Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 32.djvu/479

Rh by using the cob of one ear to shell the corn from another. In this way about five bushels in ten hours could be shelled, and the laborer would have received about one fifth of the product. The six great corn States are Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Iowa, Ohio, and Kansas. They produce more than one half the corn raised in the country. These States, by the census of 1880, had 2,056,770 persons engaged in agriculture, and it would have been necessary for this entire community to have sat astride of shovels and frying-pans for one hundred and ten days out of three hundred and sixty-five to have shelled their corn crop for the year 1880 by the old processes.

In 1790, before the grain-"cradle" was invented, an able-bodied farm-laborer in Great Britain could with a sickle reap only about a quarter of an acre of wheat in a day; at the present time a man with two horses can cut, rake, and bind in a day the wheat-product of twenty acres.

Forty years ago a deficient harvest in any one of the countries of Europe entailed a vast amount of suffering and starvation on their population. To-day the deficiency of any local crop of wheat is comparatively of little consequence, for the prices of cereals in every country readily accessible by railroad and steamships is now regulated, not by any local conditions, but by the combined production and consumption of the world; and the day of famines for the people of all such countries has passed forever. The extent to which all local advantages in respect to the supply and prices of food have been equalized in recent years through the railway service of the United States, is demonstrated by the fact that a full year's supply of meat and bread for an adult person can now be moved from the points of their most abundant and cheapest production, a thousand miles, for a cost not in excess of the single day's wages of an average American mechanic or artisan.

The same conditions that one hundred, or even fifty, years ago