Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/603

Rh in the purchasing power of the classes engaged in or connected with British agriculture, for the single year 1885, as having amounted to 42,800,000 ($214,000,000); and as the losses for several preceding years are believed to have been equal or even greater than this, an estimate of a thousand million dollars decline in the value of British farming capital since 1880, from depreciation of land-values, rentals, and prices for stock and cereals, is probably an under rather than an over-estimate. Wheat-growing, which was formerly profitable in Great Britain, is reported as not having been remunerative to the British farmer since 1874; a fact that finds eloquent expression in the acknowledged reduction in British wheat acreage from about 4,000,000 acres in 1869 to 2,528,905 in 1886. That the agricultural populations of the interior states of Europe, which have hitherto been protected in a degree by the barrier of distance against the tremendous cheapening of transportation, are also at last beginning to feel the full effects of its influence, is shown by the statement (United States consular reports, 1886) that farming land in Germany, remote from large cities, where the demand for milk and other perishable products is small, can now be purchased for fifty per cent of the prices which prevailed at the close of the Franco-German War in 1870-'71. And yet such startling results, in the place of being prime factors in occasioning a depression of British trade and industry, are really four removes from the original causes, which may be enumerated in order as follows: First, the occupation and utilization of new and immense areas of cheap and fertile wheat-growing land in the United States, Canada (Manitoba), Australia, and the Argentine Republic. Second, the invention and application of machinery for facilitating and cheapening the production and harvesting of crops, and which on the wheat-fields of Dakota (as before pointed out) have made the labor of every agriculturist equivalent to the annual production of five thousand five hundred bushels of wheat. Third, the extension of the system of transportation on land through the railroad, and on sea through the steamship, in default of which the appropriation of new land and the invention and application of new agricultural machinery would have availed but little. Fourth, the discovery of Bessemer, and the invention of the compound (steamship) engine, without which transportation could not have cheapened to the degree necessary to effect the present extent of distribution. Now, from the conjoined result of all these different agencies has come a reduction in the world's price of wheat to an extent sufficient to make its growing unprofitable on lands taken at high rents, and under unfavorable climatic conditions; and legislation is powerless to make it otherwise. In short, the whole secret of the recent immense losses of the British and to a lesser extent also of the Continental agriculturist, and the depression of British trade and industry, so far as it has been contingent on such losses, stands revealed in the simple statement that American wheat sold for export