340 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



put a low price upon it by law. Those early Christians, 

 like Christians and Israelites of our day, saw their oppor- 

 tunity to corner the market, and of which they took advan- 

 tage. They bought up the emperor's wheat, ran up the 

 price, but kept back their own for a higher rise. The em- 

 peror was wroth, and published their doings to the world, 

 which was all he could do about it. 



We are familiar with recent attempts in this country to 

 imitate the ancients in trying to corner the wheat and corn 

 markets ; and on the day this paragraph was written I read 

 in a paper published in an eastern city the following : 

 " President McKinley, on account of the recent drought, has 

 raised prices of corn and wheat, and ought to be held re- 

 sponsible for their high prices, and also of potatoes, which 

 has banished that tuber from the tables of so many people 

 except trust magnates and holders of fat government jobs." 

 This is parallel to the complaint made against Julian, and is 

 one of many that might be cited, and well illustrates the 

 point, that, like wheat, human nature does not change by 

 lapse of time or by transplanting to another continent. 



It was the wheat fields east of the Blue Ridge, in Jersey, 

 Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, that gave sustenance 

 to the patriotic revolutionary army under Washington, in 

 the seven years' war of American independence ; and it was 

 much the same region that, eighty years later, fed the con- 

 federate army under Lee in its unsuccessful attempt to sever 

 the Southern States from the Union. 



Forty years have elapsed since the latter attempt, and in 

 that time the wheat-producing centre has steadily advanced 

 westward to newer and more fertile lands, and is now en- 

 circling South Dakota, which at the close of the rebellion 

 was the abode of wild tribes, with few if any white settlers ; 

 and we wonder that forty years has made of it such a flour- 

 ishing State. 



Nor has the wheat culture and agricultural progress halted 

 east of the Rocky Mountain divide, but its onward inarch 

 has been over them and down their slopes to the Pacific 

 Ocean, where their progress was stayed, like the armies of 

 Alexander, for lack of more lands to conquer. 



