Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 700
There is a further peculiarity in regard to the world production of wheat. All commodities, especially those raised by the bounty of nature and not by the calculation of the factory, run the danger of ‘over-production.’ In our world of economic paradox, ‘plenty’ spells ruin. We must have just too little of everything or the machine goes out of gear. The extra bushel of wheat, the one hog too many, the superfluous egg uneaten — these break the price of all the rest. The remedy for this is not here under discussion — only the fact. For after ‘less,’ to keep the same effect, we must produce ‘still less,’ and continue the process with less and less again, till production vanishes. Starvation is a poor remedy for hunger.
But while all commodities, both of the factory and the field, are liable to this periodic glut of over-production, wheat is conspicuous in being not only liable to it, but sure of it. Every wheat-producing country must reckon on the fact that once in every so many years the price of wheat will collapse owing to a superabundant world crop. Here no international agreement can prevail. The price of rubber for all the world may be adjusted by a few ‘rubber men’ around a table. For years the diamond men have ‘got together.’ The ‘nickel interests’ and the ‘asbestos interests’ can pool their production, and even ‘iron and steel men’ form a sort of united front. But the wheat men are spread all over the world and reach back to Adam. ‘The men with the hoe’ cannot get together; they must hoe apart. No international combination could successfully regulate the annual planting of wheat. All such allocation would play into the hands of the weakest and the crookedest. And the chief hand of all, in agriculture, holding the trump cards of sun and rain, is the hand of God.
The only national and Empire policy here to pursue is to go on growing wheat, the best in the world with the best methods, and to carry the dead-weight of the lean years by spreading the burden from the individual farmer to the nation at large. In good times the farmer, typically an easy mark, pays it all indirectly back in buying gramophones and motor-cars, and investigating one pea under three thimbles at a Fall fair. This advocacy of open international competition is a ‘survival doctrine,’ a type that belongs in general to the outgoing age. But for the time it represents the best that we can do.
In one obvious way, however, we can at least mitigate it. The storage of Empire wheat in years of plenty, against the years of scarcity, and still more against the emergency of war and the isolation of Britain — this seems, now in war-time, as clear as sunshine, as obvious as day. Yet through twenty years of peace it was advocated in vain — a voice calling from Saskatchewan. There is no difficulty about it. Wheat in a dry cold atmosphere is almost imperishable. It loses about one per cent in its first year by evaporation, after that less and less, till there it lies in its Pyramid beside its companion the mummy of Amenhotep or Rameses, for whose nourishment it was set in his little plate four thousand years ago. The piling up of ten years’ supply in Britain would carry off the wheat-field surplus for years and years. Nor would any pay be needed; an elevator receipt is even now as good as gold.
Turning from food to drink — the comfortable and highly strategic position of the Empire in regard to Scotch whisky and Canadian rye has already been noted. In regard to the beverages which cheer but do not intoxicate, the Empire is long on tea, is short on coffee but stodged with cocoa. Tea is the British drink par excellence. The average Britisher, at home in his own islands, consumes annually about ten pounds of tea against the three-quarters of a pound needed for an American. But the Britisher does all year with three-quarters of a pound of coffee and an American needs eleven.
The English took naturally to tea. We do not wonder at it when we think of the poor slops in the way of small beer and such which they drank at breakfast, or instead of breakfast, in Elizabethan days. Tea first appeared after James I. People paid 30 dollars (£10) a pound for it. Even at the Restoration it still sold at 15 to 30 shillings a pound. But it made its way on its merits. The first recorded tea-advertisement reads— ‘That excellent and by all physicians approved China drink called by the Chineans Tcha, by other nations Tay alias Tee, is sold at the Sultanesses Head, a Coffee House in Sweetings Rents, by the Royal Exchange.’ Pepys in his Diary for 1660 (September 21st) writes, T did send for a cup of tea, a China drink of which I had never drunk before.’ The British conquest of India and the cession of Ceylon (1813) proved the bases of the tea supply — cause and effect intermingled. The Empire production before the present war represented some 300,000 tons or over one-third of the world’s total, 850,000 tons.
Coffee, and with it the coffee interest, lies mainly outside the Empire. Coffee has no ‘strategic’ meaning to tea drinkers. The plant came from Abyssinia to Arabia, and spread through the tropical world. Coffee came to England with the ‘coffee houses’ of the Restoration; it brought with it sociability, discussion, and such byproducts as Lloyd’s, the insurance company, which began as a coffee house, and the London Clearing House, originally a sociable meeting of bank messengers. But tea, the home brew, beat it out in British favour. Of the world’s annual 2,500,000 tons of coffee, the greater part comes from South America (Brazil alone 1,500,000 tons). British India produces about 17,000 tons, and British Africa about twice as much. This with a small supply from the West Indies (Jamaica) brings the Empire product of coffee up to some five per cent of the world’s total. On the other hand, for cocoa the British Empire (Nigeria and the Gold Coast) has about one-half of the world’s supply.
The sugar problem once vexed the world. It gave to the West Indian plantations their dominant importance in the eyes of the rival European nations of the old Colonial days. But the world of sugar, rum and slaves has passed away, with oblivion to veil its horrors. Napoleon’s initiation of beet sugar shifted world values. At present the annual cane crop is 17,000,000 tons, of which 2,500,000 is from British India. But the beet sugar crop is over 10,000,000 tons and can be indefinitely increased in any temperate country with arable soil.
Another vanishing king is King Cotton, once so called as holding the balanced destinies of Great Britain and America. But cotton is largely grown not only in the United States, but in Egypt, British India, Brazil and China. The United States grows one-half of the world’s cotton, the Empire, chiefly in India, about one-eighth. The years 1936-39 were marked by successive record crops with a huge carry-over each year. In the United States, by 1938, production had to be restricted. More ominous is the fact that cotton, like silk, is now being replaced by synthetic (factory-made) fibre. Nature is too slow. Cotton is going the way of the silkworm, the whale and the rubber tree. Some day the waving fields and the lowing kine will be all replaced by chemical factories. Meantime there is room in India and East Africa for all the cotton that we care to plant.
From food we turn to fuel. And here the Empire resources ii oal are so stupendous as to need little comment beyond a murmur of satisfaction. The Victorian world, before hydro-electric power and petroleum, was afraid coal might ‘run out.’ Its use was so new; so rapidly developed; so essential to British industry that such a prospect meant disaster. Coal is indeed modern in its use. Mediterranean civilization was too warm to need it. Britain lived on its forests. In America the hard anthracitic coal, the best in the world, lay unused; ‘stone coal’ the settlers called it — too hard to burn. Even in Queen Anne’s time (1700) only two and a half million tons was mined in England. This changed with the new industry that smelted iron ore with coal. There were warnings of apprehension from economists. There always are; apprehension is their business. In 1865 Stanley Jevons of Manchester in his Coal Question discussed possible exhaustion. New coal beds and new sources of power put the question to sleep. Yet consumption went on at such a pace in the present century that the coal question woke from its sleep just after the Great War. At that time the world’s annual production of coal for all purposes averaged about 1,200,000,000 tons. The United States mined each year some 500,000,000 and the United Kingdom over 200,000,000 tons. A Royal Commission on Coal Supplies in 1926, ‘looked forward to a time not far distant ‘when there would be a period of stationary output’ and then ‘a gradual decline.’ But this apprehended ‘exhaustion’ of coal has gone the way of all such fears; like the exhaustion-limit of wheat in North-West Canada as reported to the government in the middle ‘nineties; like the exhaustion of oil, already overdue in 1940, and of rubber and of much else. Such exhaustion is a sort of phantom that retreats as we approach it. In the case of coal, the supply will probably long outlive our use of it. According to a report of the Imperial Institute, which represents the last word on minerals, the deposits in Canada alone, ‘next to those of the United States and China, are the largest in the world and amounted to nearly 500,000,000 tons.’ The British Isles, it is estimated, contain 160,000,000,000 tons. Even apart from the British and Canadian coal, the Empire has large deposits in all the Australian States, except through the middle of the Continent. The brown coal beds of Victoria alone are estimated to contain 10,000,000,000 tons. The only weak spot in the coal structure of the Empire is that in British North America the coal lies all to the East and to the West, with the centre (as yet) ill supplied and heavily importing hard coal from the United States.
But in any case old King Coal no longer sits on his Victorian throne. Science will soon teach us to burn coal on the spot, underground or at the pit-head, and transmit it as electric power; to squeeze it out into petroleum; or to do without it altogether. Wind and tide and rushing water contain illimitable power. We need not weep for coal. It connects with a period of human history, heavy and grimy with dust, and weary with infinite lifting. Man in thus mastering nature was still nature’s underground slave. Beside it are the newer sources of power, rapid as explosion, clean and exhilarating as a water-fall. The motor-car hums gently with regulated explosions. One night watchman tends vast, noiseless dynamos. The machine does it alone. Man is discharged. His problem now is not that of work, but how not to work and yet divide fairly the superabundant production of a mechanized world. The coal question is vanishing with its coal dust.
The winds as yet we cannot harness; the tide still challenges us, unused; the utilization of the greatest force of the universe, the disintegrating atom, is still a dream. Yet, if we could disintegrate the atom fast enough the energy of one teaspoon full of disintegrating mud, so says a modern scientist, would carry a steamship across the Atlantic.
But the water power of lakes and rivers falling to the sea and lifted back as clouds — this is already ours. And here the British Empire, as outside of the British Isles, comes fully into its own. Estimates of the potential water power of all the globe are of necessity only more or less scientific guesses. There are vast rivers such as the Amazon and its branches, the Congo river system, the rivers of the far north in Canada, yet untouched and scarcely known. The energy now in use in 1940 amounts to about 65,000,000 horse-power. Of this 17,700,000 is in the United States and 8,199,000 in Canada. The only other part of the Empire with a notable development of hydro-electric power, relative to size and population, is New Zealand, with an installation of over 200,000 horsepower, complete or nearing completion. The estimates of available horse-power not yet utilized run to about ten times the present development for the world at large. Even in Canada, which has been foremost in the field, the eight million developed horse-power is only about one-fifth of the total. The possibility of better methods of transmission, and a still larger mechanism of generation, carry far beyond present vision, just as potential power — water, wind, current and radiation — outdistances all possible estimates of future machine use. In this mechanical and physical world, man, its master, limps miserably in the rear, trying to adjust himself to his heritage and his creation.
The world’s oldest mechanical industry is that of iron. Mythology has it that Tubal Cain, or Hephaestus, or somebody straight out of Hades and accustomed to fire, first taught man to melt and fashion iron. There are Egyptian iron blades 5,000 years old. The industry, from simple beginnings with wood fires and leather bellows and catalan forges, has grown and multiplied to the vast lurid majesty that lights at night the valleys of the Alleghany and the Ohio. All the world has iron ore, of a sort, and all the world can make steel, of a kind. Iron ore is one of the few world supplies that can truly be called inexhaustible. There are vast deposits all over the globe including many, like those of inland Brazil, as yet untouched and beyond all present reach. Geologists tell us that the workable ore beds of the globe comprise 30,000,000,000 long tons. With a present annual utilization averaging before the present war, less than 200,000,000 tons, we are all right for nearly two centuries. After that we can look around.
For the first hundred years of the modern iron and steel industry Great Britain led the world. This was a leading feature of the British industrial supremacy, a product of circumstance, good fortune, and bold initiative, impossible in the nature of things to maintain at its highest lead. In Queen Anne’s reign England produced only a few thousand tons of pig-iron in each year. The new process of using coal to melt the ore created the modern industry. In 1740 there were produced in Great Britain 18,000 tons of pig-iron. In 1820 the whole world output was only a million tons; in 1850 about four and three-quarter million; of this Great Britain produced 2,250,000 — tons and the United States 630,000. For a generation Britain was steelmaker to the world at large. The American industry, more favoured by nature, overhauled the British in great strides. By 1890 the United States produced 9,000,000 tons of pig-iron and Great Britain less than 8,000,000. France and Germany followed rapidly. In the industrial world between wars (1918 — 1939) the British Empire, while amply able to supply all its own demands and with abundant national resources in reserve, counted for but a minor part of the world’s iron and steel production. Three countries — the United States and France with either Sweden or the Soviet Union as a third, contributed each year two-thirds of the total of the world’s iron ore. The United Kingdom in a typical year, as apart from the great slump of 1932, produced only about 6 or 7 per cent, and the whole British Empire less than 20 per cent of the world’s ore. In the production of steel the banner year of 1929 showed a world total of about 120,000,000 tons, of which the Empire produced only one-ninth.
But these figures of gross production must be interpreted in the side light of the relative self-sufficiency of the industry. Iron ores are of various compositions, and must, especially in our newer world of machinery of infinite complexity, be mixed with other ores to form alloys for special purposes. Most important of these is manganese, indispensable to the making of steel. This twin sister of iron, scarcely known by name to the everyday world of ordinary people, undistinguished from iron ore till the end of the eighteenth century, has now become vital to our means of life and to our mechanism of death. Unknown though it was, it is widely distributed over the globe and out beyond it, recognizable in the atmosphere of the sun, in sea-water and in mineral drinks. Engineers tell us, technically, that manganese is ‘the only agent which can be economically employed as a deoxidizer and desulphurizer in blast furnace operations.’ In other words, we can’t make proper steel without it. The only great Power which has a self-sufficient supply of manganese, for its full industry, is Russia. But the Empire contains large resources in India, the Gold Coast and South-West Africa. In a pre-war year of a world production of over 6,000,000 tons, India had about 1,000,000, South-West Africa over 600,000, and the Gold Coast over 600,000. The weak side in the Empire situation in regard to iron and steel is the long water-haul of material needed to integrate the industry at its centres. This applies, however to the strategy of war rather than to the commerce of peace. For our proper occasions a thousand miles of water means less than fifty miles of land.
It is characteristic of the world of today to put an extraordinary premium on super-excellence. The last little increment of higher talent, or greater utility, obtains a disproportionate reward. A film actor, just a little better than the next, gets a hundred times as much. A metal compound with just a touch of extra hardness, of lightness, outranks its fellows. Just as one touch of nature makes a whole world kin, a touch of vanadium makes cutting steel, one filament of tungsten burning without extinction gives light to the indoor world. Hence the world nowadays lives, and dies, by its conjunction with a lot of queer metals of which the ancient world knew nothing or knew only as curiosities. Vanadium as a chemical element was discovered in 1801. But its adaptability to harden steel was only found in 1896. Even then it was too rare to use, till the deposits discovered in Peru (1905) brought it to the world’s industry. Peru is still the chief source of supply but for most of these auxiliary metals of the steel industry the British Empire is singularly well-placed. Conspicuous is the case of nickel of which Canada produces, in the Sudbury district of Northern Ontario, about 90 per cent of the world’s supply.
