WHEAT IN WESTERN CANADA 123 



The major causes of the crisis at the Grain Exchange 

 which resulted in the withdrawal of the facilities for fu- 

 ture trading were war causes, although the intensity of 

 the crisis was increased by the fact that much of the hedged 

 grain did not come up to the contract grades. These war 

 causes, as summarized by Gage,^* may now be discussed. 



To begin with, there was a loudly proclaimed shortage of 

 the supply of available wheat. This shortage was empha- 

 sized in the speeches of some of the most prominent men in 

 the British Empire and also in the United States. Minis- 

 ters of the Imperial Government, high officials in both 

 countries, and hundreds of newspaper editors laid stress 

 on the fact that the surplus wheat in Russia was locked up 

 by the war, that the surpluses in such countries as India 

 and Australia were not available through conditions of 

 transportation, and that Argentina had no surplus at all. 

 They proclaimed the dependence of the European allies, 

 so far as wheat is concerned, upon the continent of IN'orth 

 America, and they devised ways and means of eliminating 

 waste, of husbanding their resources, and of persuading or 

 coercing their peoples to use substitutes for the white bread 

 to which they had become accustomed. 



!N"ext, there was the imperious need of the allied peo- 

 ples for Canadian wheat at a time when their men in uni- 

 form had been withdrawn from productive work, thus caus- 

 ing a labor shortage in agriculture as in other interests 

 on the one hand, and on the other increasing the normal 

 consumption of bread. The soldiers at the front must be 

 fed and well fed ; the workers in the United Kingdom were 

 demanding and receiving higher wages ; the ranks of the 

 workers had been increased by thousands and hundreds of 

 thousands of women workers, so that the masses of the 



59 lUd., pp. 39-40. 



