STOCK EXCHANGE AND AMERICAN BUSINESS 481 
agricultural communities must depend to sell their produce. 
The farmer who sends his wheat to market over the iron 
pathway provided by our western railroads benefits uncon- 
sciously and yet profoundly from the work accomplished by 
the Stock Exchange during the preceding half-century in mar- 
keting and distributing our railroad securities. The American 
farmer could obviously never have become the progressive and, 
compared with the agricultural workers of other countries, the 
extremely prosperous individual that he is, were it as difficult 
for him to market his produce as it is for farmers in other 
less developed countries. Without the network of steel rails 
stretching all over the United States, he would be engulfed and 
isolated in its vast interior areas, as are the peasants of Russia 
or China. 
But the problem of marketing the great crops of this coun- 
try does not simply consist of getting them aboard the freight 
cars. Many other factors are also involved. There is the 
country bank, which finances the farmer’s undertakings and 
often preserves itself from illiquidity and even insolvency by 
keeping a certain part of its surplus funds invested in stock 
market loans.” In addition, there are still other vital parts of 
the crop-marketing machinery beyond the blue horizon of the 
farmer’s world. The elaborate mechanism of foreign ex- 
change and foreign trade, the exporting, shipping, and insur- 
ance companies have to perform their separate parts of the 
work. And to each of these additional factors the Stock Ex- 
change renders one important service or another.® Thus, while 
the Exchange has nothing to do directly with marketing the 
farmer’s wheat, corn, or cotton, nevertheless it renders indi- 
rectly a hundred often unnoticed and yet genuine services. 
The Modern American Farmer’s Needs.—Nor does the 
contact between the stock market and the farmer end here. For 
the American farmer of today has in many ways become an 
agricultural engineer, who uses machinery extensively and to an 
7 See Appendix XIk. 
5 See Chapter XVIII