The National tribune., 1908-09-03
WHEAT AND NOBILITY.

i Some years ago, IL VIII be remember
ed. one William J. Bryan raised great
Lpolitical commotion by mis- strenuous
insistence upon the idea that the silver
dollar and the price of a busnel Of
wheat kept company, and that wnAn
they parted it was the result of VII
famous conspiracy headed by Wall
Street
1t was easy to show that there was
no historical connection between the
silver dollar and the price Of wheat but
it is historically true that there is
decided relation between The market
value of wheat and that of European
titles of nobility. From the fall in the
price of wheat comes all this raif of
Impoverished young mobiles upon Amer
ican heiresses.
Prior to 1850 the owners of wheat
fields in Europe had the world at an
immense advantage. They could get ex-
ceedingly high prices for wheat, which
made them the princes Of the earth,
since they had an income that could
not be equaled by any other class. The
nobility in all European countries, eX-
cept France, where the baroHial own
ership had been destroyed by the re!o-
luton, were supported by the immense
revenues derived from their wheat
lands. They sublet these lands to the
actual farmers, and had no trouble in
collecting their rich rents.
The United States was coming rapidly
to the front as wheat producer, and
| in 1880 began the celebrated corn law
| agitation" This was similar to the
troubles in Germany to-day between
the land owners trying to keep up the
price of their wheat and other products
and the manufacturing interests, who
want cheap food for their workingmcn.
After an agitation of extreme bitterness
the free traders in England secured the
repeal of all protective duties upon
wheat and the free admission IF Amer
| lean grain. From that moment the
English nobility began to decay, and
the value of landed estates in England
| has actually decreased billions of dol
lars since then, reducing the nobility,
/
to the sorest of straits to keep up their
ostentatious establishments and main
tain themselves in the style they had
adopted in their days of extreme af-
fluence. They could not exact anything
! like the old rents from their farmers,
since the price of wheat was going down
continually with every Improvement in
\ A.
wheat fields of America, and other
countries where the production was con-
tinually developing.
The same process went on with the
Hungarian nobility. At one time the
Banat in Hungary was called "the gran
ary of Europe" and the Magyar lords,
who owned estates in the fertile valley
of the Danube, were as princely in their
mannev of living and their social pre-
tensions as the Earls, Marquises and
Dukes of England. All this has been
undermined and almost destroyed by
the vast quantities of wheat raised on
cheap lands in other parts of the world
and brought to Europe at very low rates
of freight by the great steamship lines.
The Government of France, which is
paternalistic to the last degree, has
saved its farmers from impoverishment
by a high tariff against foreign grain.
Ia Germany there is the fight between
| the Agrarians; that is, the nobility
which own great estates. and desire to
save themselves from the fate of the
British and Hungarian nobility by hav-
ing high tariff against foreign food
stuffs. The German manufacturers are
! in the position of those of Great Britain
in 1910. They are exceedingly eager
for a foreign trade, but in order to
manufacture as cheaply as their COM
petitors in England and the United
States they must have food for their
workingmen as cheaply as the American
and British workingmen get it.
There is an eternal strife in the
Reichsrath between the Agrarfans and
the manufacturers for notifications of
the meat and bread stuffs tariffs In favor
of cheaper food for the workingmen.
| The mournful decay of the fortunes
of the Hungarian and British noblemen
has sent them to this country to seek
brides whose fortunes will enable them
to rehabilitate their tumble down cas-
ties and mansions, and put them on a
respectable footing again. The Hun
garians cannot find wealthy brides in
their own country, since all of theif
class are equally impoverished, and
there are no great, wealthy manufac-
turers rising up as in Great Britain and
America, whose daughters are anxious
to get into the nobility.
| In Great Britain the impoverished
young noblemen have been marrying
daughters of brewers, bankers and cot
ton manufacturers, but the supply seems
insufficient, and they are turning to this
country for opportunity to recoup their
fortunes by wedding ambitious young
| Americans.
| A most important scientific state
1 ment is the denial by Mmc. Curie, one
of the discoverers of radium, of Sir Will
liam Ramsay's astonishing assertion
that radium's action on copper pro-
i duced lithium. This brought to life the
dream of the old alchemists of trans
] muting metals Nine. Curie thinks the