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Show JIM HILL DESPONDENT. President Jim Hill of the Great Northern and Northern Pacific railroads, every little while takes a gloomy view of things. Just now he is wondering where there will be a market for the surplus wheat of this country twenty-five years hence. May be by that time there will be no surplus wheat. A great many crops pay better than wheat. We are paying $135,000,000 to outside countries for sugar annually, rnd the sum is growing larger and larger every year, despite all the new sugar factories. An acre of beets pays about four times as much to the farmer far-mer as an acre of wheat. Then Mr. Hill anticipates an increase of 50,000,000 people in the next twenty-five twenty-five or thirty years and wonders what they will all do. Well, it will require a great many people to feed and clothe that great host. Mr. Hill says they might manufacture cotton and woolen cloth an steel and other things, but where would they find a market? Well, as a great railroad promoter, builder and operator, why is he not interesting his railroad friends to cut South America in twain by a railroad from the Caribbean sea to Rio and Buenos Ayres, touching on the way the great gold, silver, lead and copper mines of eastern Peru and Bolivia? That would be opening a new world which would tax all the energies of the surplus people of this country, for fifty years to come, to settle and subdue, and open for this country a market for all the surplus of steel and cotton and woolen goods that the factories could produce. He is right in one thing. This country coun-try is importing too much stuff that might be produced pro-duced at home, which shows that foreign countries pre turning out a vast amount of products, which should be supplied on American soil. That is q. fault always with a young nation and we should outgrow It. |