Rensselaer Republican, Volume 22, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 August 1890 — THE FOREIGN WHEAT MARKET. [ARTICLE]

THE FOREIGN WHEAT MARKET.

Free-trade attorneys, British and American, presistently seek the support of farmers by holding out the promise of enlarged foreign markets for the products of the farm as the result of engrafting the Cobden policy into our National legislation. The hollowness of such promise becomes apparent when it is remembered that not only is the quantity of farm products which foreigners will consume limited, but that the privilege of supplying this is contested by other fanners who are in position to crowd prices below the cost of production in this country. Take the case of wheat, which is the chief j article of export from grain-raising J farms. Last year the wheat ship- i ped abroad as grain and floor amounted to , about 89,000,000 bushels. Of this nearly four-fiths ■

went to Western Europe—over 55, 2851, 584 bushels of it to Great Britain, which was least han the average sold there for the past eigh-j teen years. Such falling off i#the quanity sold to our British customers ie not- the- result of our inability to supply their needs, foul of the fact that wheat raisei;s from other countries were on hand a " as competitors ready tell for a less price than American wheat raisers could afford to take for their grain. While the quantity of American wheat sold to Great Britain fell off from over ninety million bushels in 1887, to fifty-five and a quarter million bushels in 1889, the quantity supplied by Russia i-n creased nearly fourfold in the same time—that is to say, from 10,354,607 bushels in 1887; to over 39,800,372 bushels in 1889. Not becaue the United States had not the wheat to sell, but because wheat coud be bought cheaper from Russia than America. Consumers were too hard pressed by poverty to give heed to theories of reciprocity in commerce. They bought their bread of those who sold cheapest, and as the Russian serf works for dess money than has to be paid the American farm laborer, not only have prices been hammered down, but Russian wheat —supplemented—by more titan sixteen million bushels from India in 1889 —has been crowding the American product from the markets of Western Europe. This is the unequal contest to which free-trade attorneys urge the American farmer. In pursuit of the phantom of a foreign market in which he can sell only at a loss, they ask him to cripple the recourses of that home market which now consumes nine-tenths of all farm products, and which will, if adequately protected against under paid labor, in the near future supply American consumers with a market for all that the American farmer has to sell.