:< Dollar Wheat "

The day was when the politician who promised the farmers that their wheat would sell at $1.00 a bushel could surely elicit their applause and probably their votes. Today, after the huge war prices for grain, no little consternation was caused when wheat descended on the Chicago market under $1.00 a bushel for the first time since the outbreak of the War. Since the price of wheat will prove a major factor in electing our next President, politicians as well as farmers and speculators are now studying the wheat situation.

The latest forecast of the Department of Agriculture states the acreage in 1923 under wheat to be 58,253,000 acres, compared with 61,230,000 last year. The anticipated yield this year is 821,000,000, compared with 856,211,000 for 1922. The decline in wheat prices during 1921-23 has been due to many causes, chief among which are: greater production in Canada and elsewhere, underconsumption in Europe owing to the high price of wheat under the present exchange rates, greater effort by Europe to feed herself, and the endeavor by the American farmer to sell an output called for during abnormal war times.

The profitable planting of wheat on a wholesale basis demands cheap land. When our own land was free and cheap, wheat farmers prospered, since they could readily undersell the world markets. With the gradual filling up of the country, this cheap land is passing, and with it the ready profits in grain farming. Today Canada, South America and other new countries are and probably can continue to undersell America, since they have the cheap land.

There is absolutely no legislative panacea for the distress now fairly common among American grain farmers, since any artificial upward manipulation of wheat prices will in the long run simply increase foreign production and domestic stocks, and ultimately force prices lower yet.