340 HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL. 



grain goes in hot haste into the elevator upon the railway, always close 

 at hand, and the moment it strikes the elevator, it is, by means of the 

 telegraph, on the markets of the world. Huge milling centres supply 

 the country with flour, and the farmer himself generally sells his wheat 

 and buys his flour. The season in which the farmer realizes from his 

 productive effort, instead of ranging from ten to twelve months, is now 

 shortened to a period that does not, in its utmost limit, exceed three 

 months. 



Twenty-five years ago cotton was housed in cabins, built in the fields 

 for that purpose, and slowly ginned out by horse-gins, and marketed 

 throughout the year. Now, it is picked and put into wagons that take 

 it to the large steam merchant gin, to be found in every neighborhood, 

 and, as a rule, it may, by wire, be offered for sale in New York, Boston, 

 or Liverpool, before night, on the very day it is picked. The season for 

 marketing the cotton by the farmer has shortened as much as, or more 

 than, that of marketing the wheat. These changes are brought about by 

 the modern improvements that have substituted the railway train for the 

 ox-cart, and the telegraph for the courier that carried intelligence. 



Nothing is more certain than that these changes make some other 

 changes necessary, the most important of which is the substitution of a 

 modern for an ox-cart system of finance, to correspond to these new 

 conditions. Under the old system, the demand for money to handle 

 the products of the country being nearly the same throughout the dif- 

 ferent seasons of the year, the marketing of the products of agriculture 

 produced no great effect upon the money market ; but under modern 

 conditions it produces a most powerful effect, which may be demon- 

 strated as follows : The volume of money in circulation in the United 

 States at this time, is variously estimated at from six to fourteen hundred 

 millions ; say one billion dollars, and represent that sum by the figure 2. 

 The gross output of all manufacturing of all kinds is about five billion 

 dollars. Now suppose that all the manufactured commodities change 

 ownership between the manufacturer and the consumer three times; 

 then the demand throughout the year, for the use of money on account 

 of manufactured commodities, would equal four times that amount, or 

 twenty billion dollars. Represent that sum by the number 40, and the 

 relation of the volume of money to the demand for its use would be as 

 2 is to 40, and would only require that every dollar in circulation should 

 be used twenty times in each year, to satisfy this demand. This relation 

 is practically uniform throughout the year. 



The gross value of agricultural products is about seven and one half 

 billions of dollars. In order to be very conservative, suppose that one- 



