The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, June 7, 1903, Page 6

Asia Only Hope of | ' American Farmers | BY JAMES J. HILL, President of the Great Northern Railroad. 3 - HE question-of a market is next in importance to the question of raising the commodities we have to sell. We have extended our fields, ex- tended the areas from which our agricultural products are raised, until we have practically created a supply that is in excess of the demand for a large portion of the time. The population of this country about every thirty years. In the year 1930 we shall have a population of from 150,000,000 to 160,000,000. All the people must be occupied. If the population ‘continues to increase in the ratio indicated, where are we to put them all, and what are they to do? Our country is expanding in population. What has been done to expand our markets? \What intelligent work has been done since the Civil War—and that is as far back doubles market? 1 have given the subject some attention and am free to say that I have failed to find a single intelligent sentence, written or spoken by any one, in an endeavor to imprové our market for agricultural products. With our great growth of population we must consider how the people must be employed so that they may be intelligent, pros- perous and happy. We sell 60 or 70 per cent of our entire prod- ucts to one country—Great Britain. If for any reason that coun- try were not able to buy from us, our people would realize very very quickly the situation they are in. Where can we sell our wheat crop? In France, Italy. Austria or Germany we are met with hostile legislation. We are not welcome. To take our wheat to Russia would be like carrying coal to Newcastle. If only one-third of the people of the world are wheat-eaters IHE SUNDAY CALL. Argentina farmers, most of whom went from Italy. We areiin competition with them on an even whiffletree. We always will be so long as we have to sell outside of our own country; and that our own country will ever consume our entire product no intelligent man will believe at least for half a century. Our farmers can do nothing in the way of getting.a market. I can do very little. The price of transportation has conie down, but the price of wheat has come down with it. Compare the cost of carrying a ton of wheat to Liverpool or Antwerp twenty vears ago and now, and it will’be' found that the fall in the price of wheat from year to year is just about the difference in this rate. It has made wheat cheaper for the other fellow. He is not compelled to take your wheat. He can take wheat from Argen- tina or anywhere else. We must find new customers by enlarging our commercial relations, by expanding our markets. The coun- try has always expanded and always will. 1f & is.to go on and increase we must have some place, some people, where we can get rid of the stuff we raise. x Suppose the trade with mese Asiatic peoples to amount to 1 cent per capita for each day in the year, that would amount with China alone to $4,000,000 a day—nearly $1,500,000,000 a vear. We could not begin to furnish it to them. We have not the surplus. The European nations have the Mediterranean Sea and two oceans to cross in reaching these peoples. We have to cross but one ocean. It might do us some good if we had any ships to use it. Of the carrying trade going to China in 1898 we carried three-fourths of one per cent. Yet we call ourselves a commercial nation and are ambitious to be a maritime nation. 1f we can carry grain at these rates from the Pacific Coast to China and Japan we would not ship one bushel of wheat from , the Pacific Coast to Europe. And with a chance to bring every car back loaded with Pacific Coast lumber, we would carry mil- lions and millions of bushels from Minnesota and the Dakotas. Empty cars one way means double mileage. It would not only help farmers of the Northwestern States by taking the Pacific Coast wheat out of competition, but it would carry away\ their own crops at times. Either I know absolutely nothing or I know absolutely that these farmers would be greatly benefited. The en- tire wheat crop of the Northwest last year might have gone to the Pacific Coast, if there had been ships to take it when it got there. and the other two-thirds live on rice or maize or rye, we must find our markets with people who are not now consumers of our crop. I believe that wherever wheaten flour has been introduced to any race, with the single exception of the black race, they are ready to consume it from that time on. The Asiatic rice-eaters are as fond of flour as the white race and as ready to eat it, if they can get it at a fair price. % g as most of us remember or need to go—to add to our foreign S *i g ( ( Taking the World as You Find It. BY “THE PARSON.” T i K ey The question may arise, How can people who work for wages of from 10 to 13 cents a day, and have lived for centuries on just such wages, buy flour which must be carried across the Pacific Ocean? If they did buy flour, even at the rate of one bushel per capita, we in this country would have to go to eating corn pone. We simply could not sell it to them. If we could sell them one bushel per capita it would take 450,000,000 bushels to supply China and Japan alone, to say nothing of the Straits Set- tlements and other countries having large populations. In the north and west parts of China there is an excellent farming country, where corn and wheat can be raised, but the products are so far from the dense population on the seacoast that it cannot be carried there. We may perhaps fear that Russia, with the Siberian railway completed, may enter into competition with us for the Asiatic flour or wheat trade. The transportation question settles that. The average rate on the Russian state rail- roads is 1.8 cents per ton per mile. If the actual cost of operation amounted to but two-thirds of this figure—1.2 cents per ton per mile—this rate, applied to the distance from that part of Sibe- ria where the wheat is grown, would give a transportation charge of $4 20 per barrel on flour, while it should be carried from our Pacific ports to Yokohama, Nagasaki, Kobe, Shangwi and Hongkong for 25 cents a hundred, $5 a’ton, 50 cents a barrel. A year ago you could buy nails for $1 25 a keg; now they are $3 25. You know how lumber has gone up and all other ar- ticles of prime necessity on the prairie farrh. Fuel has advanced. Everything made of iron has advanced. But the wheat crop has not advanced, because it is sold in open competition with the product of the world. And until we get other people to eat wheat it will not advance, and we will go on hoping against hope. We will not get a high price for our wheat until wheat is made scarce. If we could increase our exports to the Orient by 50,- 000,000 bushels, I have not the slightest doubt that it would ad- vance the price of what we do send to Europe 13 to 20 cents. g g% In the first place,” what we would send to the Orient would go from the Pacific Coast. The grain of that coast is handled at present in a manner entirely different from that which prevails east of the Rocky Mountains. Having to cross the equator twice, ) it must be carried in sacks to prevent heating, and not in bulk in the hull of the ship, as on the Great Lakes or the Atlantic. The grain is practically all bought by three concerns, two of them located in Liverpool and also interested in a line of steamers, so that they can furnish their own shipping. The wheat is sent to | England and sold for what it will bring. It acts as a damper— a wet blanket—on the entire market. The voyage around the Horn is four months long, and by the time the first cargoes are reaching port the last are leaving, so that it is all afloat at the same time. The buyer in Europe knows what is afloat. Thus, the manner in which the crop is handled breaks the market down more than twice the same amount from Atlantic ports. There the buyer must send over and place his order in advance of ship- ment. With the Pacific Coast grain it must sell for what it will bring. The ship cannot be delayed and the grain cannot be stored in sacks. We can never get away from the practical proposition that we are in competition with every wheat raiser in every country— the peasants on the steppes of Russia, the ryots of India, and the —— Sy AD, she'd better,” was Thomas Carlyle’s caustic comment when it was reported to him that a cer- tain woman of his- acquaintance had decided, after long Aeliberation, jo ucce‘i)t the universe. Lin- fortunately, not every ‘one reaches her sang con- clusion., Many a man, to his own detriment and undoing, fumes and frets all his life Jong over the world as he finds it. H- looks out fupon mankind and sees nothing but the “still sad mu- sic of humanity.” Politics seem to him only a wild scramble for office; business he pronounces to be essentially barbaric; all the industry of the world is simply the operation of forces by means of which cunning, wolfish men entrap and over- throw the simple and the weak. The times are out of joint—climate, social usages, human institutions—the movemeits of daily life about him being altogether contrary to what he would bring about were he making a world. We have got beyond the age when the theologians pulled one another’s hair over the nice question as to whether this is the best possible world that a benevolent and infinite being could create. That has ceased to interest modern thinkess, for the sim- ple reason that they have grace enough to-day to confess that they have not all the data at hand with which to decide that question. The drift of thought seems to be in the direction that it is a pretty good world, at least a good world in the making. That is certainly a sensible hypothesis for the ordinary man like you or me. ¥ ¥ '3 If any one ever had reason to accept the universe since man was first created upon earth, it is he who lives under a free and enlightened government, in the best of all countries, at the be- ginning of the richest century the world has ever known. I notice that very few persons that complain about the degen- eracy of American life betake themselves to other countries for permanent residence. I have talked with globe-trotters who have come back with a great admiration for what they term “the superior virtues” of people thousands of miles from America, but to my question, “Why, then, did you not settle down in Bombay or Hongkong and make your home there?” they have always returned somewhat unsatisfactory replies. But, maybe it is easier for us to accept the universe at large than our part of the world. For it is of that we think first, when we wake up Sunday morning, and if our schemes or ambitions have been crossed or thwarted during the past week it is pretty hard to bound out ¢f bed with an exultant heart. We wish, oh so much, that things hadn’t turned out as’'they have. But, how foolish it is to waste a moment's time or an ounce of energy in bewailing the situation or butting against facts. If, as we look back over the we_ck, we can sec points where we were weak, or dilatory, or unwise, why tien let us own up like men to our faults and seek to mend our ways. But if, as it often happens, we are caught in a mesh of circums{anqes, in a network of events, in the onrush of forces for which we cannot see that we are responsi- ble, which, with the ability at our command, we were not able to overcome, the manly course is squarely to face the world as it pre- sents itself to us in this new, day of grace, even though the sky is overcast, or we may think ourselves up against a stone wall. £ a e ? @ With the Oracle of + Mulberry Center L BY S. E. KISER. ; ULBERRY CENTER, May 31.—A year from now the delegates to the donventions of our two grand old political parties will be gettin’ ready to go to St. Louis, or wherever the candidates are to be nominated, and go through the sollum and impressive ceremony of lettin’ the bosses from their States cast their votes. 1 am no political profit, but it is safe to say that one of the parties will put up a wise and noble candidate, and that the other side will have the weakest man it ever let be at the head of a ticket. One of the nomanees will have the well fair of the country at heart and be the only hon- est frend laber ever had in this country, and the other one will be a dummy gog who wants to ruin our sacred institushens. I can’t tell you what he'll want to ruin them for, but he’ll want to, ennyway, and it'll be just the same as pullin’ down the bullworks of the land to elect him. That’s one of the penalties of livin® in a free and enlightened country where the party you don’t belong to is always plottin’ to ruin the bizness and throw our sacred burth rite to the dogs. 1 was talkin’ to Henry "Martin about it the other day and I says to him: “Hen, why is it you always vote for the same party?” He looked at me kind of scared like, as tho he thot mebby T had suddenly got to be an arnakist or sumthin’, becoz him and me hafe always been on the saim side. “You wouldn’t expect me to go to work and vote for a gang of political sharpers and thieves that want to ruin the country and steal all the munny in the safes down there to Washington every time they thot the. public wasn't lookin’, woul you?” he ast. “How do you know they want to do that?” says I. “Did enny of them ever tell you that was thair game?” “No,” he says, “but a man that has reasonin’ powers oughtn’t to haft to be told about it, seems to me. Look at thair bosses. They ain’t runnin’ politics fof thair helth, I guess.” ‘No,” says I, “mebby not, but I wonder if our bosses are at it just becoz they think they need the exercize>” “We ain’t got enny bosses on our side,” says Hen. “We ain’t give up our freedom yet, thank heaven, to be drove to the polls like a flock of sheep.” ¥ ¥ v So I met Jud Brewster a little while after that and ast him about it. Jud belongs to the other side. “Jud,” says I, “tell me hotiest now why you've always be- longed to the same party. Why don’t you change over wunst afid a while and vote for the other side when it puts up a good man 2" N He laffed right out loud at me, and sed: “I would vote for it if it ever put up a good man. But that's the grate trouble. It never does. Your bosses won't let it. They always want sumboddy they can use for thair own benefits, and you and the rest on your side go up to the polls and vote the way they tell you to, just as though you was afraid you couldn’t git to heaven if you ever done your own thinkin’.” “But,” says I, “how about your own bosses?” “We ain’t got none,” he says, bulgin’ out his chest and lookin” as proud as a boy that’s just licked another about half his size. ‘““The men that belong to our party are brot up to do thair own thinkin’. They have a principull at stake and it is thair sacred duty handed down from thair fathers before them to stick to it till deth.” T've been thinkin’ the thing over a good bit since then, and as fur as I can make out the trubble seems to be that the vir- tue, liberty, indapendunce and wisdom is all located in one party, and the other side is on earth just to try to sneak in and ruin everything when the good people that you are one of hap- pens to be lookin’ the other way. Politics is like the earth as it goes rollin’ round in space. The ones that are on the other side from where you are, are always the ones that are upside down. Another queer thing about politics is that it don’t make enny difference how poor an opinion you might have about your father’s judgment in other things you always have faith in the politics he handed down to you. I've often herd about boys comin’ home “after they’ve been away to college awhile, and think their fathers don’t know how to run the bizness, but I never herd of one yet that got educated up so high above his poor ignerunt father that he broke away from the party the old man started him in. ¥ ¥ 1’2 Web Hathaway was one of them kind of boys. When he came back home from the State University he looked down on his father so the whole town couldn’t help potice it. He. went into the store and commenced turnin’ things over right and-left. He discharged old clerks that had been there for years and told his dad right out plain that he didn’t know enny more about biz- ness than a child. Imust say that he improved things a good bit, and in a year or two he'd about doubled the bizness and made the store the best place in town fo do‘tradin’ at, besides payin’ off a mortgidge the old man wouldn’t of got out from under in forty- seven years. o ; 2 _ He changed over from the church where he’d been baptized, too, becoz he sed it was too narrow for people that had outgrew the old-fashioned idees, and it used to nearly mortify him to deth when his father used poor languidge before travelin’ men from the city. s Lt g But when it come to votin’ Web stuck right to the grand old party that his father and grandfather before him had been in, and seemed to have perfect confadunce in it becoz it had been good enough fer them. JEFFERSON DOBBS. ") (‘