ipitated upon the
world a stupendous new supply of cereals and of meats, produced in
quantities enormously greater than the people of the Northwestern States
could consume. These foodstuffs have powerfully affected agriculture in
Ireland, England, France, and Germany, and, in fact, in every other part
of the accessible and cultivated globe.

[Illustration: BARREL-HOIST AND TUNNEL THROUGH THE WASHBURN MILL.]

THE NORTHWESTERN FARMER.

So much has been written of late about the condition of the farmer in
these regions that it is pertinent to inquire who the Western farmer is.
In the old States the representative farmer is a man of long training in
the difficult and honorable art of diversified agriculture. He knows
much of soils, of crops and their wise rotation, of domestic animals and
their breeding, and of a hundred distinct phases of the production, the
life, and the household economics that belong to the traditions and
methods of Anglo-Saxon farming. If he is a wise man, owning his land and
avoiding extravagance, he can defy any condition of the markets, and can
survive any known succession of adverse seasons. There are also many
such farmers in the West. But there are thousands of wheat-raisers or
corn-growers who have followed in the wake of the railway and taken up
government or railroad land, and who are not yet farmers in the truest
and best sense of the word. They are unskilled laborers who have become
speculators. They obtain their land for nothing, or for a price ranging
from one dollar and fifty cents to five dollars per acre. They borrow on
mortgage the money to build a small house and to procure horses and
implements and seed-grain. Then they proceed to put as large an acreage
as they can manage into a single crop--wheat in the Dakotas, wheat or
corn in Nebraska and Kansas. They speculate upon the chances of a
favorable season and a good crop safely harvested; and they speculate
upon the chances of a profitable market. They hope that the first two
crops may render them the possessor of an unincumbered estate, supplied
with modest buildings, and with a reasonable quantity of machinery and
live stock. Sometimes they succeed beyond their anticipations. In many
instances the chances go against them. They live on the land, and the
title is invested in them; but they are using borrowed capital, use it
unskillfully, meet an adverse season or two, lose through foreclosure
that which has cost them nothing excep