Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/330

314 The connection is most evident in transactions in goods of large consumption, and is manifested in the tendency to equalization in prices and in the rates of discount. The price of the staple articles of commerce is fixed in the market of the world. The price of wheat is determined every day by the telegraphic reports to Chicago of the day's transactions in the principal places on the globe where wheat is handled, and the price of cotton in a similar manner at New Orleans and Liverpool; and in all financial transactions the most remote commercial centers respond to one another with a facility and celerity that can hardly be excelled by those with which two houses separated only by the Thames could communicate.

This extension of quick communication over the whole globe has been attended with the further advantages of making commercial products accessible to the largest possible circle of consumers, of making capital, which flows where it can be applied with the most profit, easily available at such spots, and in the acquisition of a number of storage points whence goods can be dispatched with but little delay to the places where there is a demand for them. Conditioned upon these circumstances are the general decline of interest and the easier avoidance or quicker relief of the distress which may arise in single countries or districts from the temporary scarcity of some particular necessity. Railroads and steamboats have made the prevalence of real famine and the misery associated with it impossible so long as any purchasing power exists in a country or a city. Speculation, so much abused, while it looks out first for its own interests, takes care to compensate for local failures of crops by sending in timely supplies, and has in railroads and telegraphs ready and powerful instruments for its enterprise. That many men still actually suffer from hunger is not to be denied; but it nevertheless appears now to be impossible for the most of the world that a local scarcity of food arising from dearth or any disaster shall not be immediately remedied from without.

This wide community of interests also has its shadows. The ease with which large quantities of goods can be carried from countries where they have accumulated in excess under favoring conditions, to regions where this production is not equally favored, is fraught with disadvantages to the local producers by depreciating the prices of their goods when the circumstances are already hard for them. The depressing competition of American and Indian wheat in the European markets, which the home farmers lament with so much reason, is a striking example of this. Still more serious is the rapidity with which the effects of a commercial crisis occurring anywhere are felt in all markets. But these negative effects of solidarity of interests, hard as they may bear at times upon individuals, are insignificant as compared with the advantages it brings to the general welfare.

Apace with the widening of the trade in goods, has production