Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 678
On the prairie it is not so. The winter blizzard could tear and rip and up-root everything. Nothing could live but little birch and cotton-wood, and cypress trees, shuddering together in the coulees and the deeper valleys. Start them and shelter them, and the trees could grow. For witness, see all the beauty in the little woodland that surrounds the parliament house at Regina. Or see them in Missouri, where, within the white man’s memory, rolling empty prairie has turned to waving woods. But elsewhere on the prairies trees never started. They were still-born children. Yet if we wish it so, all Saskatchewan that will grow wheat could turn to forest.
Thus did nature strike its balance of life and death on the prairies and leave them thus for ages and ages, changing with every season, but unchanging with the centuries. “Over the meadows that blossom and wither, rings but the note of the sea birds’ song, only the sun and the rain come hither, all the year long,” — so sang the poet Swinburne of his Forsaken Garden. But he might have sung it of the prairies of Saskatchewan; for the birds, like all life, first came, blowing in from the sea, and with the birds the animals, evoluted to a great bulk, slow and graminivorous. Last of all came man, rare and precarious and wandering.
In great flat spaces nothing can live standing still. Life must be picked up on the march. Even the mind cannot live, and keep its balance, in the empty openness of limitless horizon. The story is as old as the steppes of Asia and the solitude of the Sahara, and was reproduced again when the mind of the settler’s wife kept breaking down in the fixed, empty stillness of an isolated homestead. Nothing but the blessing of the motor car, the ability to drive everywhere and nowhere, has supplied the same necessity that the Arab finds in his camel and a sailor in the motion of his ship. Motor cars, and more trees, to block here and there the empty horizons and to stop its suggestion of infinity, — that’s all that’s needed.
But human kind in the West before the white man came to America must have been infinitely rare, as far as the vast open prairie was concerned. Men couldn’t live there. Not till the Spaniards brought the horse to America, and the wild horses multiplied, could mankind invade, in any real fashion, the open plains; and even then rather in annual raids and inroads than in fixed settlement. This was the ‘buffalo and hunters’ stage; the lost paradise of the half breed living under the rule of the great Company. Then came the settler to the plains, with his acquired apparatus of civilization and his mechanism of agriculture. The Company rule ended, the homestead farmers invaded the West. The Lord said ‘let there be wheat’ and Saskatchewan was born.
All that has gone above is not poetry. It is intended as a view of the economic basis of Saskatchewan.
The Great Western Plain, thus formed and fashioned, includes in Saskatchewan the lower half of the province from the international boundary to the North Saskatchewan River. Beyond it is the broken country of lake and timber reaching to the barren lands, as yet scarcely explored, perhaps a repository of great mineral wealth. The Great Plain thus fully prepared by the hand of the Lord and opened up by the hand of man, offered itself to the raising of grain by machinery as did few places in the world. In the more highly civilized countries of Europe, diversified by hills and valleys and broken by woods and winding roads, nature forbade machine cultivation. Grapes can climb mountains, but not wheat. In Switzerland, — we have it on the high authority of Mark Twain, — a farmer is apt to fall off his farm. In the flat plains of Europe, — Hungary and the Ukraine, — mankind, as far as invention went, had been asleep for centuries. In the fertile flats of China they had invented nothing since the wheelbarrow. Even in older Canada, machinery in agriculture is still impeded by hills, by the remains of bush and swamp, snake fences and stone piles, and the little seven-acre divisions they call fields.
With the gamut of inventions that ran from the reaper, the gangplow, the seeder, the thresher, the binder, the tractor and ended with the crowning glory of the “combine”, — the West came into its own.
The summer prairies of Saskatchewan took on the aspect since familiar in pictures to all the world, vast miles of ripening grain waving in the sunshine, with flickering shadows of fleecy clouds blowing over it. There are no longer the “unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful” that Cullen Bryant saw. They are better than that. The prairie has yielded itself to man. These boundless fields murmur with life as the ripe grain sways and falls in its luxuriant death.
Thus opened up possibilities of cheap production, — cheap and easy, its cost a mere nothing, in time, a punctuated idleness. It seemed too easy. Calculations on twentieth century agriculture (comparing it with the nineteenth) made in 1925 by the United States National Industrial Conference showed that a Western farmer with a tractor ploughed eight times as much land in a day as a farmer with a team; that one man could take care of 300 acres of wheat instead of the 50 acres of oats, hay, bush, hens and mortgage that kept him hustling in Ontario; that he could raise a bushel of wheat with 10 minutes work! (in place of the three hours of his grandfather) and, with only one man to help for one fortnight, he could harvest and thrash all the grain of 500 acres! And after that, — nothing to do. What about a trip to California?
Not even the milkmaid “who poised a full pail on her head” and counted the chickens she was going to buy, indulged in rosier dreams than the Western farmer balancing on his head four quarter sections of land, a tractor, a combine, one hired man and the interest on a mortgage.
Think of it, — 500 acres of wheat, — no, make it 1,000! Lots of them had that, and 30 bushels of wheat to the acre (call it more if you like: nature can do it: it’s a dream price anyway): farmer’s cost of production (Canadian government figures these, a Bulletin on Wheat Production in Saskatchewan, — they must be right), even including 15 cents of interest, only 78 cents a bushel and the home price not the Liverpool price, the home price, — anything from a dollar up and sometimes over two! Oh, boy! can you beat it; just figure that out! and then some, — it may be away bigger than that.
No more for us the winter desolation of the prairie, contrasting with its summer sunshine: — the empty windswept landscape, with all life still and dead at 40 below, — with a blizzard sweeping the frozen snow in eddying circles, — even the sunlight hard and cruel with blindness in its empty stare. Away from all that! The sunny South, the laughing Pacific with its mermaids for us!
For some of them in those far off days the dream actually came true: they wrote their names on the hotel registers of California, like the foremost line of a charge that is beaten back.
But not many. For most of them this vision of a promised land vanished as it did for all of us. They just had a look over the fence and then somehow the promised land grew dim, grew distant and shifted as far away as ever. Man’s servant machinery once so skilful and subservient had gone silly.
What went wrong? The same thing as all over the world in all machine industries among people depending on buying and selling. The machine went out of gear. We are still tinkering to adjust it. It looks just now as if by pure accident it is going to start up again with a roar! If so, Heaven knows we didn’t do it!
The case of the farmers was this. In the golden days all was well with the Western farmer except the selling of the wheat. He wasn’t sure that he got all that was coming to him: no matter what he got he might have got more. It’s an awful thought. Anybody who has sold mining stock at a profit knows it.
The wheat price is made (makes itself) in the great European markets centering chiefly at Liverpool, and is reflected from thence to the markets of supply. From 1900-1915 the Canadian price showed an average of 69 cents a bushel. In the War years all the wheat was bought at a fixed government price, which was good and plenty (1917: $2.81 — 1918: $2.92). Even after the War and when the War Board ceased to function, the price still held (1919-1923 average $1.83). But it was falling from the peak of $3.43 in 1919 to 98 cents in 1923.
Now this Canadian farmer’s price is only a part of the Liverpool price which has to cover also a large series of charges for transport, storage and subsidiary services. It is estimated that on each bushel there is 1-¾ cents to pay for local elevator charges, 1 cent for a Winnipeg Broker, 15 cents rail to Fort William, 12-½ cents Fort William elevator, 8-¼ cents lake freight, 2 cents for Montreal handling, 6-½ cents (variable) for ocean freight, in all, with varying details, about 45 cents.
This means that there are a number of people, — brokers, buyers, elevator men, railways, ships, banks, — trying to get as much of the “farmer’s money”, — that’s the way they see it, — as they can. Any increase in their share makes his less. Any distribution of these costs shunts back on the farmer as a shock runs through a string of empty grain cars.
In the beginning the farmer was helpless. He owned no elevator, no railway. But, on the plains in early years, the wonder and gladness was to be able to sell at all. Red River farmers in the Fort Garry days could raise wheat but they had to eat it.
To get a better share farmers built elevators; so did the railways: brokers organized as the (Winnipeg) Grain Exchange: banks lent money on stored wheat. The Dominion government legislated on inspection, grading, marketing. A huge network, complicated in its outline and ramifying in its relations, spread out from the Head of the Lakes to the confines of the grain country. You can view it either as a thing of beauty or of horror, a work of God or of the devil, according to the type of mind you have. But at least it was intricate. If it ever burst there was bound to be an awful crash.
The final step was the formation of the pools, one in each Prairie Province with a joint connection through a central sales agency, the Canadian Cooperative Wheat Producers Limited, Winnipeg. Thus the word “Pool”, while this situation lasted was often used as a collective name for the three of them. The essence of a pool is this: — in the old days the farmer sold his grain as soon as he had threshed it and was presently sorry he had sold it. Under a “pool” the farmer can hold his grain till later, and perhaps presently be sorry that he didn’t sell it. But there is at least this difference: the old farmer had to sell: the pool farmer doesn’t. It’s like “predestination” and “free will”.
Under the pool system, as it developed, each member was pledged to sell his wheat by and through his provincial pool: the central agency acted for them all and became itself a member of the Winnipeg Grain Exchange. The farmer received an initial payment of so many cents per bushel plus interim payments (for example in the first year of the pool operation 1924-25 he got one dollar and sixty-six cents in all). The pools were agents only: they distributed no profits on the nominal shares but made a small charge to cover expenses (half a cent a bushel), two cents for a fund for building Pool Elevators, and one per cent. reserve.
In the years of sunshine the system worked admirably. So do most systems. But it lead to serious misunderstandings. People began to think that the Western pool could “control” the price, — make it go higher. This it couldn’t do. The pool could use its joint resources and its power to borrow from the banks to hold wheat and not throw it on the market at a bad time. But that is all. If the market is bad enough the longer you hold the more you lose. It is as if you clutched a share of stock tight in your hand, tighter and tighter, and presently opened your hand to find it gone to dust. No conjurer is needed for that. So it was with the farmer and his pool.
The world wheat stock is too large, its constituents too varied, its potential increase too great, to allow for any such cornering. Canada is a wheat country but there are others. Our 250,000 farmers in the West are only a part of the millions of farmers in the world. Before this century began, Canada as a wheat-producing country was just nowhere. The world’s crop around the year 1900 was some 2,640,000,000 bushels: of this Russia grew 424,000,000 bushels, the United States 600,000,000; a group of countries, France, Hungary, etc., about 300,000,000 each. Great Britain raised 52 million bushels and Canada only 50 millions. The Canadian export of wheat was negligible. The “Granary of the Empire”, — the phrase of 1897, — was an expression of hope not of fact.
Since the War Canada has raised huge crops of wheat. The largest year’s crop was seen in the year 1928 with over 560 million bushels. Yet the Canadian crop only represents about ten per cent, of the largest world crop (that of 1932), while the Canadian wheat crop of the drought year of 1935 was less than 8 per cent. of an average world crop.
Taking the average annual production of wheat for the years 1929-30-31-32-33, — the world’s crop was 3,707,000,000 bushels. There were 37 countries (21 of them in Europe itself) which averaged more than 5,000,000 a year. The Canadian average, 354,000,000, was below that of Russia 839,000,000, of the United States 783,000,000; only just above that of India 350,000,000 and of France 305,000,000, and closely followed by Italy 258,000,000, and the Argentine 228,000,000.
It is true that if one takes account of wheat export in place of the amount of wheat grown, the situation appears at first sight vastly different. Canada has become since the War the leading wheat-exporting country of the world. During the time between the end of the War and the great collapse, Canadian wheat sold abroad represented 35 to 40 per cent. of all exported wheat: the same is still true in the dislocated and spasmodic world trade of today. The Canadian export of 1935-36 was 47-½ per cent. of the world total export.
But this does not, as it well might with other commodities, imply a power to squeeze or force the market. All the other world-wheat is there as a potential export if the price is forced up. There was no real economic basis for the hope of many Western farmers that the establishment of a “100 per cent. compulsory pool” would of necessity allow a lift of the export price.
With the turn of the times came a collapse of wheat prices at the very period when successive years of drought lessened the volume of the Canadian crop. Winnipeg wheat (No. 1 Hard), the best in the world, showed disastrous prices, — 64 cents for 1929-31, 59 cents for 1931-32 and 54 cents for 1933-34.
Under such repeated shocks the Western pools practically went under: with fallen membership and diminished sales, the collective selling of the central agency came to an end: the pools, existing still, own elevators and handle and forward grain but the system, as it was designed, is over. With the fall of wheat there spread over the West the tidal wave of mortgage and farm debt with which the provinces now struggle as best they can by means of statutes of repudiation in Alberta, of debt reduction in Saskatchewan and with the aid of the Dominion Farmers’ Creditors Adjustment Act.
The establishment by the Dominion government of a Wheat Board (under an act of 1935) merely offers facilities for sale if the price drops enough with no organization of cooperative marketing. The experiment has finished its opening stage and the time is ripe for reconsidering wheat policy in Canada, — the whole question of production, of possible restriction, of open trading, or collective action.
Here it must be understood that our wheat situation is only a part of a world phenomenon, — the over-production, the economics of abundance, that has resulted from the progress of machinery and organization. There is no need to discuss the details of it here. Everyone has heard of the car loads of melons floating down the Potomac, the stocks of burning coffee in Brazil, and of the unborn hogs and unplanted corn of the American Middle West.
The world at large will somehow, sometime, find a means to limit production to what people can buy, or conversely to enable people to buy all that other people can produce. But the wheat of the export market at present utterly defies such restriction. It is possible to limit production where nature’s supply is small and gathered in one place. The production of diamonds has been restricted for a generation. Production can be limited even for large scale commodities if the supply can be got at and held and if common labour alone cannot increase it: such is the case of rubber. Or if the production demands great capital and corporate organization, even the hugest output can be controlled by company agreement: coal, iron, and steel, vast as they are, can be controlled. Or inside a closed area (as with the hogs in Mr. Roosevelt’s America) production can be restricted by law. If Mr. Roosevelt won’t let hogs in, and won’t let the extra hog get born, then nature is brought to a full stop. But wheat! that will grow, more or less well, all through the north and the south temperate zone, that can be grown in a dirt heap with a stick, that has behind it in Western Canada alone 250,000 independent producers, and elsewhere millions and millions. Restriction is just a dream.
If we don’t grow wheat others will. It is inevitable, — it is a provable economic proposition, that the world’s wheat production is bound to run to over-production and temporary collapse. Sound national policy must take that for granted and contrive to bridge the gaps and not let the temporary collapse of the price mean permanent ruin to the farmers.
What we ought to do in Canada is to take over from the individual farmer the worst of the risk of raising wheat. I say wheat because it is the major crop, governing all others. I do not know to what extent, if at all, the argument applies to other grains. If we guarantee too much we insure our own damnation by subsidizing the farmer to ruin us. If we guarantee too little, the farmer is ruined anyway. If a man is ruined he doesn’t care if he owes $100 and can’t pay it, or $1,000 and can’t pay it. We must guarantee a rock bottom price for wheat that is enough, just enough to keep the farmer on the farm, without a mortgage, — his motor car rattling in every joint, his trip to California up the flue, perhaps his radio cold and silent, — but still on the farm. As to the world’s crop, let it look to itself: for the present there is no other way.
Many people, especially those brought up on farms in Eastern Canada, are apt to wonder why the West cannot find salvation by transforming its agriculture from grain farming to mixed farming. The semi-independent homestead of the East, like the small holdings of the French cultivators, offer a bulwark against disaster: less productive in the money sense, they are more human in their interest, safer against changes of price and circumstance, and more solid and enduring as the basis of civil society.
