To-day the river of wheat is deepest at Minneapolis. Its twenty-two great mills roll 120,000,000 bushels into flour as an ordinary year's work. While the swiftest mill in Athens, in the age of Pericles, produced no more than two barrels a day, there is one mill of incredible size in Minneapolis that fills _seventeen thousand_ barrels in a twenty-four hours' run--enough to give bread to New York State and California. What the Greeks did in a day the Minnesotans do in ten seconds. Five million barrels of this Minneapolis flour is each year scattered among foreign nations, a fact which informs us that flour is now not a local product, but part of the real currency of nations. No doubt the people who dwell by the Sea of Galilee, whose fathers were once miraculously fed upon seven loaves of bread and a few fishes, are now being fed miraculously upon loaves of bread made from the flour of Minneapolis. The making of the bread--that is the final step in this movement of the wheat. As yet, this is a local process, though not wholly so. Certain ready-to-eat foods are now being made from wheat and boxed in such a way that they may be sent from one country to another. If we trace back the original of a loaf of bread of ordinary size, we shall find that it was made from two-thirds of a pound of flour, which was rolled from one pound of wheat, containing about twelve thousand grains that were grown on forty-eight square feet of land and reaped by a self-binder in two seconds. When the wheat was cut in the old-fashioned way, with a hand-sickle, every loaf of bread required eighty seconds' labor instead of two. In a public test made last year in the State of Washington, wheat was cut, threshed, ground into flour, and baked into biscuits in twenty-three minutes. This is an evidence that all the machinery for handling grain has now been brought up to the same high level of speed and efficiency as the self-binder. It also helps us to understand the daily marvel of cheap bread--the fact that a hundred loaves of bread are now delivered one by one at an American workingman's door for the cost of a seat at the opera or a couple of song-records by Caruso. So plentiful is this bread that the loaves baked from American flour in 1907 would have made a wall of bread around the earth, or have given thirty loaves apiece to every human creature; and so cheap has it become in these latter days that even in the United States it is not more than three cents a day per capita. The unskilled laborer who receives $1.50 a day, earns his bread in the first ten minutes, every work day morning. And the total tax he pays to the men who make the self-binders is not more than one tenth of a cent per loaf.