They are not thoroughly reconciled, evenyet, to being a merger. They look back with open regret to the wasteful but adventurous days of competition. Of the combination the elder Mrs. Cyrus McCormick finely said:
“It was a hurt of the heart. Each of our companies was like a family. Each had a body of loyal agents, who had been comrades through many struggles. But the terrible increase in expenses compelled us to subdue our feelings and to coöperate with one another.”
“I am not a merger man myself,” said William Deering, “although I believe that the International Harvester Company has been a benefit to the farmers.”
Cyrus H. McCormick goes still further. He is a “trust-buster” himself, so far as the over-capitalised and oppressive leviathans of business are concerned. He said to me frankly: “Some of the hostility to our company is inspired by worthy motives, growing out of the general opposition to the so-called trusts.” And when a North Dakota congressman proposed in 1904 that the International Harvester Company should be investigated, Cyrus McCormick at oncesent a message that amazed the Bureau of Corporations—“Please come and investigate us,” he said. “If we’re not right, we want to get right.”
“Yes,” said one of the highest officials of the Roosevelt administration, when I asked him to corroborate this very remarkable story. “It is true that from 1904 it has been the continued desire of the International Harvester Company that we should investigate them. In fact, during the last year (1907) they have urged us with considerable earnestness to make this investigation.”
So, this big business has evolved from simple to complex in accordance with the same laws that rule plants and empires. It has probably not yet reached its full maturity, for it is greater than any man or any form of organisation, and the tiny ephemeral atoms who control it to-day are no more than its most obedient retinue. They come and go—quarrel and make friends—live and die. What matter? The big business, once alive, grows on through the short centuries, from generation to generation.
And what does it all mean—this federation of thirteen factory cities—this coordination of muscle and mind and millions—this arduous development of a new art, whereby a group of mechanics can take a wagon-load of iron ore and a tree, and fashion them into a shapely automaton that has the power of a dozen farmers?
It means bread. It means hunger-insurance for the whole human race. As we shall see in the next chapter, it means that the famine problem has been solved, not only for the United States, but for all the civilised nations of the world.
Thefirst American reapers that went to Europe were given a royal welcome. There were two of them—one made by McCormick and one made by Hussey, and they were exhibited before Albert Edward, the Prince Consort of England, at a World’s Fair in London in 1851.
There had been reapers invented in England before this date, but none of them would reap. All the inventors were mere theorists. They designed their reapers for ideal grain in ideal fields. One of them was a preacher, the Rev. Patrick Bell; another, Henry Ogle, was a school-teacher. James Dobbs, an actor, invented a machine that cut artificial grain on the stage. And a machinist named Gladstone made a reaper that also worked well until he tried it on real grain in a real field.
But the exhibition of the American reaperin London did not result in its immediate adoption. There was little demand for harvesters in England fifty years ago; and in other European countries there was none at all. Farm labour was cheap—forty cents a day in England and five cents a day in Russia; and the rush of labourers into factory cities had not yet begun.
In the years following 1851, the American reaper did, however, become popular among the very rich. It became the toy of kings and titled landowners. By 1864 Europe was buying our farm machinery to the extent of $600,000. This was less than she buys to-day in a week; but it was a beginning. Several foreign manufacturers began at this time to make reapers, notably in Toronto, Sheffield, Paris, and Hamburg. This competition spurred on the American reaper agents, who were already taking advantage of the interest shown by royalty in the American reaper. And from the close of the Civil War on, there was an exciting race, generally neck and neck, between Cyrus H. McCormick, Sr., and Walter A. Wood, to see who could vanquish the most of these foreign imitators, and bag the greatest number of kings and nobilities.
It was a contest that not only resulted in the triumph of the American reaper, but also brought the Reaper Kings recognition and reputation abroad. In 1867 both McCormick and Wood were decorated with the Cross of the Legion of Honour by Napoleon III.; and later they stood side by side to receive the Imperial Cross from the hand of the Austrian emperor. Hundreds of medals and honours were showered upon these two inventor mechanics; and the French Academy of Science, in a blaze of Gallic enthusiasm, elected McCormick one of its members, because he had “done more for the cause of agriculture than any other living man.”
Many and strange were the exploits of the American Reaper Kings at the courts and royal farms of the real kings. Unable to speak any language but their own, unused to pomp and pageantry, breezily independent in the American fashion, the Reaper Kings plunged from adventure to adventure, absolutely indifferent to everything but their reapers and success.
“There is to be a trial of reapers at Rome next June,” wrote David M. Osborne, a New Yorker who began to export reapers toEurope in 1862. “Think of invading the sacred precincts of that ancient place with Yankee harvesters. We will wake up the dry bones of these old countries, and civilise and Christianise them with our farm machinery.”
C. W. Marsh, inventor of the Marsh Harvester, made a sensational début in Hungary in 1870. Several grand dukes had arranged for a great contest of the various sorts of reapers on one of the royal farms in Hungary, so that the Minister of Agriculture might take notice. When the day arrived, there were nine reapers at the farm, mostly of European design.
Marsh’s strange-looking machine seemed to be a combination of reaper and workbench. But ten minutes after the contest began, Marsh had the race won. His machine was a new type, the forerunner of the modern self-binder. It was so made that two men could stand upon it and bind the grain as fast as it was cut. But on this occasion Marsh could hire no farmer to help him and was obliged to do the work alone. The judges were stunned with amazement, therefore, when they found that he had boundthree-quarters of an acre in twenty-eight minutes. Here was a man who could do in half an hour what few Hungarian peasants could finish in less than a day!
“He is an athlete,” said one. “A wizard,” said another.
Before they could recover from their astonishment, Marsh had stored his harvester, pocketed the prize of forty golden ducats, and hurried away to his hotel, eager for a bath and a chance to pick the thistles out of his hands.
But the grand dukes and miscellaneous dignitaries were not to be escaped so easily. An officer in gorgeous uniform was sent to find Marsh and bring him forthwith to the main dining-hall of the city. Here a banquet was prepared, and a throng of high personages sat down, with Marsh at the head of the table, cursing his luck and nursing his sore fingers.
At the close of the banquet, amid great applause, a medal was pinned upon his coat, and the whole assemblage hushed to hear his reply. Now Marsh, like two-thirds of the Reaper Kings, could no more make a speech than walk a rope. On only oneprevious occasion had he faced an audience, and that was at the age of twelve, when he had recited a scrap from the “Lay of the Last Minstrel” at a school entertainment. As he rose to his feet, this poetic fragment came into his mind; and so, half in fun and half in desperation, Marsh assumed the pose of a Demosthenes and addressed the banqueters as follows:
“O Caledonia! Stern and wild,Meetnurse for a poetic child!Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,Land of the mountain and the flood,Land of my sires! What mortal handCan e’er untie the filial bandThat knits me to thy rugged strand!”
“That was the first and only speech of my life,” said Mr. Marsh, when I saw him in his home as DeKalb, where he has retired from business. “But it certainly established my reputation as an orator in that region of Hungary.”
At one famous competition near Paris, in 1879, three reapers were set to work in fields of equal size. The French reaper led off and finished in seventy-two minutes. The English reaper followed and lumbered throughin sixty-six minutes. Then came the American machine, and when it swept down its stretch of grain in twenty-two minutes, the judges were inclined to doubt either their watches or their eyesight.
Another of these tournaments, which also did much to advertise the United States as the only genuine and original reaper country, took place on an English estate in 1880. There was only one American reaper in the race, and in appearance it was the clown of the circus. The ship that carried it had been wrecked on the Irish coast, so that when it arrived the machine was rusted and dingy.
Cyrus H. McCormick, Jr., had it in charge. He was then a youth of twenty-one, and equally ready for an adventure or a sale. There was no time to repaint and polish the machine, so he resolved to convert its forlorn appearance into an asset.
“Oil her up so she’ll run like a watch,” he said to his experts. “But don’t improve her looks. If you find any paint, scrape it off. And go and hire the smallest, scrubbiest, toughest pair of horses you can find.”
The next day five or six foreign reapers were on hand, each glittering with newnessand drawn by a stately team of big Norman horses. The shabby American reaper arrived last, and met a shout of ridicule as it rolled into its place. But in the race, “Old Rusty,” as the spectators called it, swept ahead of the others as though it were an enchanted chariot, winning the gold medal and an enviable prestige among British farmers.
In Germany, as in England, the reaper was introduced into general use through royalty. This was in 1871, when a New York Reaper King named Byron E. Huntley gave the German emperor and empress their first view of harvesting on the American plan. The exhibition took place in a grain-field that lay near the royal residence at Potsdam. At first, the empress watched the machine from a window; but soon she became so keenly interested that she went into the field to study it at closer range.
“I admire you Americans,” she said to the delighted Huntley. “You are so deft—so ingenious, to make a machine like this.”
The present Emperor of Germany is not merely interested in American harvesters; he is an enthusiast. On several occasionshe has held harvester matinées for the benefit of his cabinet ministers, so that they could see with their own eyes the superiority of machinery to hand-labour. The first of these matinées was given on one of the Kaiser’s farms, near the ancient city of Bonn, in 1896; and I was told the story by Sam Dennis, the Illinois Irishman who was in charge of the harvester.
Dennis arranged a contest between his one machine and forty Polish women who cut the grain with old-fashioned sickles. As soon as the emperor and his retinue had arrived, all on horseback, a signal was given and the strange race began. On one side of the field were the forty women, bent and browned by many a day’s toil under the hot sun. On the other side was Sam Dennis, sitting on his showy harvester.
“Get ap!” said Dennis to the big German horses, and the grain fell in a wide swath over the clicking knife, swept upward on the canvas elevator into the swift steel arms and fingers, and was flung to the ground in a fusillade of sheaves, each bound tightly with a knotted string.
AMERICAN SELF-BINDERS ON THE ESTATE OF PRESIDENT FALLIERES, IN FRANCE
The emperor was radiant with delight.Being somewhat of an expert himself, he rode here and there and showed, with many gestures, the differences between the old way and the new. Some of the grain had been blown down. Nothing but a sickle could cut it, in the belief, at that time, of the average German farmer. On the contrary, as the emperor pointed out to his ministers, the harvester was raising the fallen grain and cutting it without the waste of a handful while the women were trampling much of it under their bare feet, as they jostled one another in the stubbled field.
Most wonderful of all, the one machine was soon seen to be doing more work than the whole mob of women drudges. The field had been evenly divided before the race began, and there was some wheat still uncut on the women’s side when Sam Dennis said “Whoa!” to his horses, and condescended to enter into a free and easy conversation with the distinguished onlookers.
For the forty Polish women, the new harvester meant a better life finally, although at the time they hated the red monster of a machine that was about to take their jobs. In payment for the long, sweating work ofthe harvest-field they received only twenty-five cents a day. Probably what some of those women did, when they saw themselves displaced, was to buy a steerage ticket to the country where the red harvester was made; at any rate I found two thousand women in the harvester factories of Chicago, earning $9 a week, and most of them, as it happened, were Polish.
Even Bismarck, the grim old unifier of Germany, yielded to general opinion a short time before his death, and bought an American self-binder. I was told of the incident by C. H. Haney, who made the sale, and who is to-day the head of the Foreign Department of the Harvester Company.
“Bismarck sat in his carriage,” said Haney, “but he ordered his driver to follow the harvester as closely as possible. He looked very old and feeble. For quite a while he watched me operating the machine. Then he made a sign to me to stop.”
“Let me see the thing that ties the knot,” he said.
“I took off the knotter and brought it to his carriage. With a piece of string I showed him how the mechanism worked, and gavehim a bound sheaf, so that he could see a knot that had been tied by the machine. The old man studied it for some time. Then he asked me—‘Can these machines be made in Germany?’
“‘No, your Excellency,’ I said. ‘They can be made only in America.’
“‘Well,’ said Bismarck, speaking very good English, ‘you Yankees are ingenious fellows. This is a wonderful machine.’”
When Loubet was President of France, he and Seth Low, of New York, were walking together over the President’s estate. Loubet pointed to a reaper which was being driven through a yellow wheat-field.
“Do you see that machine?” he remarked. “I bought it from an American company in 1870, and I have used it in every harvest since that time. I have four of those machines now, and I want to say to you that they are the most useful articles that come to us from the United States. I am stating no more than the simple truth when I tell you that without American harvesters, France would starve.”
In still other countries the American reaper has been popular with kings andpotentates. The Sultan of Turkey and the Shah of Persia each bought one during the Chicago World’s Fair. And the young King of Spain, who ordered a mower in 1903, narrowly escaped being minced up by its knives. Being an impulsive youth, he gave a cry of joy at sight of the handsome machine, sprang upon the seat, and lashed the horses without first laying hold of the reins. The horses leaped, and the seventeen-year-old Alphonso went sprawling. Twenty workmen ran to his help, and one level-headed American mechanic caught the reins; so the worst penalty that the boy king had to pay for his recklessness was a tumble and a bad scare.
In Russia, the Czar and the grand dukes at first bought reapers partly as toys and partly as strike-breakers. If the labourers on their estates demanded more pay than fifty cents a week, the manager would drive them in a body to his barn, then throw open the doors and show them five or six red harvesters.
“Do you see these American machines?” he would say. “Unless you go back to work at the same wages, I will reap the grainwith these machines, and you will have no work at all, and no money.” A look at these machine-devils has usually sent the cowed serfs back to their sickles. But here and there it has set them to wondering whether or not a fifty-cent-a-week job was worth having, and so has given them an A B C lesson in American doctrines.
KING ALPHONSO OF SPAIN DRIVING AN AMERICAN SEEDER
Many of the Russian nobility, too, have begun to learn a trifle about democracy from the American harvester agents. There is a certain young baron, for example, whose estate is not far from Riga. Last year, to be in fashion, he bought a Chicago self-binder. When it arrived, there came with it, as usual, an expert mechanic to set it up and start it in the field. In this case, the mechanic was a big German-American named Lutfring, born in Wisconsin, of “Forty Eighter” stock.
The baron was evidently impressed by the manly and dignified bearing of Lutfring, who stood erect while the native workmen were bowing and cringing in obeisance. And when Lutfring said to him, “Now, Baron Hahn, we are all barons in my country, but you’ll pardon me if I do this work in myshirt-sleeves,” the baron was so taken by surprise that he offered to hold Lutfring’s coat. Half an hour later he was at work himself, doing physical labour for the first time in his life. And when the harvester had been well launched upon its sea of yellow grain, he took Lutfring—the baron from Wisconsin—to dinner with him in the castle, and spent the greater part of the afternoon showing him the family portraits.
From such beginnings the harvester has advanced, to make in Russia the greatest conquests it has achieved anywhere. More business is now being done in the land of the Czar than was done with the whole world in 1885. One recent shipment, so large as to break all records, was carried from Chicago to New York on 3,000 freight-cars, and transferred to a chartered fleet of nine steam-ships, $5,000,000 worth of hunger-insurance.
During the Russo-Japanese War a striking incident occurred that showed the respect of the government for American harvesters. Several troop-trains that were on their way to the front were suddenly side-tracked, to make way for a long freight train, loaded with heavy boxes. The war generals andgrand dukes in charge of the troops were furious. Why should their trains be pushed to one side and delayed, to expedite a mere consignment of freight? They telegraphed their indignation to St. Petersburg, and received a reply from Count Witte. “The freight train must pass,” he said. “It is loaded with American harvesters.It means bread.”
As a result of this attitude, there are now some provinces in southern Russia where not even Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson would find much fault with the farming. I have secured the figures for the Province of Kuban, in the Caucasus. Here there are 3,500 thrashing-machines, 5,000 grain-drills, 37,000 harvesters, 50,000 harrows, 70,000 grain-cleaners, and 65,000 cultivators. This is a region where, one generation ago, were only the wooden plough, the sickle, and the flail.
There is, to be sure, still a dense mass of Russians whose yearly habit it is to wait until their wheat is dead ripe, then in a few days of frantic labour to cut down half of it with sickles, leaving the rest to rot in the fields. And in one Caucasian province,richer in its soil than Iowa, it is the custom of the wandering natives to move every three years to a new tract of land, in order to avoid the trouble of fertilising the soil.
“I have seen farmers ploughing in Russia with a piece of board,” said one agent. “And I have seen their thrashing done by the feet of oxen.” But the new idea has been planted and is growing. “Russia is the land of to-morrow,” said another expert. “We have been educating the farmers there for seventeen years, yet we have only scratched the surface. We who have lived among the Russian peasants expect great things from them.”
They have succeeded, then, in their campaign for the supremacy of the American reaper—the Reaper Kings who enlisted the crowned heads and the nobility of Europe in their service. By 1899 Europe was a customer at our farm machinery factories to the extent of twelve millions a year. This figure was doubled in 1906, and is now increasing by leaps and bounds. All told, this one industry has brought us $150,000,000 of foreign money in less than fifty years.
Europe has sent us emigrants—twenty-fivemillion in the past seventy-five years. But we have more than replaced them with labour-saving farm machinery. There were in 1907 as many American harvesters in Europe as would do the work of eleven million men.
If our foreign trade goes ahead at its present rate of speed, we shall soon have Europe hopelessly in our debt, in this exchange of men for machinery. In the past four years, for instance, Europe has sent us less than four million emigrants, but we have sent to Europe, in that time, enough agricultural automata to equal the labour of five million men.
And this means much to Europe. What with her 4,500,000 soldiers and her 4,000,000 public officials, she has to serve more than twenty-five million meals a day to men who are non-producers. She has to clothe and house these governmental millions and their families. How could she do this if it were not for the eleven million man-power of her American harvesters, and the half billion bushels of reaper-wheat that she can buy from other countries?
France must have our harvesters becauseshe has been short of men since the wars of Napoleon. She has half a million soldiers and nine-tenths of a million officials. Even now, with harvesters clicking merrily in all their largest grain-fields, she and Germany cannot feed themselves. Spain at one time exported wheat, but at present is buying 10,000,000 bushels a year. England grows less than a quarter as much as will feed her people. And Russia would be famine-swept from end to end, in spite of her 30,000,000 farmers and her illimitable acres, if she had to depend wholly upon the sickle and the scythe.
But the story is by no means ended with Europe. To-day the sun never sets and the season never closes for American harvesters. They are reaping the fields of Argentina in January, Upper Egypt in February, East India in March, Mexico in April, China in May, Spain in June, Iowa in July, Canada in August, Sweden in September, Norway in October, South Africa in November, and Burma in December. It is always harvest somewhere. The ripple of the ripened grain goes round the world and the American harvester follows it.
Even from this incomplete list one may begin to understand how tremendous is the task that the International Harvester Company has assumed in undertaking to cater to the farmers of fifty countries—to adapt itself to their various customs.
In Holland, for instance, where the grass is short and thick, a mower must cut as close as a barber’s clippers; and in Denmark, where moss grows under the grass, it must cut so high as to leave the moss untouched. The careful Germans of Wisconsin will buy a light harvester, such as the “Milwaukee”; but in Argentina a light machine would be racked into junk in a season. The Argentinians, having raised cattle for generations, rush to the harvest in cowboy fashion. It is the joy of their lives to hitch six or eight horses to a big “header,” crack the long whip, and dash at full gallop over the rough ground.
There are small horses in Russia, big ones in France, oxen in India, and camels in Siberia, and the harvesters must be adapted to each. Certain backward countries demand a reaper without a reel. Australia must have a monster machine called a “stripper,”which combs off the heads of the grain. California and Argentina, because of their dry climate, can use “headers,” a combination of reaper and thrashing-machine. And so the American harvester has become a citizen of the world, adopting the national dress of each country.
The men who are dealing hand to hand with these problems are no longer the Reaper Kings, personally introducing their harvesters through royalty and nobility. These have been succeeded by an army of fifteen hundred American harvester experts. They are all salaried, most of them by the “International”; and their work is to put the farmers of the world to school. They are the teachers of a stupendous kindergarten. As an example of the rapidity with which they are sometimes able to teach, take the Philippines. Nine years ago the Filipinos spent nothing whatever for farming machinery; in 1905 they bought $90,000 worth. Even yet, however, they do not raise enough rice to feed themselves; and although half of them are farmers, only one-twentieth of their land is cultivated.
BISMARCK HAVING HIS FIRST VIEW OF AN AMERICAN SELF-BINDER
“Many of our agents are now living inSiberia with their families,” said C. S. Funk, the General Manager of the International. “They are teaching the mujiks to grow wheat and harvest it. We have similar missionaries in South Africa and South America and most of the countries of the world. Some of them have gone as far as water and rail would carry them, and have then crossed the mountains with their machinery on the backs of mules, so that they might teach the natives how to farm on the American plan. All told, we have more than a thousand such missionaries in foreign countries.”
In Chicago, I met two of the leaders who are in control of this army of teachers. One was a strong-faced young Illinoisan named Couchman, who handles several nations from Hamburg; and the other was a courteous commercial diplomat named La Porte, who supervises France, Spain, Italy, and Northern Africa from his office in Paris. Each is in charge of several hundred American mechanics, who are exiled from home for the sake of our harvester trade.
No renown comes to these men. No medals are pinned upon their coats. Theyare only one regiment in the great pay-envelope army of American mechanics. But they are on the firing-line of the greatest battle against ignorance and famine that has ever been fought. They are the pioneers of the new farmer. To show the world’s peasantry how to work with brains and machinery, to bring them up to the American farmer’s level—that is their task. What could be more essentially American, or more profitable to the human race?
Many European farmers, of course, are easily up to the Kansas level; but the vast majority have been mistaught that the path of the farmer must forever be watered with sweat. Many of them are so cramped by the shackles of drudgery that they cannot even conceive of the value of leisure.
“Why don’t you use a scythe? Then you could cut twice as much,” said Horace Greeley, who was deeply interested in farm machinery and agriculture, to a French peasant. The peasant scratched his head. This was a new idea.
“Because,” he answered stodgily, “I haven’t got twice as much to cut.”
The quick, handy ways of Americanfarmers are seldom found in other countries. A Swiss will put a big stone upon a land-roller, to give it weight, and then walk behind it. To ride on the roller himself does not occur to him. A South German will usually take the reel off his reaper, and handle the grain by hand. Operating five levers is too great a tax upon his mind. An Argentinian wastes his pesos by hiring drivers—one on the seat and another astride one of the horses.
“A Spanish farmer sent for me on one occasion,” an expert told me, “and I found him in great trouble. He had bought a new harvester, and put it togetherinsidehis barn, which had only one narrow door. He had to choose between taking the machine to pieces and pulling his barn down.”
Next to Russia, in the list of countries that this army of experts has won to the harvester, comes Canada. Like the trek of the Boers into the Transvaal, and of the Japanese into Korea, there has been a trek of three hundred thousand American farmers into Western Canada—into the new forty-bushel-to-the-acre wheat-land of Alberta. Most of these emigrants were Minnesotans and Dakotans;therefore they are not poor. They carried two hundred millions across the border. And they are now uprearing a harvester-based civilisation in a vast region that will probably some day have a population of twenty-five million people.
That billiard-table country—Argentina—stands third among the foreign patrons of our Harvester Kings. As a wheat nation it is little older than Alberta. It was only about eighteen years ago, after three centuries of revolution, that Argentina settled down to raise wheat and be good.
To-day the Argentinians raise more wheat than Germany, and their country has become a land of milk and honey. It is a South American Minnesota, but eleven times larger, made fertile by the slow-moving Platte River—a hundred miles wide when it reaches the sea—which moves through its plains like an irrigating canal.
The fourth in rank of our harvester buyers is Australia, which is now sending a yearly tribute of more than a million to the International Company. This profitable reciprocity between Chicago and the island continent was greatly furthered when theInternational bought the sixty-five-acre Osborne plant, at Auburn, New York, which had been remarkably successful in its Australian, as well as its French, trade.
AN AMERICAN HARVESTER AT WORK IN ARGENTINA
Ride along any of the historic roadways of the world and you will see the painted automata from Chicago. “On the road to Mandalay,” and along the Appian Way, and the trail of death that marks the flight of Napoleon from Moscow, you will find these indispensable machines. They are cutting grass and wheat on the battle-fields of Austerlitz and Sedan and Waterloo.
Scutari, near the Adriatic Sea, bars out foreign machinery by law; but Roumania has been using our reapers and mowers for more than fifteen years. Once in a while a reaper is sent over the Andes on muleback; or into Central China via the wheelbarrow express. And now that there are irrigation pumps at the base of the Sphinx, that ancient female, who has been staring at sand-hills for three thousand years may soon look across yellow fields in which American binders are clicking cheerfully. They are for sale, too, in the holy cities of Rome, Jerusalem, Mecca, and Benares—almosteverywhere but Lhasa, the sacred capital of Tibet. So far as I can learn, not one harvesting machine of any kind has entered that land of mystery and superstition. In a few other countries harvesters are not numerous. Very few have been sold or will be in Japan. Here are the smallest farms in the world. A fork and a pair of scissors would seem much more appropriate implements for such tiny plots. Take the whole arable area of Japan, multiply it by three, and you will have only the state of Illinois.
In India, where a family “lives” on fifty cents a week, where one acre makes three farms and an entire farm outfit means no more than a ten-dollar bill, a harvester is still almost as great a curiosity as an Indian tiger is to us. One of the harvester agents told me of a rich Hindoo who bought a complete set of American farm machines, and had them set in a row near his house, apparently regarding them only as curios from a foreign land. They have never been used, and a mob of starving labourers reap his grain by hand within sight of his idle machines.
There are few harvesters in Asia Minor,where farmers live almost like groundhogs—a whole family in one windowless hut of burnt clay. And there are fewer still in Africa, where five million idle acres of fertile land will some day be made to work for the human race.
But since the formation of the big Chicago company, every foreign nation is being reached and taught to throw away its reaping-hooks and to cut its grain in a civilised way. There is now practically no great city anywhere in which a farmer cannot buy one of the handsome red harvesters that have done so much to give a “full dinner-pail” to the civilized nations.
“The world is mine oyster,” says the International Harvester Company. In the first five years of its career, it has sent to foreign countries 920,000 harvesters of all sorts, for which it has been paid $70,000,000. It has doubled its foreign sales and now makes two-third of the harvesters of the world.
What with the profits, and the big orders, and the medals, and the appreciation of monarchs, the Harvester men have found their foreign trade from the first a businessde luxe. In fact, one of the principal reasons why they quit fighting was that they might handle this world commerce in an organised way.
To-day they are not battling with one another on the royal farms of Europe, like gladiators who make sport for emperors. There is more business and less adventure. They have a geography of their own, and have divided the whole world into eight provinces. The “Domestic” Department of the International comprises the United States and Canada and is managed from Chicago. Central Europe, with Russia and Siberia, has its headquarters at Hamburg; Western Europe and Northern Africa are handled from Paris; Great Britain is directed from London; South America from Buenos Ayres; Australia from Melbourne; New Zealand from Christchurch; and Mexico from Mexico City. Such is the commercial empire that has its seat at the foot of Lake Michigan.
Other countries can sell us automobiles and bric-a-brac. They may even get over our tariff wall with hay and cotton and steel and lumber. But they have neverdared to try to sell us farm machinery. Every harvester in the United States was made at home.
GATHERING IN A FINLAND HARVEST
Either one of the two immense harvester plants of Chicago is larger than the combined plants of England, Germany, and France. France, recently, made a brilliant dash toward success in the harvester business. M. Racquet, a journalist, built a great factory at Amiens. He bought the best American machinery. He allied himself with a savings bank and sold stock to the farmers. He was protected by a high tariff. But, alas for his eloquent prospectus! His selling force was too small. His American machinery made more reapers in a month than he could sell in a year. And in 1904 he fell into bankruptcy under a debt of ten million francs.
An American harvester is practically above competition in foreign countries, and commands an exceptional price. As for tariffs, there is a wide open door in Great Britain, Holland, Norway, Bulgaria, Brazil, Servia, and South Germany. But there is a toll-gate fee of $25 per harvester in Hungary, and $20 in France; and for lack of acommercial treaty, the tax has lately been increased in part of Germany, in Hungary, Switzerland, and Rumania. The harvester companies feel that they have a substantial grievance against a government that allows them to be not only hazed and harried at home by tariffs on raw material, but driven out of foreign markets as well. “The whole world is doing business on a single street to-day,” said one harvester maker; “but the trouble is that there are two hundred tariff toll-gates along that street.”
In self-defence, against these tariffs, the “International” has been forced to build two foreign factories, one in Canada and one in Sweden. The Swedish plant is a small affair as yet, making rakes and mowers only; but the Canadian enterprise supports one-tenth of the city of Hamilton, and holds about half the Canadian trade. Its worst vexation, so far as I can tell from a hasty visit, is a lack of Canadian raw materials. Its chains, bolts, nuts, and canvas aprons come from Chicago, its steel and coal from Pittsburg, and three-fourths of its lumber from the Southern states.
The country that perhaps most disturbsthe dreams of our harvester companies, is as far as possible from being one of the great nations. It is scarcely a country at all—only a scrap of coral reef uprisen at the foot of Mexico—Yucatan. Yet this is the land on which the United States depends for binder twine. Manila fibre we can now get from our new co-Americans—the Filipinos; but there is never enough of it to supply the millions of self-binders. Only sisal-hemp yields abundantly enough. And Yucatan is the only spot in the world where sisal can be grown in commercial quantities.
Yucatan is smaller than South Carolina, with not quite the population of Milwaukee. It was once the poorest of the Central American states; but since the arrival of the twine-binder it has become the richest. It sells from fifteen to eighteen million dollars’ worth of sisal a year, and the United States buys it all.Three-fourths of this money is clear profit; and it is an almost incredible fact that the forty Sisal Kings of Yucatan have a larger net income than the owners of the immense International Harvester Company.
Roughly speaking, the American farmer pays Yucatan $12,000,000 a year forstring—mere string, which is used once and then flung away. It is an extortion and a waste, besides being the only un-American factor in the whole harvester business.
How can we save these twelve millions and completely Americanise the trade? This is a problem that William Deering toiled at for twenty years. The Harvester Company has a solution. I saw it at St. Paul—a new factory, which twists twine from flax. A farmer’s son named George H. Ellis has found a quick and cheap way to clean the flax fibre; and at the time I visited the factory there were more than three hundred workers at the spindles. Two million pound of the twine were sold in 1906, so that the enterprise is no longer an experiment. This means, probably, that the farmer of the future will grow his own twine. Instead of yielding tribute to the forty Sisal Kings of Yucatan, he will pay no more than the charges of the railroad and the factory. The flax will be his own.
Yucatan is the only cheap-labour country that has been enriched by the harvester. Elsewhere it is the rule that the common people of the nation must reach a certainhigh level before the harvester trade can begin. Where human labour has little value, it is plainly not worth saving.
IN THE ANCIENT FIELDS OF ALGIERS
For this reason, the harvester is the best barometer of civilisation. It cannot go where slavery and barbarism exist. It will not enter a land where the luxury of the city is built on the plunder of the men and women who work in the fields. Whoever operates a harvester must not only be intelligent: he must be free.
To hundreds of millions of foreigners, the United States is known as “the country where the reapers come from.” They realise, too, that farm machinery represents our type of genius, that it springs out of our national life, and comes from us as inevitably as song comes from Italy or silk from France.
Why? Read the history of the United States. This was the first country, so far as we can know, where men of high intelligence went to worken masseupon the soil, and under such conditions as compelled them to develop a high degree of mechanical skill. The pioneer American farmer had to be his own carpenter and blacksmith. He had tobuild his own house and make his own harness. Consequently, before this Farmers’ Republic was two generations old, the reaper was born in the little workshop behind the barn.
In the Old World every occupation stood alone and aloof. The mechanics knew nothing of the farm and the farmer knew nothing of the workshop. “Every man to his trade,” said Europe, Asia, and Africa. But in the New World, where trades and classes and nationalities were flung together in a heterogenous jumble, there sprang up a race of handy, inventive farmers, set free from the habits and prejudices of their fathers. They were the first body of men who were competent to solve the problem of farm machinery.
And so, the American harvester is much more than a handy device for cutting grain. It is the machine that makes democracy possible. It reaches the average man, and more—it pushes the ladder of prosperity down so far that even the farm labourer can grasp the lowest rung and climb.It has become one of our national emblems. It is as truly and as exclusively American as the Stars and Stripes or the Declaration of Independence.
If theAmerican Farmer went out of business this year he could clean up thirty thousand million dollars. And he would have to sell his farm on credit; for there is not enough money in the whole world to pay him half his price.
Talk of the money-mad Trusts! They might have reason to be mad if they owned the farms, instead of their watered stock. When we remember that the American Farmer earns enough in seventeen days to buy out Standard Oil, and enough in fifty days to wipe Carnegie and the Steel Trust off the industrial map, the story of the trusts seems like the “short and simple annals of the poor.”
One American harvest would buy the kingdom of Belgium, king and all. Two would buy Italy. Three would buy Austria-Hungary.And five, at a spot cash price, would take Russia from the Czar.
Talk of swollen fortunes! With the setting of every sun, the money-box of the American Farmer bulges with the weight of twenty-four new millions. Only the most athletic imagination can conceive of such a torrent of wealth.
Place your finger on the pulse of your wrist and count the heart-beats; one—two—three—four. With every four of those quick throbs, day and night, a thousand dollars clatters into the gold-bin of the American Farmer.
How incomprehensible it would seem to Pericles, who saw Greece in her Golden Age, if he could know that the yearly revenue of his country is now no more than one day’s pay for the men who till the soil of this infant Republic!
Or, how it would amaze a resurrected Christopher Columbus, if he were told that the revenues of Spain and Portugal are not nearly as much as the earnings of the American Farmer’s Hen!
Merely the crumbs that drop from the Farmer’s table (otherwise known asagricultural exports), have brought him in enough of foreign money since 1892, so that he could, if he wished, settle the railway problem once for all, by buying every foot of railroad in the United States.
Such is our New Farmer—a man for whom there is no name in any language. He is as far above the farmer of the story-books, as a 1908 touring-car is above a jinrikisha. Instead of being an ignorant hoe-man in a barn-yard world, he gets the news by daily paper, daily mail, and telephone; and incidentally publishes seven hundred trade journals of his own. Instead of being a moneyless peasant, he pays the interest on the mortgage with the earnings of four days, and his taxes with the earnings of a week. Even this is less of an expense than it seems, for he borrows the money from himself, out of his own banks, and spends the bulk of the tax money around his own properties.
Farming for a business, not for a living—this is themotifof the New Farmer. He is a commercialist—a man of the twentieth century. He works as hard as the Old Farmer did, but in a higher way. Heuses the four M’s—Mind, Money, Machinery and Muscle; but as little of the latter as possible.
Neither is he a Robinson Crusoe of the soil, as the Old Farmer was. His hermit days are over; he is a man among men. The railway, the trolley, the automobile and the top buggy have transformed him into a suburbanite. In fact, his business has become so complex and many-sided, that he touches civilisation at more points and lives a larger life than if he were one of the atoms of a crowded city.
All American farmers, of course, are not of the New variety. The country, like the city, has its slums. But after having made allowance for exceptions, it is still true that the United States is the native land of the New Farmer. He is the most typical human product that this country has produced, and the most important; for, in spite of its egotistical cities, the United States is still a farm-based nation.
There could be no cloth-mills without the wool and cotton of the farm; no sugar factories without beets; no flour-mills without wheat; no beef-packing industry withoutcattle. The real business that is now swinging the whole nation ahead is not the ping-pong traffic of the Stock Exchanges, but the steady output of twenty millions a day from the fields and barn-yards. If this farm output were to be cut off, the towering skyscrapers would fall and the gay palace-hotels would be as desolate as the temple of Thebes.
The brain-working farmer is the man behind prosperity. That is the Big Fact of recent American history. It is he who pays the bills and holds up the national structure in the whirlwind hour of panic. Last year, for instance, while banks were tumbling, the non-hysterical farmer was quietly gathering in a crop that was worth three times all the bank capital in the United States; and since 1902 he and his soil have produced as much new wealth as would support Uncle Sam, at his present rate of living, for fifty years.
What was called “McKinley Prosperity” was really created by the agricultural boom of 1897. There had been a general crop failure in Europe, and the price of wheat had soared above a dollar a bushel. Othernations paid us twelve hundred millions for farm products; and this unparalleled inpouring of foreign money made us the richest and busiest nation in the world.
The supreme fact about the American Farmer is that he has always been just as intelligent and important as anyone else in the Republic. He put fourteen of his sons in the White House; and he did his full share of the working and fighting and thinking and inventing, all the way down from George Washington to James Wilson.
He climbed up by self-help. He got no rebates, nor franchises, nor subsidies. The free land that was given him was worthless until he took it; and he has all along been more hindered than helped by the meddling of public officials.
His best friend has been the maker of farm-machinery. But this is a family matter. Four-fifths of the Harvester Kings were farmers’ sons; and the biggest harvester factory is only a development of the small workshop that always stood beside the barn. There are no two men who are more closely linked together by the ties of blood and business than the farmer and the manwho makes his labour-saving machines. Neither one can hurt the other without doing injury to himself.
The inventor of the modern plough, Jethro Wood, was a wealthy Quaker farmer of New York—a man of such masterful intelligence as to count Clay and Webster among his friends. The late James Oliver, and David Bradley, one of his greatest competitors, were born and bred near the furrowed soil.
McCormick built his first reaper in a blacksmith shop on a farm. So did John F. Sieberling, William N. Whiteley, Lewis Miller and C. W. Marsh. And the man who owned the first of the reaper factories, Dayton S. Morgan, grew up amid the stumps of a New York farm.
The American Farmer has always grownideas, as well as corn and potatoes. That is the secret of his prosperity. It was out in the wheat-fields where the idea of a self-binder flashed upon the brain of John F. Appleby; where Jacob Miller learned to improve the thresher and George Esterley to build the header and Joseph F. Glidden to invent barb-wire.
Before 1850 there was some progress among farmers, but it was as slow as molasses in Alaska. They were free and independent, and little else. They had poor homes, poor farms, poor implements.
Then came the gold-rush to California. What this event did for farmers and the world can scarcely be exaggerated. It opened up the prairies, fed the hungry banks with money, lured the farm labourers westward, and compelled the farmers to use machinery.
Three years later the Crimean War sent the price of wheat soaring, and the farmers had a jubilee of prosperity. Away went the log-cabin, the ox-cart, the grain-cradle, and the flail. In came the frame house, the spring buggy, the reaper, and the thresher. The farmers began to buy labour-saving devices. Better still, they began to invent them.
There is one farm-bred man, named R. C. Haskins, in the Harvester Building in Chicago, who, in his thirty years of salesmanship, has supervised the selling of $275,000,000 worth of harvesters to American farmers. And as for the amount of money represented by our farm machinery of all kinds, now inuse, it is very nearly a billion dollars—a total that no other nation can touch.
To measure American Farmers by the census is now an outgrown method, for the reason that each farmer works with the power of five men. The farm has become a factory. Four-fifths of its work is done by machinery, which explains how we can produce one-fifth of the wheat of the world, half of the cotton, and three-fourths of the corn, although we are only six per cent. of the human race.
The genie who built Aladdin’s palace in a night was the champion hustler of the fairy tale countries. But he was not so tremendously superior to the farm labourer who takes a can of gasolene and cuts fifty cords of wood in a day, or to the man who milks a herd of sixty cows in two hours, by machinery.
To-day farming is not a drudgery. Rather it is a race—an exciting rivalry between the different States. For years Illinois and Iowa have run neck and neck in the raising of corn and oats. Minnesota carries the blue ribbon for wheat, with Kansas breathless in second place. California has shotto the front in the barley race. Texas and Louisiana are tied in the production of rice. Kentucky is the tobacco champion; and New York holds the record for hay and potatoes.
To see the New Farmer at his best, I went to Iowa. No other State has invested so much money—sixty millions—in labour-saving machinery, so it can fairly claim to be the zenith of the farming world.
Here there are twenty thousand women and three hundred thousand men who have made farming a profession. They are producing wealth at the rate of five hundred millions a year, nearly sixteen hundred dollars apiece. How? By throwing the burden of drudgery upon machines.
Iowa is not so old; she will be sixty-two, this year. She is not so large; little England is larger. Yet, with her hog-money she could pay the salaries of all the monarchs of Europe; and with one year’s corn crop she could buy out the “Harvester Trust,” or build three New York Subways.
When the Indians sold Iowa to Uncle Sam they got about eight cents an acre. To give the price exactly, to a cent, it was$2,877,547.87. When this money was paid, there were statesmen who protested that it was too much. Yet this amount was less than the Iowans got for last year’s colts; it was less than one quarter of the value of the eggs in last years nests. Every three months, the Iowa hen pays for Iowa.
Through the courtesy of Mr. Harlan, of the Des Moines Historical Society, I obtained the addresses of nine old settlers, who went into Iowa with ox-carts, before 1850, and who are still living. I found that every one of them had remained on the land and was prosperous. The poorest owned $7,000, the richest $96,000; and their average wealth was $36,000.
These fortunes are not made, as in France, by sacrificial economies. The Iowan is noted as a high liver and a good spender. Here, for instance, is the menu of a chance supper I enjoyed at the home of an Iowa farmer, nine miles from Des Moines: Mashed potatoes, poached eggs, hot biscuits, white bread, fresh butter, honey, jelly, peaches and cream, gooseberry pie, and good coffee—all served on china, with fine linen tablecloth and napkins. Theman of the house was the son of a rack-rented Irish immigrant, who had been reared “on potatoes and salt, mostly.”
I found one young county, born since the Civil War, in which five thousand farmers now own property worth seventy-five millions. They have fourteen thousand horses, seventeen thousand sheep, sixty thousand cattle, and ninety thousand hogs. In the furnishing of the homes in this county, so its Auditor informs me, more than twenty-five thousand dollars have been spent on the one item of pianos.
In a small, out-of-the-way town, called Ames, I came upon a farmers’ college—a veritable Harvard of the soil. Here, on a thousand acres which fed the wild deer and buffalo in the days of Andrew Jackson, is a college that equals Princeton and Vassar combined, in the number of its pupils. Its farm machinery building is the largest of its kind. Five professors are in charge, and it is a curious fact, showing how new the New Farmer is, that these professors are obliged to teach without a text-book. As yet, there is no such thing in the world as a text-book on farm machinery.
The Iowans pay half a million dollars a year to sustain this college. They pay it cheerfully. They pay it with a hurrah. Why? Because it is the biggest money-maker in the State. One little professor, named Holden—the smallest of the whole hundred and forty, is revered by the Iowans as a King Midas of the cornfield. He has shown them how to grow ten bushels more per acre, by using a better quality of seed. This oneidea, in a State where every fourth dollar is a corn dollar, meant an extra twenty millions last year.
First in corn, first in farm machinery, and first in the number of her banks! That is Iowa. There are a few of her villages that have no banks, but they are conscious of their disgrace. They feel naked and ashamed. In all, there are as many banks as post-offices, very nearly; and they are crammed with enough wealth to build three Panama Canals.
“Money is a trifle tight just now,” said an Iowa banker. This was last September. “You see, at this time of year, the farm labourers cause a drain on the currency by keeping their wages in their pockets.” Thissurprising fact did not seem surprising to the banker. He was himself bred on the soil—the son of a farm-hand who had become a rich farmer. But to the financiers of Europe, what an incredible thing is this—that the wages of the farm-labourers should sway the money market up and down.
The pride of Iowa is Des Moines, a city of farm-bred people. It is so young that some of its old men remember when wolf-hunting was good where its one skyscraper stands to-day. It has no ancient history and no souvenirs. A little while ago a lot of industrious people came here poor, and now they are prosperous and still busy—that is the story of Des Moines in a sentence.
In the main hall of the five-domed Capitol at Des Moines is a life-sized painting of a prairie wagon, hauled by oxen. In such a rude conveyance as this most of the early settlers rolled into Iowa, at a gait of two miles an hour. But there are no prairie wagons now, nor oxen. Ten thousand miles of railway criss-cross the State, and make more profit in three months than all the railways of ancient India made last year.
Instead of being tax-ridden serfs, theseIowans pay the total self-governing cost of their Commonwealth by handing over the price of the summer’s hay. Instead of being the prey of money-lenders, they have made Des Moines the Hartford of the West, in which forty-two insurance companies carry a risk of half a billion. And so, in each one of its details, the story of these Corn Kings is staggering to a mere city-dweller, especially to anyone who has cold storage ideas about farmers.
Big Men, too, as well as big corn, are grown in Iowa. Here is a sample group—half educators and half statesmen—John B. Grinnell, Henry Smith Williams, Albert Shaw, Newell Dwight Hillis, Carl Snyder, Emerson Hough, Hamlin Garland, Senators Allison and Dolliver, Leslie M. Shaw, John A. Kasson, Horace Boies, Governor Albert B. Cummins and our Official Farmer—James Wilson. There are now fifteen hundred newspaper men in Iowa. (One of them ships seven carloads of magazines a month.) There are three hundred and fifty architects, two thousand engineers, five thousand doctors, three thousand bankers and brokers, and thirty thousand teachers.
These amazing changes have taken place within the memory of men and women who are now alive.
“I can remember when the first mowing-machine was made in our county,” said Governor Cummins, who is still far from being a man of years.
“I walked eight miles through the forest and sold eggs for three cents a dozen and butter for four cents a pound,” said John Cownie—a well-known figure at the Des Moines Capitol.
One short half-century, and here is the whole paraphernalia of a high civilisation—a fruitage which has usually required the long cultivation of a thousand years.
And Iowa is not a freak State. A traveller hears the same story—from ox-cart to automobile, in almost every region of the prairie West. The various States are only patches of one vast grassy plain where
“painted harvesters, fleet after fleet,Like yachts, career through seas of waving wheat.”
“My first experience with the ‘New Farmer,’ as you call him, was in Texas,” said a Kansas City business man. “I had taken an agency for harvesters in a sectionof Texas that was bigger than several dozen Vermonts, and I made my headquarters in a town called Amarillo. The first morning I went into the bank to get acquainted. While I was there in came a big, roughly dressed man. ‘Come here, Bill,’ said the banker. ‘Maybe you want some farm machinery.’
“‘Maybe I do,’ said the big fellow; so I gave him a catalogue and went on talking with the banker.
“Ten minutes later the big fellow looked up from the catalogue and asked—‘How much do you want for ten of these binders?’ I nearly had a spell of heart failure, but I gasped the price. He said—‘all right; send ’em along.’
“‘Don’t you worry about Bill’s credit,’ said the banker, seeing I looked dazed. ‘He has more than $100,000 in this bank right now.’
“This was my cue to get busy with the big farmer, and before he left the bank he had bought a thresher, four traction engines and half a dozen ploughs.”
Harvesting by machinery has actually become cheaper than the ancient methodof harvesting by slaves. This surprising fact was first brought to the notice of Europeans during the Chicago World’s Fair, when forty-seven foreign Commissioners were taken to the immense Dalrymple farm in North Dakota. Here they saw a wheat-field very nearly a hundred square miles in extent, with three hundred self-binders clicking out the music of the harvest. There were no serfs—no drudges—no barefooted women. And yet they were told that the labour-cost of reaping the wheat wasLESS THAN A CENT A BUSHEL.
It has now become impossible to reap the world’s wheat by hand. As well might we try to carry coal from mines to factories in baskets. Merely to have gathered in our own cereal and hay of last year’s growing, would have been a ten days’ job for every man and woman in the United States, between the ages of twenty and twenty-six. But even if it had been possible to return to hand-labour, in the production of the world’s wheat, the extra cost would have swollen, last year, to a total of $330,000,000—so I am told by a Wisconsin professor who has made a careful study of the costsof harvesting. This amount is more than equal to the entire revenue of the International Harvester Company, in the five years of its existence.
Roughly speaking, the time needed to handle an acre of wheat has been reduced from sixty-one hours to three, by the use of machinery. Hay now requires four hours, instead of twenty-one; oats seven hours, instead of sixty-six; and potatoes thirty-eight hours, instead of one hundred and nine.
It is machinery that has so vastly increased the size of the average American farm. In India, where a farmer’s whole outfit can be bought for ten dollars, the average farm is half an acre or less. In France and Germany it is five acres. In England it is nine. But in the United States—the home of farm machinery, it is one hundred and fifty acres.
Very little has been written about this stupendous prosperity of American farmers. Why? Because it is so recent. The Era of Big Profits began barely ten years ago. There was a time when the blue-ribbon New Farmer was the man who grew wheat in the Red River Valley. He was thearistocrat of the West. His year’s work was no more than a few weeks of ploughing and sowing, and a few days of harvesting. Even this was done easily, sitting on the seat of a machine and driving a team of splendid horses. After harvest, he cashed in, carried a big cheque to the bank, and settled down for a long loaf or a trip to the old homestead in the East.
But it was the bad year of 1893 that first put the farmers, the country over, on the road to affluence. Up to that time it was their usual policy to depend upon a single crop. One farmer planted nothing but wheat; another planted nothing but corn; a third nothing but cotton; and so on. But in 1893 the prices of wheat, corn, and cotton fell so low that the farmers’ profits were wiped out. This disaster set the farmers thinking; and in four years they had changed over to the new policy ofDiversified Farming.
Instead of putting all their work upon one crop, they planted from three to a dozen different crops each year. They manufactured their corn into cattle. They gave the soil a square deal in the matter of fertilisation. They learned to plant better seedand to pay attention to the Weather Bureau. They studied the market reports. And, best of all, they swung over from muscle to machinery, until to-day the value of the machinery on American farms is fully a thousand millions.
All this amazing progress that I have been describing is by no means the best that the New Farmer will do. It is merely what he has done by the aid of machinery. What he will do by the aid ofScienceremains to be seen.
Scientific agriculture is young. It has had to wait until machinery prepared the way, by giving the farmers time to think, and money to spend. The first scientist who took notice of farming was the Frenchman, Lavoisier. He found out the composition of water in 1783, and was in the midst of many discoveries, when a Paris mob hustled him to the guillotine. The famous Liebig next appeared and founded the first agricultural experiment station. Then came Berthelot—the father of synthetic chemistry, with his sensational announcement—“The soil is alive.”
To-day the New Farmer finds himselftouched by Science on all sides. He knows that there are more living things in one pinch of rich soil than there are people on the whole globe. He knows that he can take half a dozen handfuls of earth from different parts of his farm, mix them together, send one thimbleful to a chemist, and find out exactly the kind of crop that will give him the best harvest. And more, now that science has given him a peep into Nature’s factory, he can even feel a sense of kinship between himself and his acres, because he knows that the same elements that redden his blood are painting the green hues on his fields and forests.
There are now fifteen thousand New Farmers who have graduated from agricultural colleges; and since the late Professor W. C. Atwater opened the first American experiment station in 1875, fifty others have sprung into vigorous life. There is also at Washington an Agricultural Department which has become the greatest aggregation of farm-scientists in the world. To maintain this Department Uncle Sam pays grudgingly eleven millions a year. He pays much more than this to give food andblankets to a horde of lazy Indians, or for the building of two or three warships. But it is at least more than is being spent on the New Farmer in any other country.
Step by step farming is becoming a sure and scientific profession. The risks and uncertainties that formerly tossed the farmer back and forth, between hope and despair, are being mastered. The Weather Bureau, which sent half a million warnings last year to the farmers, has already become so skilful that six-sevenths of its predictions come true. In Kansas, wheat-growing has become so sure that there has been no failure for thirteen years. And in the vast South-West, the trick of irrigation is changing the man-killing desert into a Farmers’ paradise, where there is nothing so punctual as the crops.