24 THE FARMER IN THE COMING CHANGE. 



selling price, in consequence of the opening of so many American farms and the de- 

 velopment of Indian exports, no less than 69 cents per bushel, and the price of all other 

 primary staple food products have sbniiikeii in like proportion. Is it any wonder that 

 times are hard and st;ifj;natiou every wheie \v lien the fountiiin has been dried at its source? 



The price of wheat having l)een 73 per cent, greater for the five years ending in 

 1875 than during the last five years, it follows thpt the purchasing power of the farmer 

 has been lessened in nearly like measure, although ;here has been some little reduction in 

 the cost of production. Add again this proportion to the purchasing powfT of the im- 

 mense agricultural class of the United States and every artisan, laborer, mvner, manu- 

 facturer, transporter, builder and professional man will be fully employed, wages good 

 and the whole industrial life be quickened in an astonishing manner. It is almost 

 impossible to comeive that such a change is impending after the experiences of recent 

 years, when the farmer has seen, notwithstanding all his industry and privation, the 

 debt, with its annual interest charges, yearly increasing. That such a change is impend- 

 ing and is susceptible of proof, as data exists, and but requires the labor and patience 

 necessary to its gathering and tabulation, to show that there is a deficient acreage as well 

 as a most direct relationship between population, acreage in staple food products, prices 

 for such products and the prosperity of the cultivator, as well as the prosperity of all 

 other classes, as there can be no doubt that all the industrial forces are just as dependent 

 upon and just as intimately connected with, the properity of the basic industry as in 

 that remote past when the founder of the second Persian monarchy said: "Tliere can be 

 no power without an army; noarmy without money, and no money without a prosperous 

 agriculture." In the view of this most successful statesman the farmer was the ultimate 

 source of all wealth, as well as power, and to see thiit such is still the case we have only 

 to watch the stock markets and observe how values rise and fall as the crops are full or 

 meagre. 



Many things have changed since the days of Artaxerxes. and industrial processes 

 differ wonderfully, but the great underlying principles have not changed, and when the 

 basic industry is in an unprosperous condition there will be but little money moving, 

 and that little movingslowly through the arteries of industrial and commercial life, while 

 the body politic will be in just the state we have spen during the period when the acreage 

 devoted to the production of food inciensed more rapidly than the consuming population. 

 Now, however, the condition of the farmer is changing for the better more rapidly than 

 his affairs changed for the worse during the eighth and ninth decades. 



Wheat production may be said to be the controlling factor in acreage distribution, 

 as well in production, as the product is at all times and everywhere saleable at some price 

 and it is the one product that the farmers of the temperate zone rely most upon to furnish 

 the needed money. This is no less true of Russia than of Australasia; no less true of the 

 United States than of India, and the result is that of the area now employed, in 

 America, in producing food for exportation about eighty per cent thereof is devoted to 

 the production of wheat. 



During the eighth decade the wheat acreage of the world increased (in round 

 numbers) 24,000,000 acres, or 15.6 per cent., and treating the compulsory exports of India 

 as being equivalent to an addition of acreage, the additions to the supplies of the bread- 

 eating populations of European blood was, during that decade, equal to the product of 

 27,000,000 acres, and the ascertained average yield per acre would give a yearly out-turn 

 of 320,000,000 bushels; which, at 4.75 bushels per capita, was tqual to the requirements of 

 67,000,000 people, while the bread-eating populations increased 41,000,000, so that had rye 

 kept pace with the increase in the rye consuming part of the bread-eating world there 

 would have been, at the end of the eighth decade, a surplus wheat acreage equal to the 

 requirements of 26,000 000 people. 



Assuming that the wheat acreage twenty years since — when prices were 73 per 

 cent, greater than in 1890 -was sufficient to meet the requirements of the then existing 

 population we And the acreage, at the beginning of the ninth decade (treating the recently 

 developed Indian exports as an increase of available acreage equal to the production 

 of a like number of bushels), was some 9,500,000 acres in excess of requirements, and 



