Northwestern Canada, for instance, was a dozen years ago supposed to be a barren wilderness of snow and ice, in which none but the hunter and the fur-trader might earn a living. Then several adventurous Minnesotans went across and planted wheat. It grew--forty bushels to the acre, and the acres, there were two hundred million of them, were waiting for the plow and almost to be had for the asking. Since then, more than three hundred thousand American farmers have swept across the line and joined in the greatest wheat-rush of this generation. Twelve hundred grain elevators have been built along the line of the Canadian Pacific; and Chicago self-binders rattled through the yellow wheat last Summer two thousand miles north of St. Louis. In Argentina, too, and Australia, where the wheat ripens just in time to decorate the Christmas trees, there is to be seen the same conquest of nature. Desolate plains are being tamed by the plow and exploited by the harvesters. In the semi-arid belt that lies east of the Rocky Mountains, new kinds of wheat, less thirsty, are being taught to grow. In Russia and Siberia a vast tract of twenty-five million acres has been rescued from idleness in the last fifteen years. And even in the valley of the Euphrates, where wheat, so it is believed, was born, a new railway is now being constructed which, when it is finished, will carry oil and wheat. By thus opening up new regions to settlement, the wheat-farmer not only thwarts the monopolist and makes the world a larger place to live in, he does more: he compels the gold to come out of its vaults in the great cities and to flow to the outermost parts of the earth. For every eighteen thousand pounds of wheat that go to the city, there will go back to the farmer one pound of gold. For every loaf of bread upon a Londoner's table, there will go a cent and a half to the man behind the Reaper. And so, the sale of every wheat-crop means that the gold will come throbbing out into the arteries of business, like the blood from the heart, and on its way back and forth nourish the whole body of the nation.