ioo AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



production of distilled spirits and fermented liquors in 1913; five states 

 (Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Wisconsin, and Missouri) in which the 

 quantity so used represented a farm value of between five million and 

 ten million dollars, and nine (Massachusetts, Connecticut, New 

 Jersey, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Louisiana, Washington, 

 and California) in which it ranged from one million to five million 

 dollars. While these states led all their sister-states in the use of 

 grain and other farm products in the production of alcoholic liquors, 

 not any of them were fully equal to supplying their own require- 

 ments. All of them, without exception, were dependent on other 

 states for one or another of the materials used in many cases for 

 malt or malting barley, in others for rye, in nearly all for hops 

 and rice. 



There is, in fact, 'no state that does not share in the immense 

 benefit accruing to the agricultural industry from the large annual 

 consumption of farm products by brewers and distillers. A state 

 may even have few or no breweries or distilleries within its own bor- 

 ders, and yet the annual value of its farm products is increased by 

 reason of the never-failing requirements of the liquor industry as 

 inevitably and unmistakably as it would be by the opening of a new 

 market for one hundred and thirteen million dollars' worth of similar 

 products. 



What, then, it may well be asked, would be the effect upon the 

 agricultural industry of the closing of this great and ever-growing 

 market, a market that can always be relied upon for stability and 

 uniformity? (The per capita consumption of both tea and coffee 

 varies more widely from year to year than does that of spirits or 

 fermented liquors. See Statistical Abstract of the United States, 

 1913, pp. 512, 516.) While the farm products used in the production 

 of spirits and fermented liquors are of so diversified a character that, 

 as already pointed out, the entire country shares in the benefit that 

 comes from there being a constant market for between one hundred 

 and ten and one hundred and twenty million dollars' worth annually, 

 their production is at the same time so localized that its extinction 

 would fall upon certain sections of the country with all the weight of 

 a calamity. If one crop could be readily substituted for another, even 

 in that case the economic disturbance that would result would be 

 more or less serious. But it is only within comparatively narrow 

 limits that such substitution can be made. Peculiarities of soil and 



