24 READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



situation marks a permanent change or only a temporary divergence 

 due to a succession of short crops, one cannot as yet determine. 

 Certainly, crops which would have seemed very large ten years 

 ago would to-day be insufficient to feed our people and leave a 

 surplus. Many have, therefore, jumped to the conclusion that we 

 shall never regain our place as a wheat-exporting nation, and that 

 with the rapid increase of our population we shall produce little 

 more grain than is necessary for home consumption. If this 

 should prove to be the case, the influence of the wheat crop upon 

 our foreign balance, upon gold exports, and upon bank reserves 

 would evidently cease to play in the future the part it has played 

 in the past. 



IV 



. . . During that period [1873 to the present] there have oc- 

 curred, along with many minor fluctuations, two great movements 

 of industrial and commercial advance, each of amazing propor- 

 tions, and each initiated by a series of extraordinarily successful 

 harvests in America which were coincident with extraordinarily 

 poor harvests abroad. The first was the movement from 1879 to 

 1882, when the country was rapidly lifted from a six-year slough 

 of business depression to one of the most prosperous periods in 

 its entire history. Of this movement and its causes, which are 

 familiar facts of history, some mention has already been made. 

 Its propelling force arose unquestionably from the coincidence of 

 a series of crop failures abroad in 1879, 1880, and 1881, fail- 

 ures for which in duration and extent, it is said, "there had been 

 no parallel in four centuries," 1 with two successive American 

 harvests, in 1879 and 1880, whose dimensions exceeded all prec- 

 edents in all of the leading products. These conditions not only 

 resulted in huge profits for American farmers and dealers in prod- 

 uce : they stimulated the earnings of the railways ; they induced a 

 favorable balance of trade and the influx of more than two hundred 

 millions of gold during the three years from 1879 to 1881 ; and 

 they instigated a spirit of confidence, an expansion of demand, 



1 D. A. Wells, Recent Economic Changes, p. 6. 



