THE INFLUENCE OF CROPS UPON BUSINESS 29 



less to carry over stocks from the superabundant years to meet an 

 anticipated shortage. Under such circumstance any considerable 

 diminution in the crops was very apt to cause serious reaction or 

 to prolong an existing depression. But during these late years 

 the great farming areas, whether of the West or South, have be- 

 come financially independent and prosperous as never before. 

 Their people have lifted many of their mortgages, and now are 

 lenders where before they were borrowers. They are much better 

 able to cope with any temporary shrinkage in their harvests or to 

 take care of any temporary surplus. As a matter of fact, the 

 agricultural situation to-day, instead of being an aggravating in- 

 fluence in a general decline, as was the case ten or twelve years 

 ago, has become the bulwark upon which the mercantile and 

 financial interests of the country rely to break the force of every 

 threatened reaction. 



We have seen how all the great movements of business ex- 

 pansion in America during recent times have been initiated by 

 conditions of agricultural success. It has also been true that most 

 of the turning-points in the other direction have been preceded by 

 agricultural failure. The year 1872, which marked the beginning 

 of the first long period of retrenchment during the years under 

 consideration, was preceded in the autumn of 187 1 by a serious 

 shrinkage in the cotton crop and by an appreciable decline in the 

 crops of corn and wheat. The year 1882, which marks the begin- 

 ning of the next commercial decline, ensued upon a destructive 

 drought that extended over most of the United States and caused 

 a shrinkage in all of the staple crops. The crop failures of the 

 autumn of 1881 cut down freight earnings the following year by 

 some $45,000,000, reduced our export trade by $150,000,000, 

 converted a favorable into an unfavorable trade balance, and re- 

 sulted in the export of $32,000,000 of gold before the following 

 June. They thus furnished the initiatory impulse for the long 

 decline of the middle eighties. Turning to the early nineties, 

 we have seen how in this complicated period the marvelously 

 favorable crop conditions in 1891 had failed, because of political 

 uncertainties, to stimulate a repetition of the prosperity of the 

 resumption period. In the first months of 1892 they succeeded 



