Herbert Joseph Moorhouse

“ Finally, out in the great open spaces, faithful and unassuming and backing his country to the limit, must plod the Man Behind The Plow, working silently and steadily from dawn till dark to enlist and re-enlist the horizoned acres.
Canada has reason for pride in her farmers. No class is more loyal to British traditions. No class is more determined to win this war. Thousands of their sons are at the front. Many a lonely mother has stood on a prairie knoll, straining her eyes for the last glimpse of the buggy and bravely waving "God-speed." ”

“ In all great aggregations of human beings it is quite possible to discover the full gamut of human failings. But loose threads sticking to a piece of cloth are no part of its warp and woof. It is the thinking Grain Grower who must be reckoned with and he is in the majority; the others are being educated.
If there is doubt as to the sincerity of the organized farmers, why did their pioneer business agency spend its substance in educational directions instead of solely along the straight commercial lines of the concerns with which it was in competition? ”

“ To stand with a hand on the hilt of such a dream is to visualize a revolution in farm and community life—such a revolution as would switch much attraction from city to country.
Whatever the future may hold in store, the fact remains that already much valuable legislation has been secured from the Government of Saskatchewan by the farmers. Perhaps in no other province are the Grain Growers in as close touch with the Government, due to the nature of the co-operative enterprises which have been launched with Government support financially. ”

“ The idea of forming a farmers' commission company for handling the farmers' grain sounded like a very satisfactory solution of a very unsatisfactory state of affairs and he threw himself whole-heartedly into the campaign to sell enough stock to obtain a charter.
Up in the newer part of the country, which was his own particular territory, he found the farmers ready enough to listen; for they had suffered up there from the evils at which the new movement was aiming. He found also that the most interested members of his audiences were men who could least afford to lose any money. ”

“ If they should come down on us to sell our wheat inside of forty-eight hours—we're goners, boys! All that those fellows over at the Exchange have got to do is to shove down the market thirty points and our name is mud! The loss to the farmers who've shipped us their grain will kill this movement and every one like it in the West for all time to come. ”

“ And at this very time, over in the hotel at Sintaluta, a grain grower of great ability and discernment was warning an interested group of farmers against the dangers of over-confidence.
"At present we are but pygmies attacking giants," declared E. A. Partridge. "Giants may compete with giants, pygmies with pygmies, but pygmies with giants, never. We are not denizens of a hamlet but citizens of a world and we are facing the interlocking financial, commercial and industrial interests of a thousand million people. ”

“ Men are slaying each other on land, in the air, on the water and below it while the forces of Destruction are gnawing holes in the World's resources with the rapacity of swarming rats. It is costing Great Britain alone over thirty-five million dollars every day—a million and a half every hour!
As for Canada—much figuring is being done by experts and others in attempts to estimate the total debt which the Canadian people will have to carry after the war. But the people themselves are too far immersed in war efforts to pause for futile reckonings. ”

“ Business Man! Before condemning this Western farmer out of hand, put yourself in his place and try for a moment in all fairness to forget your own viewpoint. It may be that you have not even seen the prairies. Have you ever been at sea with not a thing in sight but water, sky, horizon? Imagine the water to be land, and yourself living in a one-room shack or a little low sod hut bewhiskered with growing grass. The nearest railway was fifty miles away and you got so lonesome that the howl of a coyote or the cry of owls in the night nearly drove you crazy. ”

“ But those who had taken up the railway's offer with such avidity and had invested large sums of shareholders' capital in building the elevator accommodation were mostly shrewd grain dealers whose primary object was to buy and sell. These interested corporations were not constructing elevators in order to admire their silhouettes against the beautiful prairie sunsets! In every corner of the earth the Dollar Almighty, or its equivalent, was being stalked by all sorts and conditions of men, some of whom chased it noisily and openly while others hunted with their boots in one hand. ”

“ The crop of 1900 being comparatively light, the ignoring of the car-distribution clauses of the Act did not obtrude as brazenly as it did the year following. But when grain began to pour in to the shipping points in 1901 and the farmers found the railway unheeding their requests for cars their disgust and disappointment were as complete as their anger was swift. It was the rankling disappointment of men whose rights have been officially decreed only to be unofficially annulled; it was the hot anger of a slap in the face—the anger that makes men fight with every ounce of their strength. ”

“ The man who had ridden all day with his thoughts began unconsciously to apply other meanings to the sound, to people the night with dim faces and shapes that came trooping over the edge of the tablelands above—toil-bent figures of old pioneer farmers, care-worn faces of women and bright eager faces of little children who were holding out their hands trustfully to the future. ”

“ Offices and staffs in charge of deputy inspectors are maintained in the different railway yards. They work in shifts night and day; for during the mad seventy-or-so days in which the Western crop stampedes for the lakefront there is no let-up to the in-rolling wheat-bins which come swaying and grinding in over the rails like beads on a string—the endless rosary of harvest thanksgiving. Wheat samples must be obtained from each car and no train can be moved until a placard has been placed at the end of it, reading: "Grain Inspectors have finished this train." ”

“ It is a New Farmer altogether. The Farmers' Movement is no fancy of the moment either, but the product of Time itself. It is a condition which has developed in our rural life as the corolla of increased opportunities for education. The Farmer to-day is a different man to what he was ten years ago—indeed, five years ago.
It has taken fifteen years of bitter struggle for the Western farmers to win to their present position and now that they are far enough along their Trail to Better Things to command respect they are going to say what they think without fear or favor. ”

“ Perhaps the general reader is more familiar with these mad scenes of "The Pit," as the trading floor is called, than with the steadily turning marketing machinery of which they are but a penumbra.
The modern grain exchange is much more than a mere roulette wheel for the speculator. Its real purpose is to provide a centre for the legitimate trader. It is a great information bureau of world happenings where every item of news concerning the wheat in any way is gathered and classified—drouth, rain, frost, rust, locusts, hail, Hessian fly, monsoon or chinch bug. ”

“ There was no denying the evidence that it was full time the farmers bestirred themselves.
W. R. Motherwell and Peter Dayman spoke earnestly in favor of immediate organization along strong, sane lines. The farmer was always referred to as the most independent man on earth, and so he was; but it was individual independence only. He had come lumbering into the country behind his own oxen with his family and all his worldly goods in his own wagon; had built a roof over their heads with his own hands. Alone on the prairie, he had sweated and wrestled with the problem of getting enough to eat. ”

“ The creation of wealth from our wonderfully rich natural resources, in which agriculture stands in the forefront, is the essential thing and should receive most consideration from our Governments—both Dominion and Provincial.
"We must learn to respect each other's differences and, if we do, with the development of that democratic spirit which is now day by day becoming more manifest in Western Canada, we need have no fear of our usefulness as an agency in bringing about the ultimate triumph of the principles of justice between man and man." ”

“ It is here that the curious foregather—good people from every walk of life except the grain business. The tourist who is "just passing through your beautiful city" and has heard that Winnipeg has the largest primary wheat market in the world—the tourist drops in to see the sights. ”

“ Win-the-War unity is the leaven at work in Canada to-day and regeneration is coming.
What does it matter except that our country's leaders shall rise to their opportunities for true statesmanship with a deep sense of their responsibilities to the millions who turn to them for guidance in this time of national stress? What does it matter except that the people shall grant to their leaders their sympathy and co-operation in the cares of crisis? ”

“ They found that so long as any farmer was hampered in shipping to terminal markets himself he would be more or less at the mercy of elevator operators and that the only proper relief from the possibility of undue dockage and price depression was to be found in the utmost freedom of shipping and selling. To this end they considered that the railroads should be compelled by law to furnish farmers with cars for shipping their own grain and that flat warehouses should be allowed so that the farmer could have a bin in which to accumulate a carload of grain, if he so wished. ”

“ As long as money is circulating freely Business In General, being merely an exchange in values, wears a clean shirt and the latest cravat. But let some foreign substance clog the trade channels and at once everything tightens up and squeezes everybody.
Day by day the great mass of the toilers in the cities go to work without attempting to understand the fluctuations of supply and demand. They are but cogs on the rim, dependent for their little revolutions upon the power which drives the machinery. That power being Money Value, any wastage must be replaced by the creation of new wealth. ”

“ Trading in futures finds birth in the very natural disinclination of Mr. Baker to buy his flour by the warehouseful. He does not want to provide storage for a year's supply, even if he could stand such a large bite out of his capital without losing his balance. So while the bakery man is anxious to order his flour in large quantities for future use, he is equally anxious to have it delivered only as he needs it, paying for it only as it reaches him—say, every three months. ”