TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 483 



impossible must be the attempt to revert to any expedient for artificially raising 

 the price of wheat in the interest of the home producers. Any arguments there 

 may have been 30 years ago in favour of such a course, are multiplied tenfold at 

 the present time, when the proportion of imports to home produce is so greatly 

 altered. 



Let me now revert again to the table showing the gross product in money per 

 acre of wheat. I have already pointed out that in the year 1873 there evidently 

 came into operation causes which exercised a very powerful influence on the price 

 of wheat, and which prevented its rise at a time when deficient harvests would 

 have led us to expect a very considerable rise. I do not think it is difficult to trace 

 and determine one and the main of these causes. It appears to me to be very 

 intimately connected with that which is the main cause of the commercial depres- 

 sion of the last few years. We know that between the years 1869-1872 there was 

 an extraordinary inflation of trade in America, due mainly to the enormous exten- 

 sion of railways in the Western States ; this was in a great measure stimulated by 

 reckless and unwise concessions of Congress, which gave away millions of acres of 

 land to the companies who obtained concessions for their lines, and by reckless and 

 unwise lending by capitalists and investors in this country and Germany. In four 

 years not less than 17,000 miles of new railways were constructed. The installa- 

 tion of these new lines, and the consequent speculation, led to an enormous and un- 

 natural development of the iron and coal industries in America, and to immense 

 importations of iron rails from England ; it also stimulated prices generally, and was 

 a main cause of the inflation of that period. 



The immediate result of this vast extension of the railway system in the 

 Western States was to bring to market a great amount of corn already being 

 grown in those districts, and which had hitherto been beyond the range of the 

 English markets, and the effect of this doubtless began to be felt on the price of 

 wheat in England about the year 1873. 



Its next effect was to produce a reaction and collapse without parallel to any 

 which we have experienced in the last 30 years. The collapse was mainly felt 

 in the American States. In 1873 no less than 7,000 miles of railway became bank- 

 rupt and were sold up by their creditors. The iron manufactures which had been 

 called into existence were involved in the collapse ; nearly one half of those in the 

 States stopped work. The importation of iron from England fell to zero. The 

 loss of capital engaged in these new railways and ironworks told in a hundred ways 

 upon the commercial prosperity of the States, and indirectly, though by no means to 

 the same extent, upon our own. Thousands of labourers were thrown out of work 

 in the manufacturing districts of America. Their imports fell off by 40,000,000/. 

 a year, or 32 per cent. There is no better illustration of the distress caused 

 in America than the almost total cessation of emigration to it from this coimtry. 

 The intending emigrants soon learned that they had nothing to gain by transferring 

 themselves across the Atlantic. There was greater difficulty in finding work in 

 New York, Philadelphia, and even Chicago, than at Liverpool or in Ireland. In 

 each of the years 1872 and 1873 the emigrants had numbered 230,000, in 1876 

 and 1877 there was an excess of returning emigrants. 



What followed must have affected, even more powerfully, the prices of agri- 

 cultural produce in this country. The great surplus of unemployed labour has 

 during the last five years been transferred from the manufacturing districts and 

 great towns in the Atlantic States to the new districts opened out by the railway 

 extension of the previous years. The cultivation, therefore, of corn in these newly 

 opened-out fields has increased at a ratio never before experienced. The new railways, 

 constructed before there was population or trade to supply them, stimulated this 

 new settlement by lowering their traffic rates to a minimum ; the commercial de- 

 pression operated upon the steam-carrying trade across the Atlantic in the same 

 manner, and greatly lowered freights ; coincident with this movement there has 

 been a succession of abundant harvests in America, while this country was suffer- 

 ing from such deficient harvests. 



So great a movement in the direction of increased cultivation of the surface of 

 the earth has probably never been yet experienced in so short a period, nor has 



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