Delphi complete works of.., p.699
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 699
But when we turn from money to the material things that are, that form the ‘wealth’ of the world’s commerce today, it is strange how they contrast with the wealth of the earlier days of European expansion overseas. We recall from our earliest reading how Columbus poured the wealth of the New World into the lap of Spain; how the ‘flood of gold’ came from Peru; how Asia sent out the priceless cargoes of spices of the Spice Islands, the sandalwoods of India, and the perfumes of Araby. The commerce of this earlier world turned upon gold and silver, diamonds, pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon, rare and fragrant woods and the capture and transport of slaves from the Guinea Coast.
All this picturesque and miscellaneous freight would be of little importance in the world of today. All the gold that ever came from Peru in one year of this historic flood could be added to the bank clearings of a single day in a modern city without any noticeable effect. Silver is a drug on the market, no longer real money but used only for the make-believe coins of small change, and sinking to the status of a ‘commodity,’ like potatoes in a bag. A nation deprived of silver would hardly notice the difference. Diamonds are now so perilously easy to find that unless the output is restricted they will fall in value to the level of the coloured glass which mocks by its perfect similarity both the diamond and the human folly which prizes it.
Where now are the spices — the pepper, the cloves, the cinnamon, that gave the name of Spice Islands to the Archipelago of the East Indies. For the world of these earlier days, which had no ice in summer and knew nothing of the preservation of food in sealed tins, spices had to be used in inordinate quantities with food to keep it from putrefaction and to give it a taste that would vanquish and overcome all others. A vestige of these earlier times is seen in our surviving taste for half rotten game and wholly rotten cheese. Small in bulk as compared with value, spices became the most lucrative articles of the world’s commerce. Chief of all was pepper. This is made from the berries of a climbing plant unknown to Europe but native to the jungles of Malabar and the East Indies. From time immemorial it came to Europe as a part of the blind trade that arose in the unknown East, and was passed on by the Arabs. Their own desert country gained thereby a false reputation as ‘Arabia felix’ from which came the perfumes of Araby. When Alaric the Goth sacked Rome in A.D. 408, he exacted 3,000 pounds of pepper as a chief part of the ransom. This bid fair to break the city. Today it would be worth about $750. Hence pepper became a chief magnet along the new routes of discovery. The Portuguese, after the voyage of Vasco da Gama, made vast sums — what they thought vast — out of the pepper of the Spice Islands and later of West Africa. In England pepper was so valuable in the days of the Stuarts that Charles I was able to collect a tax of 5 shillings a pound on it. Allspice, cloves, nutmeg? What are these treasures now? Sunk from the palace to the kitchen — something the cook has in a pot, for which no charge is made at purchased meals.
As time went on, newer articles of trade from the East and from the tropics rivalled and surpassed the supremacy of spices. Coffee houses belong to the spacious days of Louis Quatorze and Charles II. Tea tables appear in force with Queen Anne, and in the eighteenth century sugar from the Sugar Islands of the West Indies filled a larger horizon than the products of the Spice Islands of the East.
But in our day the world’s production and trade has shifted to other commodities, unknown to earlier times or known only as curiosities. World wealth and world rivalry centre around such things as coal, rubber, petroleum, asbestos, manganese, pulp and paper, nickel, the cargoes of frozen meat crossing ten thousand miles of ocean and the mechanized grain farmed and gathered and carried by the power of machinery. Man’s earliest trade has dismissed his service.
For nearly all these leading commodities and their lesser fellows, the situation of the British Empire is singularly fortunate. But before attempting to set down here the estimates of the quantities of the great staple commodities produced in the British Empire as compared with their total production in the whole world, it is necessary to remember that the pretentious figures called ‘world statistics’ rest on a very uncertain basis. A hundred years ago, except in broad guesses at population and in a few limited trades, it was not possible to make calculations for all the world. Modem census and tax returns make them possible, and journalism makes them fashionable. The very attempt to compile them shows how the confines, in which our total humanity lives, have shrunken from the unknown and illimitable world of yesterday. Yet such estimates of world production must be taken with a grain of salt, and many of them with a pound of it. For Great Britain the limited size of the country and the concentration of its commerce, render it possible to compile very accurate statistics. Both the United States and Canada have used the decennial census as a basis of enumerated returns, carried forward year by year by vital statistics, customs entries and tax returns. Indeed in North America the ‘progress’ idea keeps us counting and recounting our numbers and our possessions with a watchful eye, anxious not to miss a single bushel of wheat or a single hog from the barnyard. A man with one hen — I speak here of what I know — is glad to have her ‘enumerated’ by the census taker. The other British white Dominions show the same pride in increase. Older countries feel it less. Hence the statistics of the older continents, beginning with clarity and certainty in France, grow dim as they move east till they vanish in a mist in Russia, in a fog in Siberia, and midnight in devastated China. Indeed nothing of much certainty can be said of the economy of China since 1935 and even before that, much is guess-work. Moreover, economic world statistics are never truly annual — never all for the same year. The United States Census is taken in decade years (since 1790). Those of British countries are taken in ‘the year one,’ as 1941. Tabulation goes on for years, and in the less strenuous countries statistics tend to fall asleep, the old ones seeming good enough.
These government returns are supplemented by those of unofficial sources such as Lloyd’s and by the compilations and digests made up by leading banks. The League of Nations has done wonderful work in gathering world statistics through its Economic Intelligence Service. The unhappy League proved a poor general manager but a first-rate clerk. It may be added that of course the only statistics possible now are those for the years just preceding the present Nazi war. The year now opening overwhelms all economic life with darkness. Statistics are ‘blacked out.’
First in the category of wealth take the food, the bread and meat supply with which all economic life begins. Here belong as great commodities of world consumption the grain crops of wheat and rye, barley, oats, and the grain known as maize in England, mealies in South Africa and com in America. These and the beverages fermented and distilled from them are chiefly for the white races, although India and China both consume large quantities of wheat. Typical Asiatic foods are rice, millet and ground nuts. On this grain and root crop of the world and on its pasture-grass is fed also the vast flock of domestic animals that supply our milk and meat. Nature hands over as its bonus the world’s supply of fish, needing nothing but the catching.
The annual grain output of all the world (wheat, rye, barley, oats and com) is computed as between 16 and 17 thousand million bushels. Of this the world’s wheat represents £,600,000,000 bushels, and the wheat of the British Empire 1,016,000,000 bushels. These estimates are based on an average of years just preceding the present war. Rye shows a world total of 1,700,000,000 bushels, but rye is chiefly grown, for bread, in Eastern Europe. Russia raises half the crop. In the United States it reappears (in rye whisky and otherwise), but only to the extent of £2,000,000 bushels. The Empire, using white bread and Scotch whisky, has little need for rye outside of Walkerville, Ontario. It raises only one per cent of the world’s rye. Next to wheat the world’s largest crop is that of maize (com), of this the Empire raises only 200,000,000 bushels out of nearly 4,000 million. But this is a matter of preference without strategic importance. The case is similar with oats, food shared with the horse, and barley shared with the beer drinker. There is no Imperial anxiety about either. Of the typical Asiatic food crops the world output is set at 135,000,000 tons, British India raising 41 per cent of it. Similarly India raises over one-fifth of the millet crop and one-third of the ground nuts that form a staple oriental food.
Turn now from the field to the barnyard, from the bread box to the meat larder, where the Asiatic must largely stand aside; the stock of domesticated animals in all the world has been estimated as including 620,000,000 cattle with 70,000,000 buffaloes, these last in India and the East. Our American buffalo, except a few thousand in sanctuaries or reservations, have vanished. With the cattle are 670,000,000 sheep, of which over 100,000,000 belong in Australia alone. The Empire will never want for wool. The horse, man’s friend in life, counts his declining numbers at 80,000,000; even at that, 22,000,000 of the ‘horse’ are mules and asses. But the horse, except in emergency, serves but little as human food, and all for work. Very different is the hog who never works a day, man’s friend in death,
estimated with his fellows as over 200,000,000. About a third of all the world’s pigs lived (and died) in China before the great devastation. All estimates for that country are based on the year 1935. The United States with 45,000,000 is a good second. The fowls of the world reckoned at 1,540,000,000 lay the 70,000,000,000 eggs needed for food for a year, and supply food as well. They are supplemented by 100,000,000 ducks, 65.000. 000 geese and 18,000,000 turkeys. The United States here leads the world with nearly 400,000,000 fowls.
Next in order can be quoted sugar, made from sugarcane in the tropics to the extent of 17,500,000 tons a year, and from beets in the temperate zones, 10,300,000 tons. The world uses each year some 840,000 tons of tea and 2,500,000 tons of coffee, either the adjunct of 725,000 tons of cocoa. The British Empire, as will be seen in detail later, is long on tea but short on coffee. These are tropical products for which the northern zones have vainly sought a substitute. ‘The Jersey’ tea which patriotism vainly tried to swallow during the American Revolution, is still bitter in the mouth of history, and bran coffee is at best a stomach-ache. The north takes revenge with the potato that shows a world crop of 250,000,000 tons, of which Ireland (Eire) leads the world in consuming potatoes per capita — man against man. The supply of sea fish is mostly from the temperate and northern oceans and runs to over 13.000. 000 tons, Japan and its adjunct Korea supplying over 5,000,000 tons. The 13,000,000 tons of apples, a northern fruit, outweighs all the oranges, bananas, lemons, limes and grape fruit of the south put together. Tobacco, not food, but better, weighs in at 3,000,000 tons, with British India ($40,000 tons) the chief Empire contributor, Canada with 49,000 tons being second.
For beverages the British Empire has little to say for the 4,000,000,000 imperial gallons of wine, almost half of it from France and Italy, that the world drinks in a year; but the 1,000,000,000 imperial gallons of British and Colonial beer can bid it an easy good-bye. Add our uncounted million gallons of Scotch whisky and a touch of Canadian rye and life without wine is tolerable.
In this gigantic bill of fare of all the world certain things appear at once in regard to the situation of the British Empire. The first is the obvious sufficiency and over-sufficiency of our food reserves and potential supply. Moreover, great as they are, they can be immensely increased before nature’s limit would impose a barrier. Both arable and pasture land are only partly in use. We can break up more land at any time when we are prepared to use it. We can increase crops by more intensive cultivation or further labour-saving machinery. There is no physical difficulty. The barriers are not those of nature. They lie in that paradox of wealth and want which compels mankind to starve in the midst of potential plenty. The least touch of abundance is reflected in a fall of price, that puts the brake on production, sends Brazilian coffee up in smoke and floats melons down the Potomac. A doubled crop in the British Empire would be destroyed or burned where it stood with people none the less hungry looking on.
This paradox, so I think, outside the realms of passion and religious quarrels, is the source of all human woes and international conflict.
Now among the Empire food products there are some that possess a sort of strategic economic importance. They enter in a special degree into the competition of world trade, affecting thus international exchanges and currencies and the cycle of good and bad times. The greatest of these is wheat. For the white races bread is the staff of life, made from wheat and to a lesser degree, in Eastern Europe, from rye. The staff on which the Asiatic leans, and which breaks even under his lesser weight, is rice. But the use of wheat is spreading, like the plant itself, all round the world. Wheat grows in both the hemispheres and in all the continents. It ripens to its best and hardest in the long sunlight of the northern day, an initial advantage accruing to Western Canada, where wheat pushes north even to the Arctic Circle. But the plant can grow also on the equator, at a sufficient altitude, as is seen in the mountain regions of Africa. Wheat is raised in Abyssinia, 10,000 feet above the sea. On the other hand, in countries of temperate climate, as in Great Britain, wheat grows at sea level.
Leaving out of count the uncertain elements of Chinese and Russian wheat, the world’s crop, averaged over ten years before 1938, was about 3,800,000,000 bushels. The year 1938 showed a record high figure of 4,328,000,000 bushels. Of this the United States produced, in millions of bushels, 940; India 402; Argentina 285; Germany 214; Rumania 181; and Australia 130 million bushels.
But this schedule of national production is a very different thing from the comparative export. The United States normally consumes more than 80 per cent of its wheat. In the year 1937 — 38 the export was only 5.000,000 bushels. In spite of the enormous volume of the crop the export trade in wheat is a small matter in the industrial life of the nation. But to Canada the export is vital. We could no more eat all our own wheat than the Swiss can consume all their own scenery. In broad figures, over an average of five years, we consume 106.000. 000 bushels a year and export from 90,000,000 to 250,000,000. Argentina similarly exports more than half of its average crop of 230,000,000 bushels. The Australian crop, although it varies greatly with seasonal conditions, carries also an export surplus that may run close to 100,000,000 bushels. These export crops come to the European market not at one annual time but practically all year round. Argentina wheat ripens in our winter and of the Australian export a large part undergoes the delay involved by being brought under sail. The ‘sailing race’ once a year of the few ships left of the type to carry wheat, recalls wistful memories of the days of the tea-races of the clipper ships and the disputed honours of the Ariel and the Taiping in 1866.
Even the export wheat of Canada is distributed practically throughout the year. A first part of it moves immediately after harvest by the St. Lawrence route to
Great Britain. But at least a quarter of the export, all that comes from British Columbia and Alberta now moves via the Pacific and the Panama Canal arriving later, having had, so to speak, free storage for six weeks. Other wheat, a small portion, goes from the Hudson Bay port of Churchill. All through the winter wheat still goes out, from the lake-head elevators by rail to Halifax and St. John.
The point to be brought out is the peculiar nature of the world wheat market and the peculiar difficulty that would accompany any attempt at world regulation. Compare with the export countries those like Britain, which must import or perish, and those like France, which aims at self-sufficiency, eating its bread behind its garden wall.
For centuries Great Britain not only raised its own wheat but sold it abroad. Com laws were meant to work both ways, keeping wheat at home or sending it abroad. The industrial revolution altered all this. The population of England increased from 6,500,000 in 1750 to 18,000,000 a century later. Yet England still raised about 100,000,000 bushels of wheat a year at the time when free trade let in cheap foreign wheat. The opening of the western prairies of North America and the mechanization of agriculture where flat, empty land permitted operations impossible among English lanes and hedges, cut the wheat crop in half at the very time when the demand was doubling. Cobdenism, then called political economy, saw no harm in this. The prairie farmer was to feed England and England to supply his clothes. The logic of it seemed as clear as sunshine. The smoke-screens of two world wars have since hidden all this horizon. It is being rediscovered now in Great Britain that agriculture still has never lost the place it first had in the Garden of Eden.
But contrast the case of France. Here is a country typically raising its own food and eating it. Its annual wheat crop of 335,100,000 bushels is practically all for home use. Hard northern wheat is grudgingly imported for the baker’s sake, or as one-half of a trade bargain, but mainly France eats its own bread. This is a matter of national economy — or rather, in its essence, it is a matter of national history. When the French Revolution broke up the estates of France into thousands of smallholdings it made the mould in which the life of the nation has been cast. The peasant proprietors are the basis of the life thus moulded, their crooked holdings covering nearly all rural France. Their machineless agriculture, their tireless hand labour, could not stand against the competition of machine farming in America.
But the dust storm of depression that devastates a Western farm, leaves the French peasant snug behind his hedges. To keep him there, a high customs duty must enable him to sell his home wheat to his fellow Frenchman at anything up to double the foreign price. Yet this immobile French supply, ready to export a surplus, or forced to import a shortage, is another factor in world wheat situation and strategy.
In this strategic arena the British Empire is happily situated. Its wheat supply is so widespread and so distributed throughout the year, that famine, except locally in India, or by war-emergency in England, is far away. There is no wolf at the door. Moreover, in point of quality the wheat of Northern Canada leads the world. Long sunlight and winter cold, with plants as with men, will have their way. More than this, the wheat output of the Empire can be easily expanded if demand increases. In Canada only some $8,000,000 acres of arable land (90,000 square miles) are under cultivation, out of a total potential area of at least 550,000 square miles of what is officially classed as agricultural land. For wheat itself, science and experiment can carry the plant further north than its present limits. Intensive cultivation could in many places double its return. In the earlier days of the American and Canadian West it paid better to scratch than to dig. The best wheat land in the world gave the smallest crop. In Manitoba in the ‘eighties many settlers raised only 10 bushels to an acre. A Scottish farmer of the Midlothians thought nothing of 40 bushels and supposed the Manitoban an ignoramus. But when the Scot migrated to Manitoba he saw light and scratched. Even now the wheat fields of Canada average, over a period of years, only 17 bushels of wheat per acre. The Australian crop is also capable of great increase, but its augmentation lies rather in the hands of God than of man. With lots of rain Australia can raise 200,000,000 bushels of wheat a year. A dry year will bring this a long way down, as in 1938, to 130,000,000.
