HISTORY OF AGRICULTURE IN MINNESOTA. 289 



dairying, can and will make his land worth as much as it is in 

 the state south of us where there are no nearer markets than 

 here. 



Small things change the direction of these larger matters. 

 Small differences in prices and rates of freight turn the scale 

 of profit or loss. When we built the Great Northern Railway 

 to the Pacific coast, we knew that it was necessary to look to 

 Asia for a part of our traffic. I sent a trained statistician to 

 Japan and China and kept him there a year. He brought an 

 abstract, a manifest of every ship that entered or left their 

 open ports for a year, and I was quite delighted at the prospect 

 for trade with Asia. But when I came to get closer to it, closer 

 to the question of sailing ships under our own flag, it looked 

 different. There was a time when the United States did a large 

 portion of the ocean-carrying trade of the world, but when 

 I came to consider the question of carrying the Asiatic produce 

 under the American flag upon the sea, I found that we could 

 not do it profitably, I found that the little yellow man could do 

 it a great deal cheaper than we could. Therefore we made an 

 arrangement with the general steamship company of Japan to 

 run its steamers to Puget sound, and we had to consider how 

 to give them loading back. There is no trouble about loading 

 this way, for the Japanese export to our country some thirty- 

 five million dollars' worth of their products annually, and they 

 take from us about five million dollars annually, leaving us to 

 pay thirty million dollars to them in gold. They have a silver 

 standard of coinage, but when they stipulated with us that 

 they should receive such and such divisions of through rates, 

 they also stipulated that these should be paid in gold. I asked 

 the gentleman whether they were not silver people; he said, 

 "We pay in silver!" They pay their people in silver, but they 

 make other people pay them in gold. We were able to estab- 

 lish a rate on flour to load their ships back that was a low rate 

 comparatively, quite a low one. It was not as low as the rate 

 on the Atlantic ocean, but for the Pacific ocean, compared with 

 the rates charged by the line subsidized heavily by our own 

 government, a much lower rate. Now the result of that was 

 to open a market in Asia for substantially all the wheat raised 

 on the Pacific coast. 



