THE ECONOMIC DISTURBANCES SINCE 1873.
779
per cent of the entire population of the United States was engaged in agriculture, and less than 7 per cent in manufactures; and since the year 1820, or for a period of sixty-six years, the proportion between the agricultural and non-agricultural exports of this country has been remarkably steady, the average for the former for the whole of this period having been about 78 per cent. Up to the present time there has been little tendency to change in these proportions; but, if the continued fall of prices of agricultural products in the United States and other countries should compel their farming populations to seek other employments, what other employments are open to them? That the world will ultimately adjust itself to all new conditions may not be doubted; but what of the period pending adjustment?[1]
- ↑ A recent writer in the (British) "Quarterly Review" broadly antagonizes the views above expressed respecting the prospective increasing production and continued low prices for wheat, and endeavors to prove that "it has been too hastily assumed that, in the struggle for existence among wheat-growers, the British, the best farmers in the world, will not be among the fittest who will survive." In support of this conclusion the writer
starts with the proposition that the returns of the cost of growing wheat in Great Britain, collected in 1885, make the average about £8 ($40) per acre, and venturing the opinion that, with the general reduction of the rents of British farming-lands that have already taken place, and the practice of increased economies on the part of British farmers, they
can grow wheat with a profit at 40s. and 45s. a quarter (although the average price of British wheat has not for some years reached that level), next assumes, that growers "in all parts of the world—with the doubtful exception of India—can not possibly keep up the present acreage of wheat at the recent or any lower range of prices." The writer
further concludes, from an examination of American statistics, which he abundantly offers, that the area of wheat acreage in the United States is diminishing, and that the average farm-value of wheat in that country, for the years 1884-'86, was about 33s., "which can not," he says, "yield a satisfactory profit under the most favorable circumstances."
The following reply to the conclusions of this writer in the "Quarterly," so far as they relate to the United States, which appeared in the columns of the "New York Commercial Bulletin" (May, 1887), strikingly illustrates how different the situation appears to a writer equally competent to discuss the question, when viewed from a trans-Atlantic standpoint:
"These guesses about the cost of wheat-producing in this country arc highly interesting. Probably they will interest no one else so much as the American farmers, who know that they do not know, and have a strong impression that other people can not tell them, the exact cost of raising wheat per acre. Very few of them produce any one crop under such circumstances that they can accurately compute, in dollars or days' labor, what that separate crop costs them; and fewer still know what they add to the value of their land by improvements, or take from it by exhaustion yearly. But one thing a great many of them do know, that they are going to raise more wheat next year than they did last, as they raised more last year than the year before; and they have been selling wheat for several years at about 45 cents per bushel, in great regions like Kansas, Minnesota, and Dakota, and yet the business is found so far profitable that the acreage in these very States enormously increases. It is supposed that Dakota, which produced 22,800,000 in 1880, and 22,000,000 bushels three years ago, will produce 30,000,000 in 1887."
(In 1880 the crop area of the State of Kansas was about 8,000,000 acres; for the present year (1887) the area planted is believed to be in excess of 16,000,000 acres.)
"The farmer in this country is, at the same time, a land-improver and a land-speculator, in most of the great wheat-growing States. He takes possession of a farm under the homestead law, by pre-emption, or by purchase from corporations, the land costing
