178 
Variation in the Price and Supply of Wheat. 
grown in tte West, and now brougtt througli the United States 
by the Erie Canal and Hudson river. 
In the countries we have been considering we find a com- 
paratively exhausted soil, with a low average yield, which can 
only be increased profitably by an increase of population, the 
extra mouths consuming the increased produce. In America 
circumstances are entirely different. Population is increased by 
immigration ; new tracts of land are broken up by new settlers, 
who " reckon" to supply the wants of the New and the Old World. 
The average produce is small ; because the land, though rich, is 
roughly cultivated and over-cropped. It is a system of spolia- 
tion. As the great centres of population become larger, such 
sources of supply must become more variable and uncertain.* 
Prices. 
The earliest predictions of Mr. McCulloch, forty years ago, 
that the price at which corn could be obtained would not, in 
ordinary years, be less than 50.';. a quarter, and would most 
likely range from 525. to 57a-., have been verified. It is remark- 
able that steam-conveyance, which has opened up the most 
distant tracts, and brought them, it may be said, so much nearer 
our shores — to say nothing of special improvements in agricul- 
ture — should have had so little effect that the average price of 
wheat for the twenty-one years since the repeal of the corn-laws 
has been hos. per quarter. 
The opening of the English ports to corn widened the area 
of cultivation both in the Old World and the New. It was 
the signal for an army of settlers — the outposts of civilisation — 
to march further into the wilderness to subdue it. Many an 
American pioneer shouldered his tools, the weapons of a peaceful 
conquest, and marched into the Far West to use them in patient 
warfare with the forest and the prairie. And in the central 
plains of Europe the territorial lord, proud of his vast though 
wasted possessions, began to organise their subjection to the 
plough, with England as a market for his produce. The steam- 
engine, and the more complicated machines of tillage, have 
found their Avay to the plains of Egypt, and to the ruder regions 
watered by the Volga or the Dnieper. The Russian and German 
peasant have learned the use of labour-saving machines, and in 
doing so have acquired the means of a double cultivation — that 
* This paper, accidentally deferred, ■was commenced ivhen wheat was 40«. a 
quarter. Our intention was to show that, whatever the resources of English agri- 
culture might be, foreign countries would not continue their supplies at any such 
price. This was certainly true of America before the war. The future cost of 
production cannot be less. 
