Daily Inspiration Quote by Stephen Leacock

Divine creation gets reduced to a single crop, and that reduction is the joke and the critique. Leacock takes the biblical thunder of Genesis and snaps it into prairie practicality: Saskatchewan, in this telling, isn’t born from mythic destiny or heroic settlement, but from an agricultural function. The line flatters the province while also needling it, suggesting a place so defined by wheat that it can be imagined as God’s monocrop experiment.

Leacock’s intent is double-edged boosterism. There’s real affection in the clean, punchy exaggeration; it turns regional identity into a one-liner you can repeat at a dinner table. But the subtext is an economist’s wink at how staples shape societies: when an economy and a culture hinge on one commodity, everything else gets crowded out. The province becomes legible to outsiders through a single export, which is both brand and trap.

Context matters. Leacock wrote in a Canada where the Prairies were being narrativized as the nation’s breadbasket, with immigration campaigns, railway expansion, and grain markets binding local life to global prices. The biblical cadence mocks the grandeur of that nation-building story, implying it’s less epic than advertised: not “let there be a people,” but “let there be wheat.” That’s Leacock at his best - taking a lofty register, puncturing it with commerce, and revealing how often our origin myths are just supply chains with better PR.