Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/357

 THE MCKINLEY TARIFF ACT 335 Republic, the Cape of Good Hope, and other new countries. the United States a similar process has shown itself within the country. Wool-growing has steadily shifted westward. In the middle of this century, as population became more dense in the Eastern States, the number of sheep in these declined, and the quantity of wool grown became less; while in the Central States and in the Mississippi valley wool-growing became a considerable industry. As population became more dense in these Central States in turn, and as railways penetrated the region west of the Mississippi and Missouri, wool-growing again shifted further westward, and became a great industry on the wide plains of the Far West, and in the fertile but unsettled lands of California. In our own time, as population is advancing into the Far West, and as California is becoming a more and more thickly settled State, the tendency again appears for wool-growing to decline there, and make way for agricultural operations. This process, as it happens, was interrupted in the United States by the effects of the Civil War. The sudden cutting off of the supply of cotton caused a great demand for wool, and for about a decade wool-raising was highly profitable. It increased, therefore, in those regions of the Mississippi Valley, in which, under normal circumstances, it would have tended slowly to decline. The process, as it happened, was coincident with the issue of inconvertible paper money, and a consequent artificial rise in general prices. A few years after the Civil War, when cotton resumed its place as the most important and abundant of textile materials, the normal situation was reverted to. The price of wool fell sharply, wool-growing shifted rapidly to the unsettled western regions, and the considerable returns which the farmers had been getting for their wool shrank. This change, again, came with the distressing fall in prices which was the inevitable result of the contraction of the paper currency and the necessary preliminary to the resumption of specie payments. These causes, not to mention others also at work, made the condition of the agricultural producers in the heart of the country far from prosperous; and in their depression they grasped at legislation promising aid in any direction. The maintenance of the duties upon wool was one step by which the legislators could seem at least to aid them. But the endearour to stave off the working of wide-reaching economic forces has not succeeded. The westward movement of wool-growing has continued. The wool clipped in the region east of the Mississippi river has continued to decline, and the consider-