Corn exchange

“ The mistake, as it appears to me, always made by those who would limit the importation of foreign corn, is, that they suppose a limitation to consumption. They calculate as if, in common years, the quantity of corn grown in England is exactly what is required for the sustenance of the people, and that every quarter of foreign corn introduced would interfere with the sale of a quarter of that home-grown, and therefore that it is only in such years as the present, when the harvests are bad, that foreign corn should be admitted. ”

“ European countries have always entertained a prejudice against corn as a food, but this prejudice seems to have weakened in recent years. The exportation of corn, including corn meal, increased from an average of 14,200,000 bushels in the period 1867-72 to an average of 127,400,000 bushels in the period 1894-99. The exports of the earlier period constituted 1.54 per cent. ”

“ Seven hundred and seventy of these were sufficiently distinct to be recognized when the Department of Agriculture published its account of varieties. The importance of the corn crop to this country and to others is almost incalculable. In 1902, the United States produced more than two and a half billion bushels and the export price was $.60 per bushel. When the corn crop fails every man, rich or poor, in America, suffers from it, and every business is affected by it. ”

“ Corn in the ear has been used during many winters for fuel in portions of the West, not because there was no wood to be had, but because there was no convenient place at which to market the corn, even at the bare expense of shelling and hauling to market, to say nothing of the previous cost of{279} planting, cultivation, and harvesting. ”

“ They will command a high price as an esculent, and perhaps a higher, if they are preserved for the purposes of seed. Exportation also should be carried on cautiously; but we repeat, that the general tenor of our information is so far satisfactory, that it exhibits nothing more than a partial affection of the crop in the southern districts, and the majority of those are compensated by a good provision of corn. ”

“ We know that it answers to almost all small well peopled states, to import their corn; and there is every reason to suppose, that even a large landed nation, abounding in a manufacturing population, and having cultivated all its good soil, might find it cheaper to purchase a considerable part of its corn in other countries, where the supply, compared with the demand, was more abundant. ”

“ Under these laws, foreign corn is bought at low prices in years of plenty, bonded in our warehouses, and thrown into our markets at a moment when a bad harvest occasions a rise in the price of grain, necessary to the remuneration of our farmers, thus, in fact, in a very great degree, placing them at the mercy of the speculators, who, by various means, influence the prices to suit their own purposes; to such a system the admission of foreign corn, on a fixed duty, would be far preferable. ”

“ There was a falling off in American wheat exports of 13,500,000 bushels, and the Secretary is inclined to believe that wheat may not in the future be the staple export cereal product of our country, but that corn will continue to advance in importance as an export on account of the new uses to which it is constantly being appropriated. ”

“ The people in the country endeavoured to account for this scarcity from the badness of the harvest the preceding year; but the fact, I believe, was, that corn for exportation having been in great demand, and a most enormous price offered for it, the people had been tempted to dispose of a great deal more than they could well spare. Each person was eager to sell his own corn to such advantage, and depended upon getting supplied by his neighbour, so that they were all reduced to want. ”

“ If the exportation of corn were totally prohibited, the quantity, possible to be consumed among us, would be quickly known, and, being known, would rarely be exceeded; for why should corn be gathered which cannot be sold? We should, therefore, have little superfluity in the most favourable seasons; for the farmer, like the rest of mankind, acts in hope of success, and the harvest seldom outgoes the expectation of the spring. ”

“ They are at the basis of the great stock-raising interests of the country. Since the bulk of both crops are consumed on the farm and not placed upon the market, and hence are not ‘money crops,’ their importance is usually lost sight of in discussions of American agriculture. Corn stands without a rival either in respect to area or value. It is indigenous to America, and its production is still largely confined to this continent, the United States producing about three-fourths of the world's supply. It is the distinctive American crop. It has a larger acreage than all other cereals combined. ”

“ CORN LAWS. Those who argue that England may safely depend upon a supply of foreign corn, if it grow none or an insufficient quantity of its own, forget that they are subjugating the necessaries of life itself to the mere luxuries or comforts of society. Is it not certain that the price of corn abroad will be raised upon us as soon as it is once known that we must buy?—and when that fact is known, in what sort of a situation shall we be? ”

“ It requires the examination only of a single principle, a principle very well understood, and indeed thus far not very difficult to understand, to see that the nature of the farmer's business is altogether different, and is in this respect most remarkably distinguished from all other trades.
It is very extraordinary that the persons who have pretended to dictate laws on this subject have never reflected that corn is a peculiar commodity; that it has relations different from those of any other commodity which man possesses ”

“ Boyce called attention to the fact that corn is a universal crop in the United States. Demand from Europe has made wheat prices high, but Europe has not yet learned to eat our corn.
“Your advice should be heeded by everybody, in the cities and in the smaller places and country,” says one letter, from an Iowa town. “Corn has been selling at from seventy-two to seventy-seven cents a bushel. Bulk cornmeal of good quality can be bought for three to five cents a pound. As you say, there is no better food in the wintertime. People have been eating too much wheat.” ”

“ Though wheat is characterised as the most nutritious food for man in all quarters of the world, yet the Indian corn crop of the United States is not second in value to any product of the earth; cultivated in the middle and Eastern States, nay, even in the rich cotton-growing districts, Indian corn is fast rising in importance, and will soon equal in value that important commercial staple. ”

“ The millers and dealers, who of course made their profits in these times, did frequently grind up the whole corn without separating the grain from the husks, and the shell of a grain of Indian corn does not, when ground, become soft flour. ”

“ During the five years from 1804 to 1808, both inclusive, the bullion price of corn was about seventy-five shillings per quarter; yet, at this price, it answered to us better to import some portion of our supplies than to bring our land into such a state of cultivation as to grow our own consumption. ”

“ The United States produces about three fourths of the world's corn and about two thirds of its cotton.
Wheat, the value of which in 1909 at our farms was $725,000,000, is widely grown over the whole world, and the crop in this country is only one fifth of the total production. Russia, which follows 1 us closely, has about double the crop of France, which is nearly equaled by that of British India. It is a curious fact that we export more wheat than corn, and that the exports of corn have been decreasing. ”

“ Owing to this locality lying in the great cotton belt, and to the large quantities of cotton produced, the usual price per bushel of Indian corn is $1; oats, 90c, and oats will yield from forty to sixty bushels per acre, with the rude implements and tillage here in vogue—a one-horse cast-iron plow, and a small tree top for a harrow. After oats and wheat are harvested the same land is frequently planted in corn, or sown with millet, or Hungarian grass, thus producing two crops a year. Land here is cheap, water is soft and pure, and timber abundant. ”

“ Although the climate is suitable to the production of Indian corn, yet it is not cultivated to any extent. The reason is, stock is raised with less trouble, and cotton is thought to be a more profitable crop. There is hardly enough corn raised for the consumption of the inhabitants; it, therefore, bears a high price. At St. Felipe, it was a dollar a bushel; and at Velasco on the mouth of the Brazos river, I saw a bushel of shelled corn sold for two dollars! ”

“ The bounty upon the exportation of corn is liable to this further objection, that it can in no respect promote the raising of that particular commodity of which it was meant to encourage the production. ”

“ No one however will hesitate to allow all that is necessary for our argument, that the tendency of the species to multiply is much greater than the rapidity with which there is any chance that the fruits of the earth will be multiplied in Britain, or any other country in Europe, What is the consequence of this great law of society, but that the production of corn creates the market for corn? ”

“ If the potato crop fail at home, the poor are directly thrown upon the corn-market, and the price of corn must necessarily rise in proportion to the increased demand. Where the potato crop has failed abroad, the supply of foreign corn must necessarily be directed to that quarter, and therefore less corn will be imported into the British market. ”

“ We have fortunately a series of facts which place this matter beyond all doubt, and prove most decisively that it is not to the bounty on the exportation of corn that we are to ascribe the comparatively slow progress of agricultural industry. ”

“ There is no doubt, I believe, that it is a correct expectation that vast or very large quantities of corn will proceed from that province, and therefore we have to look forward to a state of things in which, for a considerable294 time to come, large quantities of wheat will be forthcoming from America, probably larger quantities, and perhaps frequently at lower prices than those at which the corn-producing and corn-exporting districts of Europe have commonly been able to supply us. Now that I believe to be, gentlemen, upon the whole, not an unfair representation of the state of things. ”

“ In particular the serious position of the wheat market and the fairly certain prospect of an acute rise in the price of wheat in the course of the winter or next spring prompt the Press to constant discussion, the burden of which is the question whether the Government of the United States should or should not prohibit the exportation of corn. ”

“ We may also reasonably anticipate some change in the Corn Law, which, while it has been as effective as that which preceded it in repressing our trade with corn growing countries, has been ineffective in protecting the farmer, by throwing in all the foreign supply at the only time of the year when he has corn to sell. ”

“ But if they merely approximate towards the truth, a rise in the price of corn must be both slow and partial in its effects upon labour. Meat, milk, butter, cheese, and potatoes are slowly affected by the price of corn, house-rent, bricks, stone, timber, fuel, soap, candles, and clothing, still more slowly ”

“ A considerable rise in the price of corn after the harvest of 1836, a pressure upon the money market, and the failure of some hanks, gave indication that the prosperity which had for some time been enjoyed was not to be of much longer continuance. ”

“ If the price of wheat is higher in proportion than for corn, the Americans export the former and consume the latter; if the demand for corn be also great, they kill their hogs and export corn, for the pork will keep. ”

“ If supplies of corn could not be obtained with some degree of steadiness and certainty from other quarters, would it not be absolutely necessary for them to grow it themselves, however ill adapted to it might be their soil and climate? ”

“ But a diminution in the real price of corn is still more efficient, in preventing the future improvement of land, than in throwing land, which has been already improved, out of cultivation. In all progressive countries, the average price of corn is never higher than what is necessary to continue the average increase of produce. ”

“ It unfortunately happens that very skilful farmers are few in number, in comparison with those who have failed to study and practice all attainable improvements. To produce cheap corn on poor land, one needs a clear understanding of what elements of the crop air and water will furnish, and what they cannot supply. It should be remembered that the atmosphere is precisely the same over ground which yields 100 bushels of corn per acre, that it is over that which produces only five bushels per acre. ”

“ Without that process, corn is very liable to become heated and musty, so as to be unfit for food for either man or beast. The kiln-dried maize meal from the Brandywine Mills, &c., made from the yellow corn, has almost monopolized the West India trade. This process is indispensable, if we export maize to Europe. ”

“ In the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth centuries corn-growing was very profitable, and a great deal of land was laid down in corn, some of it being far from suited to the purpose. In later times the profit on corn has been reduced and some of this land has been turned to other uses or has gone out of cultivation. ”