English 

 transition, the farmer, on the whole, seems to be better off after 

 the change than before the change. The economic principle of 

 the so-called " comparative costs" should govern in any situation 

 of this kind. This principle may be illustrated in this way. If 

 the Canadian farmer can raise better and cheaper wheat than the 

 American farmer, while the American farmer, in his turn, can 

 raise better and cheaper corn than his Canadian cousin, then the 

 American farmer had better buy his wheat from Canada paying 

 for it with corn, rather than keep on raising wheat for himself. 

 Each produces what he can produce best and cheapest. And 

 under a free interchange of products, eaqh gets the maximum 

 return at the least cost. This illustrates how a cheap agricultural 

 product, imported from a foreign country, may not injure the 

 American farmer. The consumers who are not farmers and they 

 constitute two-thirds of our population are of course interested in 

 any source of cheaper food supply which promises to be permanent. 



Our Foreign Trade; Its Changes; Its Significance. A glance 

 at a table of our exports and imports during a period of three 

 decades prior to the World War shows strikingly the change in our 

 foreign trade in agricultural products. We are ceasing to export 

 foodstuffs. We are beginning to import foodstuffs. The tremend- 

 ous increase in the volume of our exports is due to the growth of 



