Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/786

764 The civil war in the United States and the financial measures taken by our Government had a temporary influence, first, to stimulate exports, and secondly, to discourage them after the primary effect of an irredeemable paper currency had passed. The reaction was such as almost to destroy the ability of the United States to export wheat, and it was not till some years after the return of peace that its wheat recovered its true position in the English market. This course of the wheat trade was the most notable incident in the history of that trade since 1860, and a few figures are given to show its remarkable rise and fall. The comparison is of further interest as developing apparent sympathetic fluctuations in the imports from British North America and Egypt. The Canadian flow may be accounted for by the conditions then prevailing in the United States, but the Egyptian stands alone in its curious reflection of the rise and fall in American export.

In the period the need of England for foreign wheat increased, and yet one of the best countries of supply was, to all purposes, taken out of the race. In the five years (1861 to 1865) the average annual import of wheat was 24,902,576 hundredweight, and from 1866 to 1870 it was 31,807,745 hundredweight. The quantity received from Germany remained almost the same in the entire period, but the failure of the United States was in part made good by Russia, and in part by other countries of Europe, from which a small and somewhat unusual supply had been counted upon in the years past. The sudden appearance of these comparatively new sources of wheat, and their equally sudden disappearance, mark the exceptional conditions that gave them a temporary importance.