waved and
shone under the hot Egyptian sun. The Arabs, on their weird beasts of
burden, rode from the desert wastes down to the land of waters and of
plenty. Rebekah, when she came to fill her earthen pitcher at the
palm-shaded well, looked out with dusky, dreamy eyes across the golden
grain toward the mysterious east. Moses, when he stood in the night,
watching his flock on the starlit Arabian waste, felt borne to him on
the desert wind a scent of wheat. The Bible said, "He maketh peace in
thy borders and filleth thee with the finest of the wheat."

Black-bread days of the Middle Ages, when crude grinding made impure
flour, were the days of the oppressed peasant and the rich landowner,
dark days of toil and poverty and war, of blight and drought and famine;
when common man in his wretchedness and hunger cried out, "Bread or
blood!"

But with the spreading of wheat came the dawn of a higher civilization;
and the story of wheat down to modern times showed the development of
man. Wheat-fields of many lands, surrounding homes of prosperous
farmers; fruitful toil of happy peoples; the miller and his humming
mill!

When wheat crossed the ocean to America it came to strange and wonderful
fulfilment of its destiny. America, fresh, vast, and free, with its
sturdy pioneers ever spreading the golden grain westward; with the
advancing years when railroad lines kept pace with the indomitable
wheat-sowers; with unprecedented harvests yielding records to each
succeeding year; with boundless fields tilled and planted and harvested
by machines that were mechanical wonders; with enormous floor-mills,
humming and whirring, each grinding daily ten thousand barrels of flour,
pouring like a white stream from the steel rolls, pure, clean, and
sweet, the whitest and finest in the world!

America, the new county, became in 1918 the salvation of starving
Belgium, the mainstay of England, the hope of France! Wheat for the
world! Wheat--that was to say food, strength, fighting life for the
armies opposed to the black, hideous, medieval horde of Huns! America to
succor and to save, to sacrifice and to sow, rising out of its peaceful
slumber to a mighty wrath, magnificent and unquenchable, throwing its
vast resources of soil, its endless streams of wheat, into the gulf of
war! It was an exalted destiny for a people. Its truth was a blazing
affront in the face of age-old autocracy. Fields and toil and grains of
wheat, first and last, the salva