Burrowed into the
wheat, and the wheat quivered and sunk upon the instant as water
sinks when the siphon sucks, because the steel buckets within the
trunk were flying upon their endless round, carrying away each
its appointed morsel of wheat.
The elevator was a Persian well wheel - a wheel squashed out thin
and cased in a pipe, a wheel driven not by bullocks, but by much
horse-power, licking up the grain at the rate of thou-sands of
bushels the hour. And the wheat sunk into the fore-hatch while a
man looked - sunk till the brown timbers of the bulkheads showed
bare, and men leaped down through clouds of golden dust and
shovelled the wheat furiously round the nose of the trunk, and
got a steam-shovel of glittering steel and made that shovel also,
till there remained of the grain not more than a horse leaves in
the fold of his nose-bag.
In this manner do they handle wheat at Buffalo. On one side of
the elevator is the steamer, on the other the railway track; and
the wheat is loaded into the cars in bulk. Wah! wah! God is
great, and I do not think He ever intended Gar Sahai or Luckman
Narain to supply England with her wheat. India can cut in not
without profit to herself when her harvest is good and the
Ameri-can yield poor; but this very big country can, upon the
average, supply the earth with all the beef and bread that is
required.
A man in the train said to me: - "We kin feed all the earth, jest
as easily as we kin whip all the earth."
Now the second statement is as false as the first is true. One
of these days the respectable Republic will find this out.
Unfortunately we, the English, will never be the people to teach
her; because she is a chartered libertine allowed to say and do
anything she likes, from demanding the head of the empress in an
editorial waste-basket, to chevying Canadian schooners up and
down the Alaska Seas. It is perfectly impossible to go to war
with these people, whatever they may do.
They are much too nice, in the first place, and in the second, it
would throw out all the passenger traffic of the Atlantic, and
upset the financial arrangements of the English syndicates who
have invested their money in breweries, railways, and the like,
and in the third, it's not to be done. Everybody knows that, and
no one better than the American.
Yet there are other powers who are not "ohai band" (of the
brotherhood) - China, for instance. Try to believe an
irresponsible writer when he assures you that China's fleet
to-day, if properly manned, could waft the entire American navy
out of the water and into the blue.
