AGRICULTURAL DISCONTENT 731 



methods, are put upon the market. Among the factors chiefly 

 instrumental in effecting this result are improvements in trans- 

 portation and communication. By rendering the world's markets 

 accessible to the products of the most remote corners of the earth, 

 not only have they increased the forthcoming supply of such 

 staples as breadstuffs and meats, but, by enlarging the variety of 

 food products, they have contributed still further to the abundance 

 of the food supply. Formerly, "the food supply came only from 

 the neighborhood, and was diversified only by the seasons. Now 

 it is replenished from every zone. . . . The grocery store of 

 Chicago and that of New Orleans, the market-places of London 

 and those of Calcutta might change places in a night, without 

 revealing any striking novelty to their patrons the next morning." 

 In the presence of a harvest all the while ripening somewhere 

 round the globe, a large surplus or a crop of unusual size in 

 any country exerts a depressing influence upon the price level 

 of the entire world. 



Science and invention have also increased the food supply by 

 utilizing what were formerly waste products. For example : 



Within a few years the city of Chicago produced more tons of artificial butter 

 than any state of the Union could show of the genuine article. Filled cheese 

 has destroyed the foreign market, which was formerly so good, for the Ameri- 

 can dairy product, and so reduced the price of the unadulterated article as to 

 make its manufacture quite unprofitable. The canning and cold storage of prod- 

 ucts which were until within a very recent period so perishable as to enter into 

 the consumption only during brief periods of each year, and over limited areas, 

 have transformed them into considerable ingredients of the world's supply of 

 staple necessaries. Vegetables, fruits, and fish have thus come into direct com- 

 petition with grains and meats, thereby still further increasing the disparity 

 between the demand and supply of agricultural foods. In this way the unused 

 surplus of agricultural products and their equivalents is year by year swelled, 

 to the manifest disadvantage of the producer, and to the apparent enhancement 

 of the world's productive capacity. 



Nor is it probable that the increase in the supply of food 

 products has yet reached its limit. 



A scientific survey of the food-producing capacity of the earth, even with 

 little, if any, enhancement of the present supply of labor, makes it evident 

 that the present supply might be largely increased, possibly doubled, within 

 the scope of existing lives. 



