tales of wheat-gods favoring chosen peoples.  Ancient China raised wheat twenty-seven centuries before Christ; grains of wheat had been found in prehistoric ruins; the dwellers along the Nile were not blind to the fertility of the valley.  In the days of the Pharaohs the old river annually inundated its low banks, enriching the soil of vast areas, where soon a green-and-gold ocean of wheat waved and shone under the hot Egyptian sun.  The Arabs, on their weird beasts of burden, rode from the desert wastes down to the land of waters and of plenty.  Rebekah, when she came to fill her earthen pitcher at the palm-shaded well, looked out with dusky, dreamy eyes across the golden grain toward the mysterious east.  Moses, when he stood in the night, watching his flock on the starlit Arabian waste, felt borne to him on the desert wind a scent of wheat.  The Bible said, “He maketh peace in thy borders and filleth thee with the finest of the wheat.”

Black-bread days of the Middle Ages, when crude grinding made impure flour, were the days of the oppressed peasant and the rich landowner, dark days of toil and poverty and war, of blight and drought and famine; when common man in his wretchedness and hunger cried out, “Bread or blood!”

But with the spreading of wheat came the dawn of a higher civilization; and the story of wheat down to modern times showed the development of man.  Wheat-fields of many lands, surrounding homes of prosperous farmers; fruitful toil of happy peoples; the miller and his humming mill!

When wheat crossed the ocean to America it came to strange and wonderful fulfilment of its destiny.  America, fresh, vast, and free, with its sturdy pioneers ever spreading the golden grain westward; with the advancing years when railroad lines kept pace with the indomitable wheat-sowers; with unprecedented harvests yielding records to each succeeding year; with boundless fields tilled and planted and harvested by machines that were mechanical wonders; with enormous floor-mills, humming and whirring, each grinding daily ten thousand barrels of flour, pouring like a white stream from the steel rolls, pure, clean, and sweet, the whitest and finest in the world!

America, the new county, became in 1918 the salvation of starving Belgium, the mainstay of England, the hope of France!  Wheat for the world!  Wheat—­that was to say food, strength, fighting life for the armies opposed to the black, hideous, medieval horde of Huns!  America to succor and to save, to sacrifice and to sow, rising out of its peaceful slumber to a mighty wrath, magnificent and unquenchable, throwing its vast resources of soil, its endless streams of wheat, into the gulf of war!  It was an exalted destiny for a people.  Its truth was a blazing affront in the face of age-old autocracy.  Fields and toil and grains of wheat, first and last, the salvation of mankind, the freedom and the food of the world!

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