Cyrus Hall McCormick Part 10

But, although wheat was known to be the best food for fifty centuries, it did not until very recently, until thirty or forty years ago, become a world-food. Every community ate up its own wheat. It had little or none to sell, because, no matter how much grain the farmers planted, they could not in the eight or ten days of harvest gather more than a certain limited quant.i.ty into their barns. All that one man could do, with his wife to help him, was to s.n.a.t.c.h in enough wheat to feed ten people for a year. Each family could do no more than feed one other family and itself. This was the Tragedy of the Wheat. There was never enough of it. It was so precious that none could be sure of it except the kings and the n.o.bilities. As for the ma.s.ses of peasantry who sowed the wheat and reaped it with hand-sickles, they would almost as soon have thought of wearing diamonds as of eating white bread.

Then, in 1831, came the Reaper. It was not invented in any of the older countries, nor in any of the great cities of the world. For five thousand years neither the peasants nor the kings had conceived of any better way of reaping wheat than with the sickle and the scythe. The man who had cut the Gordian knot of Famine was the son of a citizen-farmer, Cyrus Hall McCormick by name, Scotch-Irish by race, American by birth, and inventor by heredity and early training.

This new machine, the Reaper, when it was full-grown into the self-binder, was equal to forty sickles. With one man to drive it, it could cut and bind enough wheat in one season to feed four hundred people. In its most highly developed form, the combined harvester and thresher, it has become so gigantic a machine that thirty-two horses are required to haul it. This leviathan cuts a fifty-foot roadway through the grain, threshes it and bags it at the rate of one bag every half-minute. And the total world production of Reapers of every sort--self-binders, mowers, headers, corn-binders, etc.,--is probably as many as 1,500,000 a year, two-thirds of them being made in the United States.

Because of this harvesting machinery, the wheat crop of the world is now nearly twice what it was in 1879. The American crop has multiplied six and a half times in fifty years. Western Canada, Australia, Siberia, and Argentina have become wheat producers. The cost of growing one bushel in America, with machinery and high wages, is now about half a dollar, which is less than the cost in Europe and as low as the cost in India, where laborers can be hired for a few pennies a day. With a sickle, the time-cost of a bushel of wheat was three hours; with a self-binder, it is now ten minutes. And so, because of these amazing results, the rattle of the harvester has become an indispensable part of the music of our industrial orchestra, harmonious with the click of the telegraph key, the ring of the telephone bell, the hum of the sewing-machine, the roar of the Bessemer converter, the gong of the trolley, the whistle of the steamboat, and the puff of the locomotive.

Next to the Reaper, the most important factors in this world-mechanism of the bread, are the Railroad and the Steamboat. These arrived on the scene just at the right time to distribute the surplus that the Reaper produced. The Steamboat, and its humble relative, the barge, came first.

The Erie Ca.n.a.l of 1825, the Suez Ca.n.a.l of 1869, and the Sault Ste. Marie Ca.n.a.l of 1881, were built largely for the carrying of the wheat. By 1856 wheat was on its way from Chicago to Europe; and four years later the first wheat-ship curved around Cape Horn from California. Ten years ago an entirely new kind of ship, a sort of immense steel bag called a "whaleback," was built to carry 250,000 bushels of wheat in a single load. By this means a ton of wheat is actually carried thirteen miles for one cent. There are to-day small barges on the ca.n.a.ls of Holland, large ones on the river Volga, and several thousand steamships on the world's main water-ways, all carrying burdens of wheat. Enough is now being transported from port to port to give steady work to fully three hundred steamships and summer work to very nearly as many more.

There was an exciting contest between the ship and the car in the earlier days of transportation, to see which should carry the largest share of the wheat. About 1869 the car won. In this year, too, the United States was belted with a railway, east to west, which meant the opening up of the first great wheat-empire. Other railways pushed out into the vast prairies of the West, lured by the call of the wheat. They were the pioneers of the world's wheat-railways. Wheat was their chief freight and wheat farmers were their chief pa.s.sengers. At the outset the grain was shipped in bags. Then some railway genius invented the grain-car, which holds as much as twenty or twenty-five wagons. And to-day one of the ordinary moving pictures of an American railroad is a sixty-car train travelling eastward with enough wheat in its rolling bins to give bread to a city of ten thousand people for a year.

The trans-Siberian railway, which is the longest straight line of steel in the world, was built largely as a wheat-conveyor. So were the railways of western Canada, Argentina, and India. Ever since the advent of the Reaper wheat has been the prolific mother of railways and steamships. While the rice nations are still putting their burdens on ox-carts and on the backs of camels and elephants, the wheat nations have built up a system of transportation that is a daily miracle of cheapness, efficiency, and speed. This system is not yet finished. A new line of steamships is about to be set afloat between Buenos Ayres and Hamburg. The Erie Ca.n.a.l is being re-made, at a fabulous cost, so that a steamer with 100,000 bushels of wheat can go directly from Buffalo to New York. And an adventurous railway is now pushing its way north from the wheat-fields of western Canada to the unknown water of Hudson Bay, whence the wheat will be carried by boat to London and Liverpool.

To-day it is not the long haul of wheat, but the short haul, that is more expensive. It is cheaper to carry wheat from one country to another than from the barn to the nearest town. The average distance that an American farmer has to haul his grain is nine and a half miles, and the average cost of haulage is nine cents per hundred pounds. Thus it has actually become true that to carry wheat ten miles by wagon costs more than 2,300 miles by steamship. Such is the tense efficiency of our wheat-carrier system that a bushel of grain can now be picked up in Missouri and sent to the cotton-spinners of England for a dime.

a.s.sociated with this transportation problem was the matter of storage.

There was no sort of a building known to man, fifty years ago, in which a million bushels of wheat might be conveniently kept. An entirely new kind of building had to be invented. All the wheat barns were overflowing. All the warehouses were outgrown. The difficulty was to make a huge building that could be quickly filled and emptied. Then, at the precise moment when he was needed, an inventor, F. H. Peavey, appeared with a device for elevating grain--an endless carrier to which metal cups were fastened. From this idea the _elevator_ was born.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MAMMOTH WHEAT-FIELD IN SOUTH DAKOTA WITH TWENTY HARVESTERS IN LINE]

The first city that appreciated the usefulness of this new, unlovely building was Chicago. It became not only the home of the Reaper, but also the main storehouse of the wheat. It erected one after another of these mastodonic buildings until to-day thirty-six of them stand along the water-front, roomy enough to hold the entire crop of Holland, Sweden, Greece, Egypt, Mexico, and New Zealand. What these immense grain-bins have done for the prosperity of Chicago would require many books to tell completely. It was largely because of them that Chicago outgrew Berlin and became the central metropolis of North America, with twenty-six railways emptying their freight at her doors and seven thousand vessels a year arriving at her harbor.

At present Chicago has swung from wheat to corn and oats, and enabled Minneapolis to become the greatest actual wheat-storage city of the world. In Minneapolis the owning of elevators has become a profession.

There are not only forty-four elevators in the city itself, but also forty elevator companies that have built more than two thousand elevators in the wheat States of the Northwest. The Jumbo of all elevators is here--a stupendous granary that holds 6,000,000 bushels, as much as may be reaped by two thousand self-binders from seven hundred square miles of land.

Of all American cities, there are only five others that can put roofs over 10,000,000 bushels of grain. Duluth-Superior stands at the head of these, with twice the storage capacity of New York. This double city, with the picturesque location, Duluth on her Minnesota hillside and Superior on her Wisconsin plain, has in recent years overtaken all compet.i.tors and is now the leading wheat-shipping port in the world.

Buffalo comes next as an elevator city, having twenty-eight towering buildings of steel operated by the energy of Niagara Falls. Even this famous cataract helps a little in the making of cheap bread. New York follows closely after Buffalo; with Kansas City and St. Louis running neck and neck at quite a distance behind. It is an odd fact that there is not one elevator on the Pacific coast. Because of the rainless weather, the wheat is put into bags and piled outdoors until the day of shipment. This is an expensive method of handling, as the bags cost four cents apiece and no machine has as yet been invented that will pick up and handle a sack of grain.

The American elevator has now been very generally adopted as the ideal wheat-bin. Two Roumanian cities, Braila and Galatz, have suggested an improvement by using concrete instead of steel. And one Russian city, Novorossisk, on the Black Sea, has introduced a most original feature in the building of elevators by erecting a very large one a quarter of a mile back from the dock, because of the better view that this site affords of the harbor.

London has no elevators, and never has had, although it buys more wheat than any other city. It has six million mouths to feed, so that the grain is devoured as fast as it arrives. To give bread to London would take the entire crop of Indiana or Siberia. Neither are there any elevators of any importance in Paris, Berlin, or Antwerp. Whatever wheat arrives at these cities is either hurried to the mill or re-shipped.

Wheat is too precious in Europe to be stored for a year or for two years, as may happen in Minnesota. Rotterdam has one elevator only and of moderate size. Neither Odessa nor Sulina have any of the large proportions, for the reasons that in Odessa the labor unions have an unconquerable prejudice against elevators, and in Sulina the grain is held only a short time and then forwarded elsewhere. This Sulina, as a glance at the map of Europe will show, is the loneliest of all the wheat-cities. It stands on a heap of gravel at the mouth of the Danube--an oasis of human life in a vast marshy wilderness. The children born there have never seen a railway; but 1,400 ships leave the stone docks of Sulina every year laden with enough wheat to feed London, Paris, and Berlin. To find the exact reverse of Sulina, we must go to Buenos Ayres--the premier wheat-city of South America and the gayest of them all. Built up at first by the cattle trade, and now depending mainly upon wheat, this superb city has become the topmost pinnacle of South American luxury and refinement. It has several new elevators, erected by the railway companies.

After the Reaper, the Railway, the Steamship, and the Elevator, came the Exchange. This, too, came first in Chicago, in its modern form. There was one little grain Exchange in the Italian city of Genoa, several centuries ago, and England points back to 1747 as the year when her first Corn Exchange was born. But it was the Exchange in Chicago, started by thirteen men in 1848, that first came into its full growth and became an arena of international forces.

A wheat Exchange is to-day much more than a meeting-place for brokers.

It is a mechanism. It is a news bureau--a parliament--a part of the whispering-gallery of the world. It not only provides a market where wheat can at once be bought and sold, but it obtains for both buyer and seller all the news from everywhere about the wheat, so that no bargain may be made in the dark. Before Exchanges were organized there were times when a farmer would drive twenty miles to the nearest town with a load of wheat, and find no one to buy it. Even in Chicago, in the early forties, a farmer ran the risk of not being able to trade his wheat for a few groceries.

At present, when a buyer or a seller of wheat arrives at an Exchange, he goes at once to consult the weather map of the day. From here he pa.s.ses to a series of bulletin-boards, which inform him of the arrival or outgo of wheat at many cities. One board tells him the visible supply of wheat in the world, so that he can easily ascertain, if he wishes to do so, _how much bread the human race ate last week_. Other boards have telegrams and cablegrams of disaster--frost in Alberta, hail in Minnesota, green bug in Texas, rust in Argentina, drought in Australia, locusts in Siberia, monsoon in India, and chinch bug in Missouri. Good news is here, too, as well as bad. There may be reports of a record-breaking crop in Roumania, an opulent rain in Kansas, a new steamship line from Kurrachee to Liverpool, and the plowing of a million acres of new land in western Canada. And also there are, of course, the records of the latest sales and prices in other Exchanges.

Thus the farmer can not only find a ready buyer for his wheat. He can, by means of a newspaper or a telephone, know what price he ought to receive, as all the news gathered by the Exchanges is freely given to the public. Such is the perfection of the news mechanism that has been built up around the marketing of the wheat, that before a Dakota farmer starts out for town with a load of grain, he can go to the telephone under his own roof and learn the prices at various cities and the world-conditions of the wheat trade.

The paper which best deserves to be called the official journal of the wheat is the _Corn Trade News_, of Liverpool; and the building which best deserves to be called the international headquarters of the wheat business is the handsome new Baltic Exchange, near by the Bank of England in London. This Baltic market is so practically international, in fact, that it is never closed. Whoever wishes to buy or sell wheat may do so here at any hour of the day or night. There are no days in this building and no seasons, for the reason that it is always noonday and harvest-time in some part of the world. In this Baltic Exchange, too, there is now a nucleus for a Wheat Parliament, organized under the name of the Corn Trade a.s.sociation. This society has undertaken to put the wheat business in order, by establishing standard contracts, collecting samples of all wheats, arbitrating disputes, and condemning all dishonesties of whatever sort.

As wheat Exchange cities, London, Liverpool, and Chicago outcla.s.s all others. Neither Italy nor France have any central or dominating market.

In Paris, Antwerp, Hamburg, and Amsterdam the Bourses, as the Exchanges are called, are public buildings, and the members of each Bourse represent the local situation and nothing more. One of the most ambitious and speculative of the European Exchanges is the one at Budapest, which stands beside a dainty little park where the brokers eat their lunch in fine weather; and the youngest of all Exchanges is the one that was born in Buenos Ayres in 1908, representing a surplus of a hundred million bushels a year.

Besides the brokers, in their Exchanges, there must also be inspectors in the marketing of the wheat. In some countries these inspectors are government officers, as in Germany and Canada; and elsewhere they are local officials or private employees, as in the United States. A carload of wheat, pa.s.sing from Dakota to New York, will probably have from three to six inspections.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HARVESTING IN ROUMANIA]

Also, the insurance agent takes his place in the circle of co-operation when the wheat begins to move from barn to bakery. He insures the wheat in the elevators, on the cars, or in the steamships.

He may even insure it against hail and tornadoes while it is growing. It is so precious, this brown seed, that we watch over every step of its progress.

It is the bankers' busy season, too, when the wheat begins to move. The marketing of the grain ties up more money than any other yearly event.

"It threatens us with disaster every fall," said one of the Secretaries of the Treasury, when making a plea for a more elastic currency. "We ship half a million dollars a day during harvest," said the president of a Chicago bank. "We drew more than five millions of currency from the East and sent thirty-eight millions to the country during September and October of last year," said a third financier, who spoke for Chicago as a whole. In short, the movement of the wheat means a matter of five hundred millions to American bankers; and it is the most important occurrence of the year to the bankers of Russia, Canada, Argentina, and Australia. Many a bank, as well as many a railroad, was founded upon the moving of the wheat.

The broker, the banker, the inspector, and the insurance agent--these four render a useful service to the wheat that has left home; but there is a fifth man about whose usefulness there is the widest possible difference of opinion--the speculator. From one point of view, the speculator is the driving-wheel of the whole wheat trade. By his energy and his impetus he steadies and equalizes the conflicting forces, and gives the entire mechanism a continuous movement. From another point of view, he is a gambler, reckless and parasitical, who interferes with the natural laws of supply and demand, and s.n.a.t.c.hes an unearned toll from the wheat bins of the world.

Some of the wheat nations not only permit speculation in wheat, but practically encourage it by allowing more privileges to the speculator than to the ordinary business man. Others are resolutely stamping it out, as a nuisance and a crime. The nations that have voted "Yea" on speculation are Great Britain, Hungary, Sweden, Norway, France, and the United States; and the nations that have voted "Nay" are Germany, Holland, Belgium, Australia, Switzerland, Greece, and Argentina. Canada has been divided on the question, since the Province of Manitoba broke up the Winnipeg Grain Exchange by legislation in 1908.

In the end, as organization increases, speculation will decline. Chicago will try to push prices up and London will try to pull them down; but there will be fewer violent fluctuations. Better methods of farming and a more reliable system of news-gathering will eliminate the element of chance to such an extent that the wheat trade will offer less and less scope for speculation and no inducements at all to the reckless plunger.

Already the frantic methods of marketing wheat have been outgrown in the Exchanges of Liverpool and London. In neither of these places is there any Wheat Pit, or any maelstrom of frenzied brokers. Without any shouting or jostling or wild tumult of any kind, the English brokers are buying two hundred million bushels of wheat a year, and controlling the situation to a greater extent than any other body of men. This, too, without any restrictive legislation.

Before wheat was made plentiful by the Reaper, it was possible for a daring man to establish a corner or monopoly; but no one has succeeded in doing this for more than forty years. The last wheat corner that did not fail was in 1867. Since then every would-be cornerer has been caught in his own trap. The wheat-machinery of the world has now become so vast that no individual can master it. Whoever has tried it has found that he was being cornered by the wheat; for as soon as he had raised the price to an artificial level, the grain has flowed in upon him and covered him up. The price of wheat to-day may be temporarily deflected by schemes and conspiracies, but not for long. Ultimately it is decided by the state of the crop and the state of public opinion in the thirty-six countries that grow wheat and eat bread.

Within the last thirty years, since the Reaper has come into universal use, the area of the world's wheat-field has doubled. New countries have arisen, that were only waste places before. The habitable earth has grown immensely larger. There is more room for both wheat and men to grow, and less scope for the forestaller and the monopolist. Just as the Reaper was the advance-machine of civilization across the prairies of the West, so it is to-day opening up new territories and developing new resources.

Northwestern Canada, for instance, was a dozen years ago supposed to be a barren wilderness of snow and ice, in which none but the hunter and the fur-trader might earn a living. Then several adventurous Minnesotans went across and planted wheat. It grew--forty bushels to the acre, and the acres, there were two hundred million of them, were waiting for the plow and almost to be had for the asking. Since then, more than three hundred thousand American farmers have swept across the line and joined in the greatest wheat-rush of this generation. Twelve hundred grain elevators have been built along the line of the Canadian Pacific; and Chicago self-binders rattled through the yellow wheat last Summer two thousand miles north of St. Louis.

In Argentina, too, and Australia, where the wheat ripens just in time to decorate the Christmas trees, there is to be seen the same conquest of nature. Desolate plains are being tamed by the plow and exploited by the harvesters. In the semi-arid belt that lies east of the Rocky Mountains, new kinds of wheat, less thirsty, are being taught to grow. In Russia and Siberia a vast tract of twenty-five million acres has been rescued from idleness in the last fifteen years. And even in the valley of the Euphrates, where wheat, so it is believed, was born, a new railway is now being constructed which, when it is finished, will carry oil and wheat.

By thus opening up new regions to settlement, the wheat-farmer not only thwarts the monopolist and makes the world a larger place to live in, he does more: he compels the gold to come out of its vaults in the great cities and to flow to the outermost parts of the earth. For every eighteen thousand pounds of wheat that go to the city, there will go back to the farmer one pound of gold. For every loaf of bread upon a Londoner's table, there will go a cent and a half to the man behind the Reaper. And so, the sale of every wheat-crop means that the gold will come throbbing out into the arteries of business, like the blood from the heart, and on its way back and forth nourish the whole body of the nation.

It is in the very nature of the wheat trade to benefit the ma.s.ses and not the few. The more wheat that grows, the less danger there is of an aristocracy of wheat. More wheat means more luxury in the farm-house, more traffic on the railway, and more food in the slums. It means busier factories and steel-mills, because the farmer, when he receives his wheat-money, becomes the customer of the manufacturer. Thus it was not at all accidental that the wealth of Buenos Ayres came with the exportation of wheat, or that the commercial awakening of Canada followed the opening up of her western prairies, or that the industrial supremacy of the United States dates from the immense wheat harvests that began in 1880 to push the whole country forward with the power of $500,000,000 a year. As one of McCormick's compet.i.tors, J. D. Easter of Evanston, once declared, "It seems as though the McCormick Reaper started the ball of prosperity rolling, and it has been rolling ever since."

[Ill.u.s.tration: HARVESTING HEAVY GRAIN, SOUTH AMERICA]

If we wish to know what the Reaper will eventually do for these new wheat countries, we have but to glance back over the short history of our ten prairie States. Here, by the use of both science and machinery, the New Farmer has reached his highest level of success. By 1884 these ten States had twenty million thriving settlers, riding on forty-two thousand miles of railway, raising as much wheat in a day as New England could in a year, and storing their profits in twenty-five hundred banks.

Incredible as it may seem to Europe and Asia, it is true that even the poorhouses in Iowa and Kansas were used last year as storehouses for wheat. And it is true that in the co-operative commonwealth called Kansas, at the last a.s.sessment, there were found to be forty-four thousand pianos and six million dollars' worth of carriages and automobiles. This in a State where there are no Grand Dukes and where every man works for a living!

If the lords of Siberia wish to know what may be done with that famine-swept vast.i.tude they may come and see that bed of an ancient sea, which in thirty years has been transformed into the world's greatest bread-land--the Red River Valley. Here the banks are not only packed with millions, but hundreds of millions, belonging to the shirt-sleeved proprietors of the soil. Here, in the yellow days of August, a man may travel for days and see no limit to the ocean of waving, shimmering wheat, that ripples around him in a vast sky-bounded circle.

Wheat--wheat--wheat! Nothing but wheat! It is a Field of the Cloth of Gold, that adds nothing to the glory of kings, but much to the glory of the common people. Drop the German Empire down upon this valley and its expanse of dizzying, swirling wheat, and the wheat would not be wholly eclipsed. There would still be enough grain around the edges to make a golden fringe.

The children born and bred in this Red River Valley have never seen, except in pictures, a sickle or a flail. Their only conception of a harvest time is that a battery of red self-binders, with reels whirling and knives clacking, shall charge upon the wheat as though each acre were a battalion of hostile infantry, and make war until the land is strewn with heaps of fallen sheaves. Famine, to these children of the wheat, seems as remote a danger as the cooling of the sun. Even the one young State of North Dakota, not yet of age, is now growing food for herself, and for twelve million people besides.

So, the urgent world-problem is to teach other nations the lesson of the Red River Valley. There is not yet enough bread so that we may put a loaf at every plate. To feed the whole race according to the present American standard of living would require ten thousand million bushels--three times as much as we are raising now; and the demand is fast outgrowing the supply. Sooner or later the Chinese will learn to eat at least one loaf a week apiece, and when they do, it will mean that the world's wheat crop must be increased ten per cent.

More wheat and a more efficient organization of wheat agencies--that is the programme of the future. Already one unsuccessful effort has been made to hold an international Wheat Congress; and the second attempt may end more happily. Now that the world has become so small that a cablegram flashes completely around it in twelve minutes; now that there are forty-four nations united by The Hague Conferences and fifty-eight by the Postal Union; now that war has grown to be so expensive that one cannon-shot costs as much as a college education and one battleship as much as a first-cla.s.s University,--it is quite probable that the march of co-operation will continue until there is a Congress, and a central headquarters and a Tribunal, which will represent nothing less than an international fellowship of the wheat.

CHAPTER XIII

GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD