The Last of the Flatboats

by George Cary Eggleston

  CHAPTER XXX

  A YAZOO AFTERNOON

  There were no difficulties of any consequence to contend with after _TheLast of the Flatboats_ entered the Yazoo. The boys' guests were wellnow, and joined them in their long talks on deck. These talks coveredevery conceivable subject, and the planter, who proved himself to be anunusually well-informed man, added not a little to their interest.

  "I say, Ed," said Phil one day, holding up one of his newspapers, "youwere all wrong about the crops."

  "How do you mean, Phil?"

  "Why, you put corn first, as the most valuable crop produced in thiscountry."

  "Well, isn't it?"

  "Not if this newspaper writer knows his business and tells the truth."

  "Why, what does he say?" asked Ed, with an interest he had not at firstshown in Phil's criticism.

  "He says that in Missouri, which I take to be one of the greatcorn-growing states--"

  "It is all that," answered Ed. "What about it?"

  "Why, he says that in Missouri the eggs and spring chickens produced bywhat he calls 'the great American hen' sell every year for more moneythan all the corn, wheat, oats, and hay raised in the state, twice over.And he gives the figures for it too."

  "That is surprising," said Ed, "but it is very probably true. Thetrouble is that we have no trustworthy statistics on the subject. Noordinary farmer keeps any account of his crops of that kind. Not onefarmer in a hundred could tell you at the end of a year how many dozensof eggs or how many pairs of chickens he had sold. Still less could hetell you how many of either his family had eaten. So it must all beguess-work about such crops, while practically every bushel of wheat,corn, and oats and every bale of cotton or hay, and every pound oftobacco is carefully set down in official records."

  "That reminds me," said Irv, "of the remark a farmer once made to me,when deploring the poverty of himself and his class."

  "What was it?" asked Will.

  "Why, he said that lots of men in the cities got two or three thousanddollars a year for their work, while he never yet had got over fivehundred dollars for his. I questioned him a little, and found that hedidn't take any account of his house rent and fuel free, or of all thefarm produce that his family ate. He thought the few hundred dollars hehad to the good at the end of the year, after paying for his groceriesand dry goods, was all he got for his labor."

  "Speaking of these unconsidered crops," said the planter, "I fancy itwould astonish us if we could have the figures on them. It is said, forexample, that more than a million turkeys are eaten in New York Cityalone every winter. Now, if we count all the other great cities and allthe little ones, and all the towns and all the country homes whereturkeys are eaten, it will be very hard to guess how many millions ofthese fowls are raised and sold and eaten in this country every year."

  "It's hard on the turkeys," moralized Will Moreraud.

  "Well, I don't know," answered Phil. "I remember reading a story byJames K. Paulding called 'A Reverie in the Woods.' He tells how he fellhalf asleep and heard all the animals and birds and fishes holding asort of congress to denounce man for his cruelties to them. After awhile the earthworm got so excited over the matter that he wriggledhimself into the brook. Thereupon the trout, who had also been one ofthe complainants against man's cruelty, snapped up the worm, andswallowed him. Seeing this, the cat grabbed the trout, and the foxcaught the cat, and the eagle caught the fox, and the hawk made luncheonon the dove, and so on through the whole list. I imagine that that isnature's way. Everything that lives, lives at the expense of somethingelse that lives. It is all a struggle for existence, with the survivalof the fittest as the outcome. And as a man, or even a commonplace boylike me, is fitter to live than a turkey, I think the slaughter of thoseinnocents is all right enough."

  "You are entirely right, Phil," said Ed. "A pound of boy is certainlyworth fifty or fifty thousand pounds of turkey, because one boy can domore for the world than all the turkeys that were ever hatched. Andwhen a boy eats turkey he converts it into boy, and it helps him to growinto a man."

  "Precisely!" said Irv Strong. "It cost the worthless lives of many pigs,turkeys, chickens, sheep, and cattle to make George Washington. Butsurely one George Washington was worth more than all the pigs, turkeys,chickens, sheep, and beef-cattle that were killed in all this countrybetween the day he was born and the day of his death. But pardon us,"added Irv, turning to the planter, "you were going to say something morewhen we interrupted."

  "It was nothing of any consequence," answered their guest, "and yourlittle discussion has interested me more than anything I had thought ofsaying. But I was going to say that according to a New York newspaper'scareful calculation, that city pays more than a million dollars everyspring for white flowers for Easter decorations alone, while itsexpenditures for flowers during the rest of the year is estimated at notless than five millions more. Then there is the peanut crop. Who everthinks of it? Who thinks of peanuts in any serious way? Yet it was thepeanut crop that saved the people of tidewater Virginia and NorthCarolina from actual starvation during the first few years after theCivil War. And every year that crop amounts to more than two and a halfmillion bushels!"

  "What luck for the circuses!" exclaimed Will Moreraud.

  "But the circuses do not furnish the chief market for peanuts," saidIrv, who was somewhat "up" on these things.

  "Where are they consumed, then?" asked Will.

  "Well, the greater part of them are used in the manufacture of 'pure'Italian or French olive oil--most of it 'warranted sublime,'" said Irv.

  "Are we a nation of swindlers, then?" asked Phil, whose courage wasalways offended by any suggestion of untruth or hypocrisy or dishonesty.

  "I don't know," said Irv, "how to draw the line there. The men who makeolive oil out of peanuts stoutly contend that their olive oil is reallybetter, more wholesome, and more palatable than that made from olives."

  "Why don't they call it peanut oil, then, and advertise it as betterthan olive oil, and take the consequences?" asked upright, downright,bravely honest Phil.

  "Men in trade are not always so scrupulous about honesty andtruthfulness as you are, Phil," said Ed. "But sometimes--they excusetheir falsehoods on the ground--"

  "There isn't any excuse possible for not telling the truth," said Phil."Men who tell lies in their business are swindlers, and that's the endof the matter. If they are making a better article than the importedone, they ought to say so, and people would find it out quickly enough.When they offer their goods as something quite different from what theyreally are, they are telling lies, I say, and I, for one, have norespect for a liar."

  "You are right, Phil, of course," said Ed. "But there is a world of thatsort of thing done. The potteries in New Jersey, I am told, mark theirfiner wares with European brands, and they contend that if they did notdo it they could not sell their goods."

  "A more interesting illustration," said the planter, "is found in thematter of cheeses. Cheese, as at first produced, is the same the worldover. But cheese that is set to 'ripen' in the caves of Roquefort isone thing, cheese ripened at Camembert is another, and so on throughthe list. Now of late years it has been discovered that the differencesbetween these several kinds of cheese are due solely to microbes. Thereis one sort of microbe at Roquefort, another at Brie, and so on. NowAmerican cheesemakers found this out some years ago, and decided thatthey could make any sort of cheese they pleased in this country. So theytook the several kinds of imported cheeses, selected the best samples ofeach, and set to work to cultivate their microbes. By introducing themicrobes of Roquefort into their cheeses they made Roquefort cheeses ofthem. By inoculating them with the Brie microbe, or the Camembertmicrobe, or the Stilton or Gruyere microbe, they converted their simpleAmerican cheeses into all these choice varieties. And it is asserted byexperts that these American imitations, or some of them at any rate, areactually superior to the imported cheeses, besides being much moreuniform in quality."

  "That's all right," said Phil
. "But why not tell the truth about it?Surely, if their cheeses are better than those made abroad, they cantrust the good judges of cheese to find out the fact and declare it.And when that fact became known they could sell their cheese for ahigher price than that of the imported article, on the simple ground ofits superiority. How I do hate shams and frauds and lies--and especiallyliars!"

  "What bothers me," drawled Irv, "is that I've been eating microbes allmy life without knowing it. I here and now register a solemn vow thatI'll never again eat a piece of cheese--unless I want to."

  "Oh, the microbes are all right," said Ed, "provided they are of theright sort. There are some microbes that kill us, and others that wecouldn't live without. There are still others, like those in cheese,that do us neither good nor harm, except that they make our food morepalatable. For that matter the yeast germ is a microbe, and it is thatalone that makes our bread light. Surely we can't quit eating lightbread and take to heavy baked dough instead, because light bread is madelight by the presence of some hundreds of millions of living germs inevery loaf of it while it is in the dough state."

  "Coming back to the question of crops," said the planter, "does it occurto you that there would be no possibility of prosperity in this countrybut for the absolute freedom of traffic between the states?"

  "Would you kindly explain?" said Ed.

  "Certainly. The farmers of New York and New Jersey used to grow all thewheat, and all the beef, mutton, and pork that were eaten in the greatcity, and they made a good living by doing it. But the time came whenthe western states could raise wheat and beef and all the rest of itmuch more cheaply than any eastern farmer could. This threatened todrive the New York and New Jersey farmers out of business, andnaturally, if they could, they would have made their legislators passlaws to exclude this western wheat and meat from competition with theircrops. This would have hurt the western farmer; for what would in thatcase have happened in New York would have happened in all the othereastern states. But it would have hurt the people of the greatcities--and indeed all the people in the country still more. It wouldhave made the city people's food cost them two or three times as much asbefore. That would have compelled them to charge more for theirmanufactured products and for their work in carrying on the foreigncommerce of the country. That would have crippled commerce,--which livesupon exceedingly small margins of profit,--and the prosperity of thecountry would have been ruined. It was to prevent that sort of thingthat our national government was formed, with a constitution whichforbade any state to interfere with commerce between the states."

  "What became of the New York farmer, then?" asked Irv.

  "When he found that he couldn't raise wheat, corn, etc., as cheaply asthe western farmer could sell them in New York, he quit raising thosethings and produced things that paid him instead."

  "What sort of things?"

  "Fruits, poultry, milk, butter, eggs, cheese, vegetables, buckwheat,honey, etc., and in producing these the New York farmer grew richer thanever. Since New York quit raising on any considerable scale the thingsthat we commonly think of as farm products, that state has become therichest in the country in the value of its agricultural production,simply because the New York farmer raises only those things for whichthere is a market almost at his front gate."

  "That is very interesting," said Will. "But how is it that the far Westcan furnish New York and Philadelphia and the rest of the eastern citieswith bread and meat cheaper than the farmers near those cities can sellthe same things?"

  "The value of land," said the planter, "has much to do with it. Thevalue of a farmer's land is his investment, and first of all, he mustearn interest on that."

  "Pardon me," said Ed, "but that, it seems to me, is a very small factor.The value of good farming lands in the East is not very different fromthat of similar lands in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and the other greatfarming states of the West."

  "What is the key to the mystery, then?" asked Irv.

  "Transportation," answered Ed. "The western farm lands, with an equalamount of labor, produce more wheat, corn, pork, and the like, thaneastern lands do, and it costs next to nothing to carry their wheat,corn, pork, etc., to the East."

  "What does it cost?" asked Will.

  "Well, I see that the rate is now less than three mills per ton permile. At three mills per ton per mile, ten barrels, or a ton, of flourcould be carried from Chicago to New York for three dollars, or thirtycents a barrel. Even at half a cent per ton per mile it would cost onlyfifty cents."

  "While the railroads are engaged in transporting that flour to thehungry New Yorkers at that exceedingly reasonable rate," said Irv,slowly rising to his feet, "it is my duty to go below and convert a fewinsignificant pounds of the flour on board into a pan of biscuit, whileyou, Ed, fry some salt pork, the only meat we have left, and heat up acan or two of tomatoes."

  This ended the long chat, for besides the preparation of supper therewas much else to do. There were the lights to be hung in their places,and more occupying still, there was the difficult task of tying up theboat for the night. For experience had taught Phil caution, and he haddecided that until _The Last of the Flatboats_ should again float uponthe broad reaches of the Mississippi, she should be securely moored totwo trees during the hours of darkness. With the Yazoo ten feet aboveits banks, it would have been very easy indeed for the flatboat to driftout of the river into the fields and woodlands. And Phil had had all theexperience he wanted of such wanderings.