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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41953 ***
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 41953-h.htm or 41953-h.zip:
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/41953/41953-h/41953-h.htm)
+      or
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/41953/41953-h.zip)
+
+
+      Images of the original pages are available through
+      Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA),
+      Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University, see
+      http://chla.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=chla;idno=3139668
+      and
+      Internet Archive/American Libraries, see
+      http://archive.org/details/cyrushallmccormi00cass
+
+
+
+
+
+CYRUS HALL McCORMICK
+
+His Life and Work
+
+
+[Illustration: C. H. McCormick (signature)]
+
+
+CYRUS HALL McCORMICK
+
+His Life and Work
+
+by
+
+HERBERT N. CASSON
+
+Author of
+"The Romance of Steel," "The Romance of the Reaper," etc.
+
+Illustrated
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Chicago
+A. C. McClurg & Co.
+1909
+
+Copyright
+A. C. McClurg & Co.
+1909
+
+Published October, 1909
+
+Entered at Stationers' Hall, London, England
+
+The Lakeside Press
+R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company
+Chicago
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+Whoever wishes to understand the making of the United States must read
+the life of Cyrus Hall McCormick. No other one man so truly represented
+the dawn of the industrial era,--the grapple of the pioneer with the
+crudities of a new country, the replacing of muscle with machinery, and
+the establishment of better ways and better times in farm and city
+alike. Beginning exactly one hundred years ago, the life of McCormick
+spanned the heroic period of our industrial advancement, when great
+things were done by great individuals. To know McCormick is to know what
+type of man it was who created the United States of the nineteenth
+century. And now that a new century has arrived, with a new type of
+business development, it may be especially instructive to review a life
+that was so structural and so fundamental.
+
+As Professor Simon Newcomb has observed, "It is impressive to think how
+few men we should have had to remove from the earth during the past
+three centuries to have stopped the advance of our civilization." From
+this point of view, there are few, if any, who will appear to be more
+indispensable than McCormick. He was not brilliant. He was not
+picturesque. He was no caterer for fame or favor. But he was as
+necessary as bread. He fed his country as truly as Washington created it
+and Lincoln preserved it. He abolished our agricultural peasantry so
+effectively that we have had to import our muscle from foreign countries
+ever since. And he added an immense province to the new empire of mind
+over matter, the expansion of which has been and is now the highest and
+most important of all human endeavors.
+
+As the master builder of the modern business of manufacturing farm
+machinery, McCormick set in motion so many forces of human betterment
+that the fruitfulness of his life can never be fully told. There are
+to-day in all countries more than one hundred thousand patents for
+inventions that were meant to lighten the labor of the farmer. And the
+cereal crop of the world has risen with incredible gains, until this
+year its value will be not far from ten thousand millions of
+dollars,--very nearly the equivalent of all the gold in coin and jewelry
+and bullion.
+
+So, if there is not power and fascination in this story, it will be the
+fault of the story-teller, and not of his theme. The story itself is
+destined to be told and retold. It cannot be forgotten, because it is
+one of those rare life-histories that blazon out the peculiar genius of
+the nation under the stress of a new experience. As it is passed on from
+generation to generation, it may finally be polished into an Epic of the
+Wheat,--the tale of Man's long wrestle with Famine, and how he won at
+last by creating a world-wide system for the production and distribution
+of the Bread.
+
+    H. N. C.
+
+CHICAGO, _September 1, 1909_.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+    CHAPTER                                      PAGE
+       I. THE WORLD'S NEED OF A REAPER              1
+
+      II. THE McCORMICK HOME                       13
+
+     III. THE INVENTION OF THE REAPER              26
+
+      IV. SIXTEEN YEARS OF PIONEERING              48
+
+       V. THE BUILDING OF THE REAPER BUSINESS      68
+
+      VI. THE STRUGGLE TO PROTECT PATENTS          91
+
+     VII. THE EVOLUTION OF THE REAPER             105
+
+    VIII. THE CONQUEST OF EUROPE                  123
+
+      IX. McCORMICK AS A MANUFACTURER             139
+
+       X. CYRUS H. McCORMICK AS A MAN             154
+
+      XI. THE REAPER AND THE NATION               188
+
+     XII. THE REAPER AND THE WORLD                203
+
+    XIII. GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD        234
+
+          INDEX                                   249
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+    PORTRAIT OF CYRUS HALL McCORMICK                      _Frontispiece_
+
+    OLD BLACKSMITH SHOP ON WALNUT GROVE FARM, VIRGINIA                14
+
+    THE OLD McCORMICK HOMESTEAD, WALNUT GROVE FARM, ROCKBRIDGE
+        COUNTY, VIRGINIA                                              18
+
+    PORTRAIT OF ROBERT McCORMICK                                      22
+
+    PORTRAIT OF MRS. MARY ANN HALL McCORMICK                          24
+
+    NEW PROVIDENCE CHURCH, ROCKBRIDGE COUNTY, VIRGINIA                28
+
+    FACSIMILES FROM MANUSCRIPT BY MR. McCORMICK, GIVING HIS OWN
+        ACCOUNT OF THE ORIGIN OF THE REAPER                           30
+
+    FIRST PRACTICAL REAPING MACHINE                                   34
+
+    THE FIELD ON WHICH THE FIRST McCORMICK REAPER WAS TRIED,
+        WALNUT GROVE FARM, VIRGINIA                                   38
+
+    INTERIOR OF BLACKSMITH SHOP IN WHICH C. H. McCORMICK BUILT
+        HIS FIRST REAPER                                              42
+
+    REAPING WITH CRUDE KNIVES IN INDIA                                50
+
+    REAPING WITH SICKLES IN ALGERIA                                   56
+
+    REAPING WITH CRADLES IN ILLINOIS                                  60
+
+    AN EARLY ADVERTISEMENT FOR McCORMICK'S PATENT VIRGINIA REAPER     64
+
+    THE McCORMICK REAPER OF 1847, ON WHICH SEATS WERE PLACED FOR
+        THE DRIVER AND THE RAKER                                      70
+
+    PORTRAIT OF CYRUS HALL McCORMICK, 1839                            76
+
+    PANORAMIC VIEW SHOWING THE McCORMICK REAPER WORKS BEFORE THE
+        CHICAGO FIRE OF 1871, ON CHICAGO RIVER, EAST OF RUSH
+        STREET BRIDGE                                                 82
+
+    MEN OF PROGRESS                                                   96
+
+    THE FIRST McCORMICK SELF-RAKE REAPING MACHINE                    112
+
+    PORTRAIT OF CYRUS HALL McCORMICK, 1858                           120
+
+    PORTRAIT OF CYRUS HALL McCORMICK, 1867                           136
+
+    McCORMICK REAPER CUTTING ON A SIDE HILL IN PENNSYLVANIA          144
+
+    REAPER DRAWN BY OXEN IN ALGERIA                                  150
+
+    THE REAPER IN HEAVY GRAIN                                        166
+
+    HARVESTING NEAR SPOKANE, WASHINGTON                              174
+
+    PORTRAIT OF CYRUS HALL McCORMICK, 1883                           182
+
+    THE WORKS OF THE McCORMICK HARVESTING MACHINE COMPANY            190
+
+    McCORMICK REAPER IN USE IN RUSSIA                                196
+
+    CHART SHOWING RELATIVE DISTRIBUTION OF VALUES BY PRODUCING
+        COUNTRIES OF 1908 OF WORLD'S PRODUCTION OF FIVE
+        PRINCIPAL GRAINS                                             206
+
+    CHART SHOWING RELATIVE VALUES IN 1908 OF THE WORLD'S
+        PRODUCTION OF THE FIVE PRINCIPAL GRAINS                      206
+
+    MAMMOTH WHEAT-FIELD IN SOUTH DAKOTA WITH TWENTY HARVESTERS
+        IN LINE                                                      214
+
+    HARVESTING IN ROUMANIA                                           222
+
+    HARVESTING HEAVY GRAIN, SOUTH AMERICA                            230
+
+    INDIANS REAPING THEIR HARVEST, WHITE EARTH, MINNESOTA            236
+
+    A HARVEST SCENE UPON A RUSSIAN ESTATE                            242
+
+
+
+
+CYRUS HALL McCORMICK HIS LIFE AND WORK
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE WORLD'S NEED OF A REAPER
+
+
+Either by a very strange coincidence, or as a phenomenon of the instinct
+of self-preservation, the year 1809, which was marked by famine and
+tragedy in almost every quarter of the globe, was also a most prolific
+birthyear for men of genius. Into this year came Poe, Blackie, and
+Tennyson, the poet laureates of America, Scotland, and England; Chopin
+and Mendelssohn, the apostles of sweeter music; Lincoln, who kept the
+United States united; Baron Haussemann, the beautifier of Paris;
+Proudhon, the prophet of communism; Lord Houghton, who did much in
+science, and Darwin, who did most; FitzGerald, who made known the
+literature of Persia; Bonar, who wrote hymns; Kinglake, who wrote
+histories; Holmes, who wrote sentiment and humor; Gladstone, who
+ennobled the politics of the British empire; and McCormick, who gave the
+world cheap bread, and whose life-story is now set before us in the
+following pages.
+
+None of these eminent men, except Lincoln, began life in as remote and
+secluded a corner of the world as McCormick. His father's farm was at
+the northern edge of Rockbridge County, Virginia, in a long, thin strip
+of fairly fertile land that lay crumpled between the Blue Ridge on the
+east and the Alleghanies on the west. It was eighteen miles south of the
+nearest town of Staunton, and a hundred miles from the Atlantic coast.
+The whole region was a quiet, industrious valley, whose only local
+tragedy had been an Indian massacre in 1764, in which eighty white
+settlers had been put to death by a horde of savages.
+
+The older men and women of 1809 could remember when wolf-heads were used
+as currency; and when the stocks and the ducking stool stood in the main
+street of Staunton. Also, they were fond of telling how the farmers of
+the valley, when they heard that the Revolution had begun in
+Massachusetts, carted 137 barrels of flour to Frederick, one hundred
+miles north, and ordered it sent forthwith to the needy people of
+Boston. This grew to be one of the most popular tales of local
+history,--an epic of the patriots who fought for liberty, not with
+gunpowder but flour.
+
+By 1809 the more severe hardships of the pioneer days had been overcome.
+Houses were still built of logs, but they were larger and better
+furnished. In the McCormick homestead, for instance, there was a parlor
+which had the dignity of mahogany furniture, and the luxury of books and
+a carpet. The next-door county of Augusta boasted of thirteen carriages
+and one hundred and two cut-glass decanters. And the chief sources of
+excitement had evolved from Indian raids and wolf-hunts into elections,
+lotteries, and litigation.
+
+It was perhaps fortunate for the child McCormick that he was born in
+such an out-of-the-way nook, for the reason that in 1809 almost the
+whole civilized world was in a turmoil. In England mobs of unemployed
+men and women were either begging for bread or smashing the new machines
+that had displaced them in the factories. In the Tyrol, sixty thousand
+peasants, who had revolted from the intolerable tyranny of the
+Bavarians, were being beaten into submission. In Servia, the Turks were
+striking down a rebellion by building a pyramid of thirty thousand
+Servian skulls,--a tragic pile which may still be seen midway between
+Belgrade and Stamboul. Sweden was being trampled under the feet of a
+Russian army; and the greater part of Holland, Austria, Germany, and
+Spain had been so scourged by the hosts of Napoleon as to be one vast
+shamble of misery and blood.
+
+In the United States there was no war, but there certainly did exist an
+abnormal surplus of adversity. The young republic, which had fewer white
+citizens than the two cities of New York and Chicago possess to-day, was
+being terrorized in the West by the Indian Confederacy of Tecumseh; and
+its flag had been flouted by England, France, and the Barbary pirates.
+Its total revenue was much less than the value of last year's hay crop
+in Vermont. It was desperately poor, with its people housed for the most
+part in log cabins, clothed in homespun, and fed every winter on food
+that would cause a riot in any modern penitentiary.
+
+There was no such thing known, except in dreams, as the use of machinery
+in the cultivation of the soil. The average farmer, in all civilized
+countries, believed that an iron plow would poison the soil. He planted
+his grain by the phases of the moon; kept his cows outside in winter;
+and was unaware that glanders was contagious. Joseph Jenks, of Lynn, had
+invented the scythe in 1655, "for the more speedy cutting of grasse";
+and a Scotchman had improved it into the grain cradle. But the greater
+part of the grain in all countries was, a century ago, being cut by the
+same little hand sickle that the Egyptians had used on the banks of the
+Nile and the Babylonians in the valley of the Euphrates.
+
+The wise public men of that day knew how urgent was the need of better
+methods in farming. Fifteen years before, George Washington had said,
+"I know of no pursuit in which more real and important service can be
+rendered to any country than by improving its agriculture." But it was
+generally believed that the task was hopeless; and any effort to
+encourage inventors had hitherto been a failure. An English society, for
+instance, had offered a prize of one hundred and fifty dollars for a
+better method of reaping grain, and the only answer it received was from
+a traveller who had seen the Belgians reaping with a two-foot scythe and
+a cane; the cane was used to push the grain back before it was cut, so
+that more grain could be cut at a blow. As to whether or not he received
+the prize for this discovery is not recorded.
+
+The city of New York in 1809 was not larger than the Des Moines of
+to-day, and not nearly so well built and prosperous. Two miles to the
+north of it, through swamps and forests, lay the clearing that is now
+known as Herald Square. There was no street railway, nor cooking range,
+nor petroleum, nor savings bank, nor friction match, nor steel plow,
+neither in New York nor anywhere else. And the one pride and boast of
+the city was Fulton's new steamboat, the _Clermont_, which could waddle
+to Albany and back, if all went well, in three days or possibly four.
+
+As for social conditions, they were so hopelessly bad that few had the
+heart to improve them. The house that we call a "slum tenement" to-day
+would have made an average American hotel in 1809. Rudeness and rowdyism
+were the rule. Drunkenness was as common, and as little considered, as
+smoking is at the present time; there was no organized opposition to it
+of any kind, except one little temperance society at Saratoga. There
+were no sewers, and much of the water was drawn from putrid wells. Many
+faces were pitted with small-pox. Cholera and yellow jack or strange
+hunger-fevers cut wide swaths of death again and again among the
+helpless people. There was no science, of course, and no sanitation, and
+no medical knowledge except a medley of drastic measures which were apt
+to be as dangerous as the disease.
+
+The desperate struggle to survive appears to have been so intense that
+there was little or no social sympathy. There was very little pity for
+the pauper,--he was auctioned off to be half starved by the lowest
+bidder; and for the criminal there was no feeling except the utmost
+repulsion and abhorrence. It was found, for instance, in 1809, that in
+the jail in New York there were seventy-two women, white and black, in
+one chairless, bedless room, all kept in order by a keeper with a whip,
+and fed like cattle from a tub of mush, some eating with spoons and some
+with cups and some with their unwashed hands. And the men's room of that
+jail, says this report, "is worse than the women's."
+
+Also, in 1809, the chronic quantity of misery had been terribly
+augmented by the Embargo,--that most ruinous invention of President
+Jefferson, whereby American ships were swept from the sea, with a loss
+to capital of twelve millions a year, and a loss to labor of thirty
+thousand places of employment. According to this amazing act of
+political folly, every market-boat sailing from New Jersey to New
+York--every sailboat or canoe--had to give bail to the federal
+government before it dared to leave the dock.
+
+Whatever flimsy little structure of industry had been built up in thirty
+years of independence, was thrown prostrate by this Embargo. A hundred
+thousand men stood on the streets with helpless hands, begging for work
+or bread. The jails were jammed with debtors,--1,300 in New York alone.
+The newspapers were overrun by bankruptcy notices. The coffee-houses
+were empty. The ships lay mouldering at the docks. In those
+hand-to-mouth days there was no piled-up reserve of food or wealth,--no
+range of towering wheat-banks at every port; and the seaboard cities lay
+for a time as desolate as though they had been ravaged by a pestilence.
+
+In that darkest year the hardscrabble little republic learned and
+remembered one of its most important lessons,--the fact that liberty and
+independence are not enough. Here it was, an absolutely free
+nation,--_the only free civilized country in the world_,--and yet as
+miserable and poor and hungry as though it were a mere province of a
+European empire. So, by degrees, there came a change in the American
+point of view,--a swing from politicalism to industrialism. The mass of
+the people were now surfeited with oratory and politics and war. They
+began to settle down to hard facts and hard work. Instead of declaiming
+about the rights of man, they began to build roads and weave cloth and
+organize stock companies. Slowly they came to realize that a second
+Revolution must be wrought,--a Revolution that would enable them to
+write a Declaration of Independence against Hunger and Hardship and Hand
+Labor.
+
+Up to the year 1809 the chief topics of interest in American
+legislatures and grocery stores were the blockades, the Embargo, the
+treaties, the badness of Napoleon, the blunders of Jefferson, and the
+rudeness of England and France. But after that year the chief topics of
+interest came to be of a wholly different sort. They were such as the
+tariff, the currency, the building of factories and canals, the opening
+of public lands, the problem of slavery, and the development of the
+West. The hardy, victorious little nation began to talk less and work
+more; and so by a natural evolution of thought the era of George
+Washington and Thomas Jefferson came to an end, and the era of Robert
+Fulton and Peter Cooper and Cyrus Hall McCormick was in its dawn.
+
+From 1810 to 1820 there was a rush to the land. Twenty million acres
+were sold, in most cases for two dollars an acre. Thousands of men who
+had been sailors turned their backs on the sea and learned to till the
+soil. Town laborers, too, whose wages had been fifty cents a day,
+tramped westward along the Indian trails and seized upon scraps of land
+that lay ownerless. Nine out of ten Americans began to farm with the
+utmost energy and perseverance,--_but with what tools?_ With the wooden
+plow, the sickle, the scythe, and the flail, the same rude hand-labor
+tools that the nations of antiquity had tried to farm with,--the tools
+of failure and slavery and famine.
+
+Such was the predicament of this republic for the first seventy-five
+years of its life. It could not develop beyond the struggle for food. It
+was chained to the bread-line. It could not feed itself. Not even
+nine-tenths of its people could produce enough grain to satisfy its
+hunger. Again and again, until 1858, wheat had to be imported by this
+nation of farmers. So, as we now look back over those basic years, from
+the summit of the twentieth century, we can see how timely an event it
+was that in the dark year 1809 the inventor of the Reaper was born.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE McCORMICK HOME
+
+
+IF we wish to solve the riddle of the Reaper,--to know why it was not
+invented in any of the older nations that rose to greatness and perished
+in so many instances for lack of bread,--we can find the key to the
+answer in the home and the ancestry of the McCormicks. We shall see that
+the family into which he was born represented in the highest degree that
+new species of farmer,--self-reliant, studious, enterprising, and
+inventive,--which was developed in the pioneer period of American
+history.
+
+Robert McCormick, the father of Cyrus, was in his most prosperous days
+the owner of four farms, having in all 1,800 acres. But his acres were
+only one-half of his interests. He owned as well two grist-mills, two
+sawmills, a smelting-furnace, a distillery, and a blacksmith-shop. He
+did much more than till the soil. He hammered iron and shaped wood, and
+did both well, as those can testify who have seen an iron crane and
+walnut cabinet that were made by his hands. More than this, he invented
+new types of farm machinery,--a hemp-brake, a clover huller, a bellows,
+and a threshing-machine.
+
+The little log workshop still stands where Robert McCormick and his sons
+hammered and tinkered on rainy days. It is about twenty-four feet
+square, with an uneven floor, and a heavy door that was hung in place by
+home-made nails and home-made hinges. There was a forge on either side
+of the chimney, so that two men could work at the same time; and one
+small rusted anvil is all that now remains of its equipment.
+
+[Illustration: OLD BLACKSMITH SHOP ON WALNUT GROVE FARM, VIRGINIA
+
+In this shop the first practical reaping machine was built by Cyrus Hall
+McCormick in 1831]
+
+As for the McCormick homestead itself, there were so many manufacturing
+activities in it that it was literally half a home and half a factory.
+Shoes were cobbled, cotton, flax, and wool were spun into yarn, woven
+into cloth, and fashioned into clothes for the whole family. The
+stockings and mitts and caps were all home-made, and so was the cradle
+in which the eight children were rocked. What with the moulding of
+candles, and sewing of carpet-rags, and curing of hams, and boiling
+of soap, and drying of herbs, and stringing of apples, the McCormick
+home was practically a school of many trades for the people who lived
+under its roof.
+
+Robert McCormick was an educated man. He was not at all like the poor
+serfs who tilled the soil of Europe. He belonged to the same general
+class as those other eminent farmers,--Washington, Jefferson, Adams,
+Webster, and Clay. He was a reader of deep books and a student of
+astronomy. Lawyers and clergymen would frequently drive to his house to
+consult with him. And in mechanical pursuits he had an unusual degree of
+skill, having been born the son of a weaver and accustomed from babyhood
+to the use of machinery.
+
+He was a gentle, reflective man, with a genius for self-reliance in any
+great or little emergency. When a new stone church was built, and he
+found that his pew was so dark that he could not see to read the hymns,
+he promptly cut a small window in the wall,--a peculiarity which is
+still pointed out to visitors. On another occasion, with this same
+spirit of resourcefulness, he drove the spectre of yellow fever from
+the home. This dreaded disease was gathering in a full harvest in the
+farm-houses of the county. It had cut down three of Mrs. McCormick's
+family,--her father, mother, and brother,--and had swung its fatal
+scythe toward the boy Cyrus, who was then five years of age. When the
+doctor was called, he insisted that the child should be bled. "But you
+bled all the others, and they died," said Robert McCormick quietly;
+"I'll have no more bleedings." No remedy for yellow fever, except
+bleeding, was known to the doctors of a century ago, so Robert McCormick
+at once invented a remedy. He devised a treatment of hot baths, hot
+teas, and bitter herbs; and Cyrus was rescued from the fever and
+restored to perfect health.
+
+Such a man as Robert McCormick would have been practically impossible in
+any other country at that time. There, in that isolated hollow of the
+Virginian mountains, he was a citizen of a free country. His vote had
+helped to make Thomas Jefferson President. He was a proprietor, not a
+serf nor a tenant. He was not compelled to divide up every cord of wood
+and bushel of wheat with a king or a landlord. Whatever he earned was
+his own. He was an American; and thus, in the endless chain of cause and
+effect, we can trace the origin of the Reaper back, if we wish, to
+George Washington and Christopher Columbus.
+
+The whole spirit of the young republic pushed towards the invention of
+labor-saving machinery,--towards replacing the hoe with the steel plow,
+the needle with the sewing-machine, the puddling-furnace with the
+Bessemer converter, the sickle with the Reaper. And it is fair to say
+that the social forces that represented the American spirit were focused
+to a remarkable degree in the home in which Cyrus H. McCormick had his
+birth and his education.
+
+There was another contributing influence, too, in the making of
+McCormick,--the fact that the blood of his father and mother came to him
+in a pure strain of Scotch-Irish. It was this inheritance that endowed
+him with the tenacity and unconquerable resiliency that enabled him not
+only to invent a new machine, but to create a new industry and hold
+fast to it against all comers.
+
+The Scotch-Irish! The full story of what the United States owes to this
+fire-hardened race has never yet been told,--it is a tale that will some
+day be expanded into a fascinating volume of American history. It is not
+possible to understand either the character or the success of McCormick
+without knowing the Scotch-Irish influences that shaped him.
+
+The one man who did more to launch the Scotch-Irish on their conquering
+way, so it appears, was John Knox. This preacher-statesman, "who never
+feared the face of man," forced Queen Mary from her throne, and
+established self-government and a pure religion in Scotland, about
+seventy-five years after the discovery of America. This brought English
+armies down upon the Scotch, and for very nearly two centuries the
+struggle was bitter and desperate, the Scotch refusing to compromise or
+to bate one jot or tittle of a covenant which many of them had signed
+with their blood.
+
+[Illustration: THE OLD McCORMICK HOMESTEAD, WALNUT GROVE FARM,
+ROCKBRIDGE COUNTY, VIRGINIA]
+
+At the height of this conflict, about 300,000 of these Scotch
+Covenanters left their ravaged country and set out in a fleet of little
+vessels for the north of Ireland. Here they settled in the barren and
+boggy province of Ulster, and presto! in the course of two generations
+Ulster became the most prosperous, moral, and intelligent section of the
+British empire. Its people were, beyond a doubt, the best educated
+masses of that period, either in Great Britain or anywhere else. They
+were the most skilful of farmers. They wove woollen cloth and the finest
+of linen. They built schools and churches and factories. But in 1698,
+the English Parliament, jealous of such progressiveness, passed laws
+against their manufacturing, and Ulster was overrun, as Scotland had
+been, with the police and the soldiery of England.
+
+The Scotch-Irish fought, of course, even against such odds. They had
+never learned how to submit. But as the devastation of Ulster continued,
+they resolved to do as their great-grandfathers had done,--emigrate to a
+new country. They had heard good reports of America, through several of
+their leaders who had been banished there by the British government. So
+they packed up their movable property, and set out across the wide
+uncharted Atlantic Ocean in an exodus for liberty of industry and
+liberty of conscience.
+
+By the year 1776 there were more than 500,000 of the Scotch-Irish in
+this country. They went first across the Alleghanies, into the new lands
+of western Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Texas. Beyond all
+question, they were the hardiest and ablest founders of the republic.
+They dissolved the rule of the Cavaliers in Virginia; and in the little
+hamlet of Mecklenburg they planned the first defiance of Great Britain
+and struck the key-note of the Revolution. They gave Washington
+thirty-nine of his generals, three out of four members of his cabinet,
+and three out of five judges of the first Supreme Court.
+
+Of all classes of settlers in the thirteen colonies, they were the best
+prepared and most willing for the struggle with England, for the reason
+that they had begun to fight for liberty two hundred and fifty years
+before the battle of Bunker Hill. They were not amateurs in the work of
+revolution. They were veterans. And so, because they were pioneers and
+patriots by nature and inheritance, the Scotch-Irish became, in the
+words of John Fiske, "the main strength of our American democracy."
+
+Naturally, they were pathfinders in industry as well as in the matter of
+self-government, as many of them had been manufacturers in Ireland.
+"Thousands of the best manufacturers and weavers in Ulster went to seek
+their bread in America," writes Froude, "and they carried their art and
+their tools with them." In one instance, by the failure of the woollen
+trade, 20,000 of them were driven to the United States. As might have
+been expected, these Scotch-Irish Americans have produced not only five
+of our Presidents, but also such merchants as A. T. Stewart; such
+publishers as Harper, Bonner, Scribner, and McClurg; and such inventors
+as Joseph Henry, Morse, Fulton, and McCormick. They were possibly the
+first large body of people who had ever been driven from manufacturing
+into farming; and it was not at all surprising, therefore, that the new
+profession of making farm machinery should have been born upon a
+Scotch-Irish farm.
+
+As for Cyrus H. McCormick, he represented the fourth generation of
+American McCormicks. His great-grandfather, Thomas McCormick, quit
+Ulster in the troublous days of 1735. He was a soldier at Londonderry;
+and later became noted as an Indian fighter in Pennsylvania. His son
+Robert, who moved south to Virginia, carried a rifle for American
+independence at the battle of Guilford Court-house, North Carolina, in
+1781. He was a farmer and weaver by occupation, a typical Ulsterman,
+whose farm was a busy workshop of invention and manufacturing.
+
+[Illustration: ROBERT McCORMICK]
+
+On his mother's side, too, Cyrus McCormick had behind him a line of
+battling Scotch-Irish. She was the daughter of a Virginian farmer named
+Patrick Hall, one of whose forefathers had been driven out of Armagh by
+the massacre of 1641. Patrick Hall was the leader of the old-school
+Presbyterians in his region of Virginia. So rigid was he in his loyalty
+to the faith of the Covenanters, that once when a new minister came
+to preach in the little kirk, and lined out a Watts hymn instead of a
+psalm of David, Patrick Hall picked up his hat and strode out, followed
+by a goodly part of the congregation. He at once built upon his own farm
+a new church of limestone, in which no such levity as hymn-singing was
+permitted.
+
+Cyrus McCormick's mother inherited her father's strength of character,
+without his severity. She was a thorough Celt, impulsive, free-spoken,
+and highly imaginative. Judging from the stories about her that are
+remembered in the neighborhood, it is evident that she was a woman of
+exceptional quality of mind. She was not as studious as her husband, but
+quicker and more ambitious. As a girl, she had been strikingly handsome,
+with a tall and commanding figure. She was saving and shrewd, with the
+Scotch-Irish passion for "getting ahead." She allowed no idle moments in
+the home. If the children were dressed before breakfast was ready, out
+they went to cut wood or weed the garden. She knew the profession of
+housekeeping in all its old-fashioned complexity; and she worked at it
+from dawn to starlight, with no rest except the relief of flitting from
+one task to another.
+
+"Mrs. McCormick came riding by our farm one day," said an aged neighbor,
+"at a time when my father and mother were hurrying to save some hay from
+a coming rain-storm. 'If you don't hurry up you'll be too late,' she
+said; and then tying her horse to the fence she picked up a rake and
+helped with the hay until it was all in the barn. That's the kind of
+woman she was,--always full of energy and ready to help."
+
+[Illustration: MRS. MARY ANN HALL McCORMICK]
+
+But Mrs. McCormick was much more than industrious. She had a fine pride
+in the ownership of beautiful things,--flowers and handsome clothes and
+silverware and mahogany furniture. Her flock of peacocks was one of the
+sights of the county; and in her later life, when she was for ten years
+the sole manager of the farm, she was accustomed to drive about in a
+wonderful carriage with folding steps, drawn by prancing horses and
+driven by a stately colored coachman,--an equipage of so much style
+and grandeur that it is still remembered by the neighbors. "She loved to
+drive fast," said one old lady; "and I was much impressed as a little
+girl with the startling way in which her horses would come clattering
+and dancing up to the door."
+
+Thus there was in the McCormick home the spiritual and imaginative
+element that was vital to the development of a man whose whole life was
+a battle against the prejudices and "impossibilities" of the world.
+Cyrus McCormick was predestined, we may legitimately say, by the
+conditions of his birth, to accomplish his great work. From his father
+he had a specific training as an inventor; from his mother he had
+executive ability and ambition; from his Scotch-Irish ancestry he had
+the dogged tenacity that defied defeat; and from the wheat-fields that
+environed his home came the call for the Reaper, to lighten the heavy
+drudgery of the harvest.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE INVENTION OF THE REAPER
+
+
+Not far from the McCormick homestead was the "Old Field School," built
+of logs and with a part of one of the upper logs cut out to provide a
+window. Here the boy Cyrus sat on a slab bench and studied five books as
+though they were the only books in the world,--Murray's Grammar,
+Dilworth's Arithmetic, Webster's Spelling Book, the Shorter Catechism,
+and the Bible.
+
+He was a strong-limbed, self-contained, serious-natured boy, always
+profoundly intent upon what he was doing. Even at the age of fifteen he
+was inventive. One winter morning he brought to school a most elaborate
+map of the world, showing the two hemispheres side by side. First he had
+drawn it in ink upon paper, then pasted the paper upon linen, and hung
+it upon two varnished rollers. This map, which is still preserved,
+reveals a remarkable degree of skill and patience; and the fact that a
+mere lad could conceive of and create such a map was a week's wonder in
+the little community. "That boy," declared the teacher, "is beyond me."
+
+At about this time he undertook to do a man's work in the reaping of the
+wheat, and here he discovered that to swing a cradle against a field of
+grain under a hot summer sun was of all farming drudgeries the severest.
+Both his back and his brain rebelled against it. One thing at least he
+could do,--he could make a smaller cradle, that would be easier to
+swing; and he did this, whittling away in the evening in the little log
+workshop.
+
+"Cyrus was a natural mechanical genius," said an old laborer who had
+worked on the McCormick farm. "He was always trying to invent
+something." "He was a young man of great and superior talents," said a
+neighbor. At eighteen he studied the profession of surveying, and made a
+quadrant for his own use. This is still preserved, and bears witness to
+his good workmanship. From this time until his twenty-second year, there
+is nothing of exceptional interest recorded of him. He had grown to be
+a tall, muscular, dignified young man. The neighbors, in later years,
+remembered him mainly because he was so well dressed on Sundays, in
+broadcloth coat and beaver hat, and because of his fine treble voice as
+he led the singing in the country church.
+
+Even as a youth he was absorbed in his inventions and business projects.
+He had no time for gayeties. In a letter written from Kentucky to a
+cousin, Adam McChesney, in 1831, he says: "Mr. Hart has two fine
+daughters, right pretty, very smart, and as rich probably as you would
+wish; but alas! I have other business to attend to."
+
+[Illustration: NEW PROVIDENCE CHURCH, ROCKBRIDGE COUNTY, VIRGINIA]
+
+Ever since Cyrus was a child of seven, it had been the most ardent
+ambition of his father to invent a Reaper. He had made one and tried it
+in the harvest of 1816, but it was a failure. It was a fantastic
+machine, pushed from behind by two horses. A row of short curved sickles
+were fastened to upright posts, and the grain was whirled against them
+by revolving rods. It was highly ingenious, but the sinewy grain merely
+bunched and tangled around its futile sickles; and the poor old
+Reaper that would not reap was hauled off the field, to become one of
+the jokes of the neighborhood.
+
+This failure did not dishearten Robert McCormick. He persevered with
+Scotch-Irish tenacity, but in secret. Hurt by the jests of the
+neighbors, he worked thenceforward with the door of his workshop locked,
+or at night. He hid his Reaper, too, upon a shelf inside the workshop.
+"He allowed no one to see what he was doing, except his sons," said
+Davis McCormick, who is now the only living person in the neighborhood
+with a memory that extends back to that early period. "Yes," said this
+lone octogenarian, "Robert McCormick was a good man, a true Christian;
+and he worked for years to make a Reaper. He always kept his plans to
+himself, and he told his wife that if visitors came to the house, she
+should send one of the children to fetch him, and not allow the visitors
+to come to his workshop."
+
+By the early Summer of 1831, Robert McCormick had so improved his Reaper
+that he gave it a trial in a field of grain. Again it was a failure. It
+did cut the grain fairly well, but flung it in a tangled heap. As much
+as this had been done before by other machines, and it was not enough.
+To cut the grain was only one-half of the problem; the other half of the
+problem, which up to this time no one had solved, was how to properly
+handle and deliver the grain after it was cut.
+
+[Illustration: FACSIMILES FROM MANUSCRIPT BY MR. McCORMICK GIVING HIS
+OWN ACCOUNT OF THE ORIGIN OF THE REAPER]
+
+By this time Cyrus had become as much of a Reaper enthusiast as his
+father. Also, he had been studying out the reasons for his father's
+failure, and working out in his mind a new plan of construction. How
+this _new plan_ was slowly moulded into shape by his creative fancy is
+now told for the first time. A manuscript, written by Cyrus H. McCormick
+himself, and which has not hitherto been made public, gives a complete
+description of the process of thought by which he became the inventor of
+the first practical Reaper. This account, it may be said in explanation,
+was written by Mr. McCormick shortly before the Chicago fire of 1871. It
+was to be published at that time, and was in type when the fire came and
+left not a vestige of the printery. The original manuscript was
+preserved; but the labor of rebuilding his factory prevented him from
+carrying out his original design. He wholly forgot his authorship in the
+troubles of his city; and so his own story of his invention lay
+untouched among the private papers of the family for thirty-eight years.
+
+"Robert McCormick," says this document, "being satisfied that his
+principle of operation could not succeed, laid aside and abandoned the
+further prosecution of his idea." He had labored for fifteen years to
+make a Reaper that would reap, and he had failed.
+
+At this point Cyrus took up the work that his father had reluctantly
+abandoned. He had never seen or heard of any Reaper experiments except
+those of his father; but he believed he saw a better way, and "devoted
+himself most laboriously to the discovery of a _new principle of
+operation_."
+
+He showed his originality at the outset by beginning where his father
+and all other Reaper inventors had left off,--with the cutting of grain
+that lay in a fallen and tangled mass. He faced the problem worst end
+first. The Reaper that would cut such grain, he believed, must first
+separate the grain that is to be cut from the grain that is left
+standing. It must have at the end of its knife a curved arm--a
+_divider_. This idea was simple, but in the long history of harvesting
+grain no one had thought of it before.
+
+Next, in order to cut this snarled and prostrate grain without missing
+any of it, the knife must have two motions: its forward motion, as drawn
+by the horses, and also a slashing sideways motion of its own. How was
+this to be done? McCormick's first thought was to cut the grain with a
+whirling wheel-knife, but this plan presented too many new difficulties.
+Suddenly the idea came to him--why not have a straight blade, with a
+back and forward motion of its own? This was the birth-idea of the
+_reciprocating blade_, which has been used to this day on all
+grain-cutting machines. It was not, like the divider, a wholly new
+conception; but Cyrus McCormick conceived it independently, and did more
+than any one else to establish it as the basic feature of the Reaper.
+
+The third problem was the supporting of the grain while it was being
+cut, so that the knife would not merely flatten it to the ground.
+McCormick solved this by placing a row of _fingers_ at the edge of the
+blade. These fingers projected a few inches, in such a way that the
+grain was caught and held in position to be cut. The shape of these
+fingers was afterwards much improved, to prevent wet grain from clogging
+the slit in which the knife slid back and forth.
+
+A fourth device was still needed to lift up and straighten the grain
+that had fallen. This was done by a simple revolving _reel_, such as
+fishermen use for the drying of their nets. Several of the abortive
+Reapers that had been tried elsewhere had possessed some sort of a reel;
+but McCormick made his much larger than any other, so that no grain was
+too low to escape it.
+
+The fifth factor in this assembling of a Reaper was the _platform_, to
+catch the cut grain as it fell; and from which the grain was to be raked
+off by a man who walked alongside of it. The sixth was the idea of
+putting the shafts on the outside, or stubble side, of the Reaper,
+making it a _side-draught_, instead of a "push" machine. And the
+seventh and final factor was the building of the whole Reaper upon one
+big _driving-wheel_, which carried the weight and operated the reel and
+cutting-blade. The grain-side end of the blade was at first supported by
+a wooden runner, and later--the following year--by a small wheel.
+
+[Illustration: FIRST PRACTICAL REAPING MACHINE
+
+Built and used by Cyrus Hall McCormick on Walnut Grove Farm, Va., in
+1831]
+
+Such was the making of the first practical Reaper in the history of the
+world. It was as clumsy as a Red River ox-cart; but _it reaped_. It was
+made on right lines. The "new principle" that the youth McCormick
+laboriously conceived in the little log workshop became the basic type
+of a wholly new machine. It has never been displaced. Since then there
+have been 12,000 patents issued for reaper and mower inventions; but not
+one of them has overthrown the type of the first McCormick Reaper. Not
+one of the seven factors that he assembled has been thrown aside; and
+the most elaborate self-binder of to-day is a direct descendant of the
+crude machine that was thus created by a young Virginian farmer in
+1831.
+
+The young inventor toiled "laboriously," he says, to complete his Reaper
+in time for the harvest of 1831. He was very nearly too late, but a
+small patch of wheat was left standing at his request; and one day in
+July, with no spectators except his parents and his excited brothers and
+sisters, Cyrus put a horse between the shafts of his Reaper, and drove
+against the yellow grain. The reel revolved and swept the gentle wheat
+downwards upon the knife. Click! Click! Click! The white steel blade
+shot back and forth. The grain was cut. It fell upon the platform in a
+shimmering golden swath. From here it was raked off by a young laborer
+named John Cash. It was a roughly done specimen of reaping, no doubt.
+The reel and the divider worked poorly. But for a preliminary test it
+was a magnificent success. Here, at last, was a Reaper that reaped, the
+first that had ever been made in any country.
+
+The scene of this first "reaping by horse-power" was then, and is
+to-day, one of unusual beauty. The field is near by the farm-house,
+rolling in several undulations to the rim of a winding little rivulet.
+In the centre of the field is a single tree, a wide-branched white oak,
+which was probably born before the first colonists arrived at Jamestown.
+And in the background, not more than two miles distant, rise the tall
+and jagged crags of the Blue Ridge, twelve sharp peaks flung high from
+deep ravines, on which the lights and shades are incessantly
+changing,--a most impressive staging for the first act of the drama of
+the Reaper.
+
+This McCormick farm, having 600 acres of land, is now owned by the
+McCormick family. The whole region has changed but little. Once, and
+once only, the great noisy outside world surged into this quiet
+valley,--when a Union army under General Butler clattered through it,
+burning and destroying, and so close to the McCormick homestead that the
+blue uniforms could be seen from its front windows. Doubtless, when
+farmers have time to take a proper pride in the history of their own
+profession, they will visit the McCormick farm as a spot of historic
+interest,--the place where the New Agriculture was born. It is no longer
+a difficult place to reach, as it is now possible to lunch to-day in
+either Chicago or New York and to-morrow in the same comfortable red
+brick farm-house that sheltered the McCormicks in 1831.
+
+Several days after the advent of the Reaper on the home farm, Cyrus
+McCormick had improved its reel and divider, and was ready for a public
+exhibition at the near-by village of Steele's Tavern. Here, with two
+horses, he cut six acres of oats in an afternoon, a feat which was
+attested in court in 1848 by his brothers William and Leander, and also
+by three of the villagers, John Steele, Eliza Steele, and Dr. N. M.
+Hitt. Such a thing at that time was incredible. It was equal to the work
+of six laborers with scythes, or twenty-four peasants with sickles. It
+was as marvellous as though a man should walk down the street carrying a
+dray-horse on his back.
+
+The next year, 1832, Cyrus McCormick came out with his Reaper into what
+seemed to him "the wide, wide world." He gave a public exhibition near
+the little town of Lexington, which lay eighteen miles south of the
+farm. Fully one hundred people were present--several political leaders
+of local fame, farmers, professors, laborers, and a group of negroes who
+frolicked and shouted in uncomprehending joy.
+
+At the start, it appeared as though this new contraption of a machine,
+which was unlike anything else that human eyes had ever seen, was to
+prove a grotesque failure. The field was hilly, and the Reaper jolted
+and slewed so violently that John Ruff, the owner of the field, made a
+loud protest.
+
+"Here! This won't do," he shouted. "Stop your horses. You are rattling
+the heads off my wheat."
+
+[Illustration: THE FIELD ON WHICH THE FIRST McCORMICK REAPER WAS TRIED,
+WALNUT GROVE FARM, VIRGINIA]
+
+This was a hard blow to the young farmer-inventor. Several laborers, who
+were openly hostile to the machine as their rival in the labor market,
+began to jeer with great satisfaction. "It's a humbug," said one. "Give
+me the old cradle yet, boys," said another. These men were hardened and
+bent and calloused with the drudgery of harvesting. They worked twelve
+and fourteen hours a day for less than a nickel an hour. But they were
+as resentful toward a Reaper as the drivers of stage-coaches were to
+railroads, or as the hackmen of to-day are towards automobiles.
+
+At this moment of apparent defeat, a man of striking appearance, who had
+been watching the floundering of the Reaper with great interest, came to
+the rescue.
+
+"I'll give you a fair chance, young man," he said. "That field of wheat
+on the other side of the fence belongs to me. Pull down the fence and
+cross over."
+
+This friend in need was the Honorable William Taylor, who was several
+years later a candidate for the governorship of Virginia. His offer was
+at once accepted by Cyrus McCormick, and as the second field was fairly
+level, he laid low six acres of wheat before sundown. This was no more
+than he had done in 1831, but on this occasion he had conquered a larger
+and more incredulous audience.
+
+After the sixth acre was cut, the Reaper was driven with great acclaim
+into the town of Lexington and placed on view in the court-house square.
+Here it was carefully studied by a Professor Bradshaw of the Lexington
+Female Academy, who finally announced in a loud and emphatic voice,
+"This--machine--is worth--a hundred--thousand--dollars." This praise,
+from "a scholar and a gentleman," as McCormick afterwards called him,
+was very encouraging. And still more so was the quiet word of praise
+from Robert McCormick, who said, "It makes me feel proud to have a son
+do what I could not do."
+
+Of all who were present on that memorable summer day, not one is now
+alive. Neither in Lexington nor in Staunton--the towns that lay on
+either side of the McCormick farm--can we find any one who saw the
+Reapers of 1831 and 1832. But among those who testified at various
+lawsuits that they had seen the Lexington Reaper operate were Colonel
+James McDowell, Colonel John Bowyer, Colonel Samuel Reed, Colonel A. T.
+Barclay, Dr. Taylor, William Taylor, John Ruff, John W. Houghawout, John
+Steele, James Moore, and Andrew Wallace. There was an old lady, also, in
+1885, Miss Polly Carson, who told how she had seen the Reaper hauled
+along the road by two horses, which, she said, "had to be led by a
+couple of darkies, because they were scared to death by the racket of
+the machine." And she expressed the general unbelief of that day, very
+likely, by saying, "I thought it was a right smart curious sort of a
+thing, but that it wouldn't come to much."
+
+Cyrus McCormick was far from being the first to secure a Reaper patent.
+He was the forty-seventh. Twenty-three others in Europe and twenty-three
+in the United States had invented machines of varying inefficiency; but
+there was not one of these which could have been improved into the
+proper shape. Without any exception, the rival manufacturers who rose up
+in later years to fight McCormick did him the homage of copying his
+Reaper; and certainly none of them attempted to offer for sale any type
+of machine that was invented prior to 1831.
+
+A careful study of the pre-McCormick Reapers reveals one fault common to
+all,--they were made by theorists, to cut ideal grain in ideal fields.
+Some of them, if grain always grew straight and was perfectly willing
+to be cut, might have been fairly useful. They assuredly might have
+succeeded if grain grew in a parlor. But to cut actual grain in actual
+fields was another matter, and quite beyond their power. None of them,
+apparently, knew the fundamental difference between a Reaper and a
+mower. They did not observe that grain is easy to cut but hard to
+handle, while grass is hard to cut and easy to handle; and they
+persisted in the assumption that grain could be reaped by a mower.
+
+[Illustration: INTERIOR OF BLACKSMITH SHOP IN WHICH C. H. McCORMICK
+BUILT HIS FIRST REAPER]
+
+These inventors who failed, but who doubtless blazed the way by their
+failures to the final success of McCormick, were not, as he was, a
+practical farmer on rough and hilly ground. One was a clergyman, who
+devised a six-wheel chariot, with many pairs of scissors, and which was
+to be pushed by horses and steered by a rudder that in rough ground
+would jerk a man's arm out of joint. A second of these inventors was a
+sailor, who experimented with a few stalks of straight grain stuck in
+gimlet holes in his workshop floor. A third was an actor, who had
+built a Reaper that would cut artificial grain on the stage. A fourth
+was a school-teacher, a fifth a machinist, and so on. In no instance can
+we find that any one of these pre-McCormick inventors was a farmer, who
+therefore knew what practical difficulties had to be overcome.
+
+The farmers, on the other hand, thought first of these difficulties and
+scoffed at the parlor inventors. The editor of the "Farmer's Register"
+spoke the opinion of most farmers of that time when he said that "an
+insurmountable difficulty will sometimes be found to the use of
+reaping-machines in the state of the growing crops, which may be twisted
+and laid flat in every possible direction. A whole crop may be ravelled
+and beaten down by high winds and heavy rains in a single day."
+
+One of the basic reasons, therefore, for the success of Cyrus McCormick
+was the fact that he was not a parlor inventor. He was primarily a
+farmer. He knew what wheat was and how it grew. And his first aim in
+making a reaper was not to produce a mechanical curiosity, nor to
+derive a fortune from the sale of his patent, but to cut the grain on
+his father's farm.
+
+So far as the pre-McCormick inventors are concerned, the whole truth
+about them seems to be that a few invented fractional mowers or reapers
+that were fairly good as far as they went, and that most of them
+invented nothing that became of any lasting value. Nine-tenths of them
+were pathfinders in the sense that they showed what ought _not_ to be
+done.
+
+Very little attention would have been given them had it not been for the
+persistent effort made by rival manufacturers to detract from
+McCormick's reputation as an inventor. This they did in a wholly
+impersonal manner, of course, so that they should not be obliged to pay
+him royalties, and because his prestige as the original inventor of the
+Reaper enabled him to outsell them among the farmers.
+
+But now that the competition of Reaper manufacturers has been tempered
+by consolidation, the time has arrived to do justice to Cyrus McCormick
+as the inventor of the Reaper. The stock phrase,--"He was less of an
+inventor than a business man," which was so widely used against him
+during his lifetime, ought now in all fairness to be laid aside. The
+fact is, as we have seen, that he was schooled as a boy into an
+inventive habit of mind; and that before his invention of the Reaper, he
+had devised a new grain-cradle, a hillside plow, and a self-sharpening
+plow. There is abundant corroborative evidence in the letters which he
+wrote to his father and brothers, instructing them to "make the divider
+and wheel post longer," to "put the crank one inch farther back," and so
+forth. Also, in the will of Robert McCormick, there is a clause
+authorizing the executor to pay a royalty to Cyrus of fifteen dollars
+apiece on whatever machines were sold by the family during that season,
+showing that the father, who of all men was in the best position to
+know, regarded Cyrus as the inventor.
+
+Of all the manufacturers who fought McCormick in the patent suits of
+early days, three only have survived to see the passing of the McCormick
+Centenary--Ralph Emerson, C. W. Marsh, and William N. Whiteley. In
+response to a question as to Cyrus McCormick's place as an inventor,
+Mr. Whiteley said: "McCormick invented the divider and the practical
+reel; and he was the first man to make the Reaper a success in the
+field." Mr. Marsh said: "He was a meritorious inventor, although he
+combined the ideas of other men with his own; and he produced the first
+practical side-delivery machine in the market." And Mr. Emerson said:
+"The enemies of Cyrus H. McCormick have said that he was not an
+inventor, but I say that he was an inventor of eminence."
+
+Thus it appears that the invention of the Reaper was not in any sense
+unique; it came about by an evolutionary process such as produced all
+other great discoveries and inventions. First come the dreamers, the
+theorists, the heroic innovators who awaken the world's brain upon a new
+line of thought. Then come the pioneers who solve certain parts of the
+problem and make suggestions that are of practical value. And then, in
+the fulness of time, comes one masterful man who is more of a doer than
+a dreamer, who works out the exact combination of ideas to produce the
+result, and establishes the new product as a necessary part of the
+equipment of the whole human family.
+
+Cyrus Hall McCormick invented the Reaper. He did more--he invented the
+business of making Reapers and selling them to the farmers of America
+and foreign countries. He held preëminence in this line, with scarcely a
+break, until his death; and the manufacturing plant that he founded is
+to-day the largest of its kind. Thus, it is no more than an exact
+statement of the truth to say that he did more than any other member of
+the human race to abolish the famine of the cities and the drudgery of
+the farm--to feed the hungry and straighten the bent backs of the
+world.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+SIXTEEN YEARS OF PIONEERING
+
+
+In 1831 Cyrus McCormick had his Reaper, but the great world knew nothing
+of it. None of the 850 papers that were being printed at this time in
+the United States had given the notice of its birth. There was the young
+inventor, with the one machine that the human race most needed, in a
+remote cleft of the Virginian mountains, four days' journey from
+Richmond, and wholly without any experience or money or influence that
+would enable him to announce what he had done.
+
+He had such a problem to solve as no inventor of to-day or to-morrow can
+have. He was not living, as we are, in an age of faith and
+optimism--when every new invention is welcomed with a shout of joy. He
+confronted a sceptical and slow-moving little world, so different from
+that of to-day that it requires a few lines of portrayal.
+
+In general, it was a non-inventive and hand-labor world. There were few
+factories, except for the weaving of cotton and woollen cloth. There
+was no sewing-machine, nor Bessemer converter, nor Hoe press, nor
+telegraph, nor photography. It was still the age of the tallow candle
+and stage-coach and tinder-box. Practically no such thing was known as
+farm machinery. Jethro Wood had invented his iron plow, but he was at
+this time dying in poverty, never having been able to persuade farmers
+to abandon their plows of wood. As for steel plows, no one in any
+country had conceived of such a thing. James Oliver was a bare-footed
+school-boy in Scotland and John Deere was a young blacksmith in Vermont.
+Plows were pulled by oxen and horses, not by slaves, as in certain
+regions of Asia; but almost every other sort of farm work was done by
+hand.
+
+Railways were few and of little account. Eighty-two miles of flimsy
+track had been built in the United States; the Baltimore and Ohio was
+making a solemn experiment with locomotives, horses, and _sails_, to
+ascertain which one of these three was the best method of propulsion.
+The first really successful American locomotive was put on the rails in
+this year; and Professor Joseph Henry set up his trial telegraph wire
+and gave the electric current its first lesson in obedience.
+
+There was no free library in the world in 1831. The first one was
+started in Peterborough, N. H., two years later. In England, electoral
+reform had not begun, a General Fast had been ordered because of the
+prevalence of cholera, and a four-pound loaf cost more than the day's
+pay of a laborer. The United States was a twenty-four-State republic,
+with very little knowledge of two-thirds of its own territory. The
+source of the Mississippi River, for instance, was unknown. To send a
+letter from Boston to New York cost the price of half a bushel of wheat.
+There was no newspaper in Wisconsin and no house in Iowa. The first sale
+of lots was announced in Chicago, but there was then no public building
+in that hamlet, nothing but a few log cabins in a swampy waste that was
+populous only in wild ducks, bears, and wolves. Forty of the latter were
+shot by the villagers in 1834.
+
+[Illustration: REAPING WITH CRUDE KNIVES IN INDIA]
+
+Of the many eminent men who had the same birth-year as McCormick, Poe
+and Mendelssohn had begun to be known as men of genius in 1831. But
+Lincoln was then "a sort of clerk" in a village store. Darwin was
+setting out on H. M. S. _Beagle_ upon his first voyage as a naturalist.
+Gladstone was a student at Oxford. Proudhon was working at the case as a
+poor printer. Oliver Wendell Holmes was somewhat aimlessly studying law.
+Chopin was on his way to Paris. Tennyson had left college, without a
+degree, to devote his life to the service of poetry. Three great men who
+had been born earlier, Garrison, Whittier, and Mazzini, began their
+life-work in 1831. And science was a babe in the cradle. Herbert
+Spencer, Virchow and Pasteur were learning the multiplication table.
+Huxley was six and Bertheiot four.
+
+There was no Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, California, nor
+Texas. Virginia was the main wheat State. Local famines were of
+yearly occurrence. The period between 1816 and 1820 had been
+one of severe depression and was bitterly referred to as the
+"1800-and-starve-to-death" period. Seventy-five thousand people had
+been imprisoned for debt in New York in a single year, and a
+workingmen's party had sprung up as a protest against such intolerable
+conditions. Even as late as 1837 there was a bread riot in the city of
+New York. Five thousand hungry rioters broke into the warehouse of Eli
+Hart & Company, and destroyed a great quantity of flour and wheat. Five
+hundred barrels of flour were thrown from the windows; and women and
+children gathered it up greedily from the dirty gutter where it fell.
+
+So the world that confronted Cyrus McCormick was not a friendly world of
+science and invention and prosperity. It was slow and dull and largely
+hostile to whoever would teach it a better way of working. And we shall
+now see by what means McCormick compelled it to accept his Reaper, and
+to give him the credit and pay for his invention.
+
+He was resolved from the first not to be robbed and flung aside as most
+inventors had been. Whitney, the inventor of the cotton-gin, had said in
+1812: "The whole amount I have received is not equal to the value of the
+labor saved in one hour by my machines now in use." Fulton had died at
+fifty, plagued and plundered by imitators. Kay, Jacquard, Heathcoat, and
+Hargreaves, inventors of weaving machinery, were mobbed. Arkwright's
+mill was burned by incendiaries. Gutenberg, Cort, and Jethro Wood lost
+their fortunes. Palissy was thrown into the Bastile. And Goodyear, who
+gave us rubber, Bottgher, who gave us Sèvres porcelain, and Sauvage, who
+gave us the screw propeller, died in poverty and neglect.
+
+But Cyrus McCormick was more than an inventor. He was a
+business-builder. In the same resolute, deliberate way in which he had
+made his Reaper, he now set to work to make a business. He planned and
+figured and made experiments. "His whole soul was wrapped up in his
+Reaper," said one of the neighbors. Once while riding home on horseback
+in the Summer of 1832, his horse stopped to drink in the centre of a
+stream, and as he looked out upon the fields of yellow grain, shimmering
+in the sunlight, the dazzling thought flashed upon his brain, "Perhaps I
+may make a million dollars from this Reaper." As he said in a letter
+written in later years: "This thought was so enormous that it seemed
+like a dream-like dwelling in the clouds--so remote, so unattainable, so
+exalted, so visionary."
+
+His first step was seemingly a mistake, though it must have contributed
+much toward the development of self-reliance and hardihood in his own
+character. He received a tract of land from his father, and proceeded
+with might and main to farm it alone. There was a small log house on his
+land, and here he lived with two aged negro servants and his Reaper.
+
+He needed money to buy iron--to advertise--to appoint agents. And he had
+no means of earning money except by farming.
+
+It is very evident that he had not set aside his purpose to make
+Reapers, for we find in the _Lexington Union_ of September 28, 1833, the
+first advertisement of his machine. He offers Reapers for sale at $50.00
+apiece, and gives four testimonials from farmers. But nothing came of
+this advertisement. No farmer came forward to buy. The four men who had
+given testimonials had only seen the Reaper at work. They were not
+purchasers. McCormick was "a voice crying in the wilderness" for _nine
+years_ before he found a farmer who had the money and the courage to buy
+one of his Reapers.
+
+After living for more than a year on his farm, McCormick saw that as a
+means of raising money it was a failure. It had given him a most
+valuable period of preparatory solitude, but it had not helped him to
+launch the Reaper; so he looked about him for some enterprise that would
+yield a larger profit. There was a large deposit of iron ore near by,
+and he resolved to build a furnace and make iron. Iron was the most
+expensive item in the making of a reaper. At that time it was $50.00 a
+ton--two and a half cents a pound. So as he had been unable to establish
+the Reaper business with a farm, he now set out to do it with a furnace.
+He persuaded his father and the school teacher to become his partners;
+and they built the furnace and were making their first iron in
+1835--the same year, by the way, in which a babe named Andrew Carnegie
+was born in the little Scotch town of Dunfermline.
+
+[Illustration: REAPING WITH SICKLES IN ALGERIA]
+
+For several years the furnace did fairly well. It swallowed the ore and
+charcoal and limestone, and poured into the channelled sand little
+sputtering streams of fiery metal. Cyrus made the patterns for the
+moulds, and, because of his great strength, did much of the heaviest
+labor. But the work was so incessant that he had no time to build
+Reapers. And in 1839, when the effects of the 1837 panic were felt in
+the more remote regions of Virginia, Cyrus McCormick realized to the
+full the aptness of that couplet of Hudibras--
+
+    "Ah, me, the perils that environ
+    The man who meddles with cold iron!"
+
+The price of iron fell; debtors were unable to pay; the school teacher
+signed over his property to his mother; and the whole burden of the
+inevitable bankruptcy fell upon the McCormicks. Cyrus gave up his farm
+to the creditors, and whatever other property he had that was saleable.
+He did not give up the Reaper, and nobody would have taken it if he
+had. Thus far, he had made no progress towards the building of a Reaper
+business. Instead of being the owner of a million, or any part of a
+million, he was eight years older than when he had begun to seek his
+fortune, and penniless.
+
+In this hour of debt and defeat Cyrus became the leader of the family.
+Here for the first time he showed that indomitable spirit which was,
+more than any other one thing, the secret of his success. At once he did
+what he had not felt was possible before--he began to make Reapers.
+Without money, without credit, without customers, he founded the first
+of the world's reaper factories in the little log workshop near his
+father's house. In the year of the iron failure, 1839, he gave a public
+exhibition on the farm of Joshua Smith, near the town of Staunton. With
+two men and a team of horses he cut two acres of wheat an hour. At this
+there was great applause, but no buyers.
+
+The farmers of that day were not accustomed to the use of machinery.
+Their farm tools, for the most part, were so simple as to be made
+either by themselves or by the village blacksmith. That the Reaper did
+the work of ten men, they could not deny. But it was driven by an
+expert. "It's all very wonderful, but I'm running a farm, not a circus,"
+thought the average spectator at these exhibitions. Also, there was in
+all Eastern States at that time a surplus of labor and a scarcity of
+money, both of which tended to retard the adoption of the Reaper.
+
+Neither did the business men of Staunton pay any serious attention to
+it. There was a Samson Eager at that time who made wagons, a David
+Gilkerson who made furniture, a Jacob Kurtz who made spinning wheels,
+and an Absalom Brooks who made harness. But none of these men saw any
+fortune in the making of Reapers, and Staunton lost its great
+opportunity to be a manufacturing centre.
+
+Failure was being heaped on failure, yet Cyrus McCormick hung to his
+Reaper as John Knox had to his Bible. He went back to the little log
+workshop with a fighting hope in his heart, and hammered away to make a
+still better machine.
+
+This was the darkest period in the history of the McCormicks--from 1837
+to 1840. Once a constable named John Newton rode up to the farm-house
+door with a summons, calling Cyrus and his father before the County
+Judge on account of a debt of $19.01. A teamster named John Brains had
+brought suit. His bill had been $72.00 and he had been paid more than
+three-fourths of the money. But the constable was so impressed with the
+honesty and industry of the McCormicks, that he rode back to town
+without having served the summons. A little later, Mr. John Brains
+received his money; and it may be said that had he accepted, instead, a
+five per cent interest in the Reaper, he would have become in twenty
+years or less one of the richest men in the county.
+
+As it happened, not one of Cyrus McCormick's creditors thought of such
+an idea as seizing the Reaper, or the patent, which had been secured in
+1834. If the queer-looking machine, which was regarded as part marvel
+and part freak, had been put up to auction in that neighborhood of
+farmers, very likely it would have found no bidders. There appeared to
+be one man only, a William Massie, who appreciated the ability of Cyrus
+McCormick and lent him sums of money on various urgent occasions.
+
+But in 1840 a stranger rode from the north and drew rein in front of the
+little log workshop. In appearance he was a rough-looking man, but to
+Cyrus he was an angel of light. He had come to buy a Reaper. He had been
+one of the spectators at the Staunton exhibition, and he had resolved to
+risk $50 on one of the new machines. His name, which deserves to be
+recorded in the annals of the Reaper, was Abraham Smith.
+
+[Illustration: REAPING WITH CRADLES IN ILLINOIS]
+
+Several weeks later came two other angels in disguise--farmers who had
+heard of the Reaper and who had ridden from their homes on the James
+River, a forty-mile journey on horseback through the Blue Ridge
+Mountains. These men had never seen a Reaper, but they had faith.
+They were notable men. Both ordered machines, and Cyrus McCormick
+accepted one of the orders only, as he was not satisfied with the way
+his Reaper worked in grain that was wet. It was apt to clog in the
+grooves that held the blade. Even in this darkest and most debt-ridden
+period of his life, McCormick was much more intent, apparently, upon
+making his Reapers work well than upon winning a fortune.
+
+Almost breathlessly, the young inventor waited for the next harvest.
+This was the unique difficulty of his task, that he had only a few weeks
+once a year to try out his machine and to improve it. He had now sold
+two, so that there were three Reapers clicking through the grain-fields
+in the Summer of 1840. They failed to operate evenly. Where the grain
+was dry, they cut well; but where it was damp, they clogged and at times
+refused to cut at all.
+
+Wet grain! This, after nine years of arduous labor, still remained a
+stubborn obstacle to the success of the Reaper. It was especially hard
+to overcome, because in that primitive neighborhood McCormick could not
+secure the best workmanship in the making of the cutting-blade. However,
+this obstacle did not daunt him. He gave his blade a more serrated edge,
+and to his delight it cut down the wet grain very nearly as neatly as
+the dry.
+
+This success had cost him another year, for he sold no machines in 1841.
+But he had now, at least, a wholly satisfactory Reaper. Fortified with a
+testimonial from Abraham Smith, he fixed the price at $100 and became a
+salesman. By great persistence he sold seven Reapers in 1842,
+twenty-nine in 1843, and fifty in 1844. At last, after thirteen years of
+struggle and defeat, Cyrus McCormick had succeeded; and the home farm
+was transformed into a busy and triumphant Reaper factory.
+
+There were new obstacles, of course. A few buyers failed to pay. Four
+machines were held on loitering canal-boats until they were too late for
+the harvest. There was strong opposition in several places by day
+laborers. A trusted workman who was sent out to collect $300 ran away
+with both horse and money. But none of these trifles moved the
+victorious McCormick. The great stubborn world was about to surrender,
+and he knew it.
+
+By 1844 he had done more than sell machines. He had made converts. One
+enthusiastic farmer named James M. Hite, who had made a world's record
+in 1843 by cutting 175 acres of wheat in less than eight days, was the
+first of these apostles of the Reaper. "My Reaper has more than paid for
+itself in one harvest," he said; and he gave $1,333 for the right to
+sell Reapers in eight counties. Closely after this man came Colonel
+Tutwiler, who agreed to pay $2,500 for the right to sell in southern
+Virginia. And a manufacturer in Richmond, J. Parker, bought an agency in
+five counties for $500; and won the renown of being the first business
+man who appreciated the Reaper. All this money was not paid in at once.
+Some of it was never paid. But after thirteen years of struggle and
+debt, this was Big Business.
+
+Best of all, orders for seven Reapers had come from the West. Two
+farmers in Tennessee and one each in Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa,
+Illinois, and Ohio, had written to McCormick for "Virginia Reapers," as
+they were called in the farm papers of that day. These seven letters, as
+may be imagined, brought great joy and satisfaction to the McCormick
+family, which was now, under the leadership of Cyrus, devoting its best
+energies to the making of Reapers. The Reapers were made and then, when
+the question of their transportation arose, Cyrus for the first time saw
+clearly that the Virginia farm was not the best site for a factory. To
+get the seven Reapers to the West, they had first to be carried in
+wagons to Scottsville, then by canal to Richmond, re-shipped down the
+James River to the Atlantic Ocean and around Florida to New Orleans,
+transferred here to a river boat that went up the Mississippi and Ohio
+Rivers to Cincinnati, and from Cincinnati in various directions to the
+expectant farmers. Four of these Reapers arrived too late for the
+harvest of 1844, and two of them were not paid for. Clearly, something
+must be done to supply the Western farmers more efficiently.
+
+[Illustration: AN EARLY ADVERTISEMENT FOR McCORMICK'S PATENT VIRGINIA
+REAPER]
+
+At this time a friend said to him, "Cyrus, why don't you go West with
+your Reaper, where the land is level and labor is scarce?" His mind was
+ripe for this idea. It was the call of the West. So one morning he put
+$300 into his belt and set off on a 3,000-mile journey to establish the
+empire of the Reaper. Up through Pennsylvania he rode by stage to Lake
+Ontario, then westward through Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin,
+Iowa, and Missouri.
+
+For the first time he saw the _prairies_. So vast, so flat, so fertile,
+these boundless plains amazed him. And he was quick to see that this
+great land ocean was the natural home of the Reaper. Virginia might, but
+the West _must_, accept his new machine.
+
+Already the West was in desperate need of a quicker way to cut grain. As
+McCormick rode through Illinois, he saw the most convincing argument in
+favor of his Reaper. He saw hogs and cattle turned into fields of ripe
+wheat, for lack of laborers to gather it in. The fertile soil had given
+Illinois five million bushels of wheat, and it was too much. It was more
+than the sickle and the scythe could cut. Men toiled and sweltered to
+save the yellow affluence from destruction. They worked by day and by
+night; and their wives and children worked. But the tragic aspect of the
+grain crop is this--it must be gathered quickly or it breaks down and
+decays. It will not wait. The harvest season lasts from four to ten days
+only. And whoever cannot snatch his grain from the field during this
+short period must lose it.
+
+Truly, the West needed the Reaper; and McCormick's first plan was to
+overcome the transportation obstacle by selling licenses to many
+manufacturers in many States. By 1846 he had, with herculean energy,
+started Fitch & Company and Seymour, Morgan & Company in Brockport, N.
+Y., Henry Bear in Missouri, Gray & Warner in Illinois, and A. C. Brown
+in Cincinnati. These manufacturers, and the McCormick family in
+Virginia, built 190 Reapers for the harvest of 1846. This was
+multiplying the business by four, very nearly, but the plan was not
+satisfactory. Some manufacturers used poor materials; some had unskilled
+workmen; and one became so absorbed in new experiments that when the
+harvest time arrived, his machines were not completed.
+
+The new difficulty was not to get manufacturers to make Reapers, but to
+get them to make _good_ Reapers. What was to be done? The thought of
+having defective Reapers scattered among the farmers was intolerable to
+Cyrus McCormick. He pondered deeply over the whole situation. He
+considered the fact that the supremacy in wheat was slowly passing from
+Virginia to Ohio. He took note of the railroads that were creeping
+westward. He remembered the limitless prairies, far out in the sunset
+country, that were still uncultivated. Plainly, he must make Reapers in
+a factory of his own, so as to have them made well, and he must locate
+that factory as near as possible to the prairies, at some point along
+the Great Lakes. With the most painstaking diligence he studied the map
+and finally he put his finger upon a town--a small new town, which bore
+the strange name of _Chicago_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE BUILDING OF THE REAPER BUSINESS
+
+
+Of all the cities that Cyrus McCormick had seen in his 3,000-mile
+journey, Chicago was unquestionably the youngest, the ugliest, and the
+most forlorn. It lacked the comforts of ordinary life, and many of the
+necessities. For the most part, it was the residuum of a broken land
+boom; and most of its citizens were remaining in the hope that they
+might persuade some incoming stranger to buy them out.
+
+The little community, which had absurdly been called a city ten years
+before, had at this time barely ten thousand people--as many as are now
+employed by a couple of its department stores. It was exhausted by a
+desperate struggle with mud, dust, floods, droughts, cholera, debt,
+panics, broken banks, and a slump in land values. Other cities ridiculed
+its ambitions and called it a mudhole. Its harbor, into which six small
+schooners ventured in 1847, was obstructed by a sand-bar. And the entire
+region, for miles back from the lake, was a dismal swamp--the natural
+home of frogs, wild ducks, and beavers.
+
+The six years between 1837 and 1843 had been to Illinois a period of the
+deepest discouragement. There was little or no money that any one could
+accept with confidence. Trade was on a barter basis. The State was
+hopelessly in debt. It had borrowed $14,000,000 in the enthusiasm of its
+first land boom, and now had no money to pay the interest. Even as late
+as 1846 there was only $9,000 in the State treasury.
+
+Buffalo was at this time the chief grain market of the United States. We
+were selling a little wheat to foreign countries--much less than is
+grown to-day in Oklahoma. Hulled corn was the staff of life in Iowa. The
+Mormons had just started from Illinois on their 1,500-mile pilgrimage to
+the West, through a country that had not a road, a village, a bridge,
+nor a well. The sewing-machine had recently been invented by Howe, and
+the use of ether had been announced by Dr. Morton; but there was no Hoe
+press, nor Bessemer steel, nor even so much as a postage stamp. And in
+the Old World the two most impressive figures, perhaps, were
+Livingstone, the missionary, who was groping his way to the heart of the
+Dark Continent, and DeLesseps, the master-builder of canals, who was now
+cutting a channel through the hot sand at Suez.
+
+In Chicago, there was at this time no Board of Trade. The first wheat
+had been exported nine years before--as much as would load an ordinary
+wagon. There was no paved street, except one short block of wooden
+paving. The houses were rickety, unpainted frame shanties, which had not
+even the dignity of being numbered. There was a school, a jail, a police
+force of six, a theatre, and a fire-engine. But there was no railroad,
+nor telegraph, nor gas, nor sewer, nor stock-yards. The only post-office
+was a little frame shack on Clark Street, with one window and one clerk;
+and one of the lesser hardships of the citizens was to stand in line
+here on rainy days.
+
+[Illustration: THE McCORMICK REAPER OF 1847, ON WHICH SEATS WERE PLACED
+FOR THE DRIVER AND THE RAKER]
+
+Prosperity was still an elusive hope in 1847, but the spirit of
+depression was being overcome. The Federal bankrupt law of 1842 had
+broken the deadlock, and the Legislature had passed several "Hard Times"
+measures for the relief of debtors. To such an extent had the little
+community recovered its confidence that it opened a new theatre,
+welcomed its first circus, founded a law-school, launched a new daily
+paper called the _Tribune_, and organized a regiment for the Mexican
+War.
+
+There were two Chicago events in this year which must have deeply
+impressed Cyrus McCormick. The first was the arrival of a horde of
+hunger-driven immigrants from Ireland. The famine of 1846, which had
+caused 210,000 deaths in that unfortunate island, was driving the
+survivors to America; and the people of Chicago showed the warmest
+sympathy towards these gaunt, sad-faced newcomers. Even in the depth of
+her own depression, Chicago called a special meeting to consider what
+could be done to alleviate the suffering of the Irish, and gave several
+thousand dollars for their relief.
+
+The second event was the holding of the great "River and Harbor
+Convention" in Chicago. This was the first formal recognition of
+Chicago by Congress, and gave the greatest possible amount of delight
+and reassurance to its citizens. Abraham Lincoln, who had just been
+elected to Congress, was there; and Horace Greeley and Thurlow Weed.
+There was a grand procession in the muddy little main street. A ship
+under full sail was hauled through the city on wheels. The newly
+organized firemen, in the glory of red shirts and leather hats, threw a
+stream of water over the flag-staff in the public square, and Thurlow
+Weed, in a peroration that aroused the utmost enthusiasm, prophesied
+that "on the shores of these lakes is a vast country that will in fifty
+years support one-quarter of a million people." It is interesting to
+notice that had Thurlow Weed lived fifty years after the delivery of
+that optimistic prophecy, he would have seen one-quarter of a million
+school children in the city of Chicago alone.
+
+As a matter of history, the arrival of McCormick was a much more
+important event for Chicago than the "River and Harbor Convention." He
+was the first of its big manufacturers. His factory was the largest and
+the busiest; and the Reapers that it produced were a most important
+factor in the growth of Chicago. Every Reaper shipped to the West was a
+feeder of the city. It brought back more wheat. It opened up new
+territory. The Reaper gave the farmers of the Middle West an ideal
+weapon with which to win wealth from the prairies. And it established
+the primary greatness of Chicago as the principal wheat market of the
+world.
+
+This incoming flood of wheat gave Chicago its start as a railway and
+shipping centre. Chicago was never obliged to give money, or to lend it,
+to railroad companies. The railroads came into Chicago without the
+inducement of subsidies, because they wanted to carry its wheat. And
+ships, too, came more and more readily to Chicago when they found that
+they could be sure of a return cargo.
+
+The choice of Chicago as his centre of operations was one of the
+master-strokes of McCormick's career. At that time, Cleveland,
+Milwaukee, and St. Louis were more prosperous cities; but McCormick
+considered one thing only--the making and selling of his Reaper, and he
+saw that Chicago, with all its mud and shabbiness, was the link between
+the Great Lakes and the Great West. Here he could best assemble his
+materials--steel from Sheffield, pig iron from Scotland and Pittsburg,
+and white ash from Michigan. And here he could best ship his finished
+machines to both East and West.
+
+Chicago, in fact, and the McCormick Reaper, had many characteristics in
+common. Both were born at very nearly the same time. Both were cradled
+in adversity. Both were unsightly to the artistic eye. Both were linked
+closely with the development of the West. And both inevitably achieved
+success, because they were fundamentally right--Chicago in location and
+the Reaper in design.
+
+At the time that he began to build his Chicago factory, Cyrus McCormick
+was no longer a country youth. He was thirty-eight years of age, and a
+tall powerful Titan of a man, with a massive head and broad shoulders.
+His upper lip was clean-shaven, but he had a thick, well-trimmed beard,
+and dark, wavy hair, worn fairly long. His nose was straight and
+well-shaped, his mouth firm, and his eyes brown-gray and piercing. In
+manner he was resolute and prompt, with a rigid insistence that could
+not be turned aside. He had won the prize in the contest of
+reaper-inventors; and he was now about to enter a second contest,
+against overwhelming odds, with a number of aggressive and competent
+business men who had determined that, by right or by might, they would
+manufacture McCormick Reapers and sell them to the farmers.
+
+As McCormick had neither money nor credit, it was evident to him that
+his first step in business-building must be to secure a partner who had
+both of these. He looked about him and selected the man who was
+unquestionably the first citizen of Chicago--William B. Ogden. Ogden had
+been the first mayor of the little city. He had been from the beginning
+its natural leader. He had built the first handsome house, promoted the
+first canal, and was now busy in the building of the first railroad
+from Chicago to Galena.
+
+William Butler Ogden had been born in the little New York hamlet of
+Walton, four years earlier than the birth of McCormick. To use his own
+picturesque words, he "was born close to a saw-mill, was early left an
+orphan, christened in a mill-pond, taught at a log school-house, and at
+fourteen fancied that nothing was impossible, which ever since, and with
+some success, I have been trying to prove." Once in Chicago he quickly
+made a fortune in real estate, and was generally looked to as the leader
+in any large enterprise that promised to help Chicago.
+
+[Illustration: CYRUS HALL McCORMICK
+
+From a Daguerreotype, taken about 1839]
+
+He was a tall man of striking appearance. At that time he wore no beard,
+and with his keen eyes, high forehead, long straight nose, and masterful
+under-lip, he would attract attention in any assemblage. By his
+hospitality and courtly manners he made many friends for the city. Among
+his guests were Webster, Van Buren, Bryant, Tilden, and Miss Martineau.
+And when Cyrus McCormick came to him and proposed the building of a
+Reaper factory, Ogden was as quick as a flash to see its value to
+Chicago. "You are the man we want," said he to McCormick. "I'll give you
+$25,000 for a half interest, and we'll start to build the factory at
+once."
+
+This partnership helped McCormick greatly. It gave him at once capital,
+credit, prestige, and a factory. It enabled him to escape from the
+tyranny of small anxieties. It set him free from contract-breaking
+manufacturers, who looked upon the making of Reapers merely as business,
+and not, as McCormick did, as a mission. He now had his chance to
+manufacture on a large scale; and he immediately made plans to sell 500
+Reapers for the harvest of 1848. He built the largest factory in
+Chicago, on the spot where John Kinzie had built the first house in
+1804, and thus once for all was solved the problem of where and how his
+Reapers should be made.
+
+For two years it was one of the sights of Chicago to see McCormick and
+Ogden walking together to their factory. They were both tall, powerful,
+dominating men, and were easily the chief citizens--the Romulus and
+Remus of a city that was destined to be more populous than Rome.
+
+But they were not suited as co-workers. Each was too strong-willed for
+co-operative action. Also, Ogden was a man of many interests, while
+McCormick was absorbed in his Reaper. There was no open quarrel, but in
+1849 McCormick said: "I will pay you back the $25,000 that you invested,
+and give you $25,000 for profits and interest." Ogden accepted, well
+pleased to have doubled his money in two years; and from that time
+onward McCormick had no partners except the members of his own family.
+
+Moving at once from one obstacle to another, as McCormick did throughout
+the whole course of his life, he now began to create the best possible
+_system_ of selling his Reapers to the farmers. This he had to do, for
+the reason that there was no means at that time whereby he could offer
+them for sale. The village blacksmith was too busy at his anvil to
+become an agent. The village storekeeper was not a mechanic, and was
+too careful of his reputation among the farmers to offer for sale a
+machine that he did not understand. Therefore, McCormick bent all his
+energies to this new task of devising a mode of action. He began to
+develop what he was apt to call "the finger-ends of the business." And
+he created a new species of commercial organization which is by many
+thought to be fully as remarkable as his invention of the Reaper.
+
+First, he gave a _Written Guarantee_ with every machine. He had
+conceived of this inducement as early as 1842. He "warranted the
+performance of the Reaper in every respect," and by this means made
+seven sales in that year. In 1848 he had his guarantee printed like an
+advertisement, with a picture of the Reaper at the top, and blank spaces
+for the farmer, the agent, and two witnesses to sign. The price of the
+machine was to be $120. The farmer was to pay $30 cash, and the balance
+in six months, on condition that the Reaper would cut one and a half
+acres an hour, that it would scatter less grain than the grain-cradle,
+that it was well made, and that the raking off could easily be done from
+a raker's seat. If the Reaper failed to fulfil these promises, it was to
+be brought back and the $30 was to be refunded.
+
+This idea of giving a free trial, and returning the money to any
+dissatisfied customer, was at that time new and revolutionary. To-day it
+is the code of the department store, and even the mail-order
+establishments are in many instances adopting it. It has become one of
+the higher laws of the business world. It has driven that discreditable
+maxim, "Let the buyer beware," out of all decent commercialism. To
+McCormick, who had never studied the selfish economic theories of his
+day, there was no reason for any antagonism between buyer and seller. He
+trusted his Reaper and he trusted the farmers. And he built his business
+foursquare on this confidence.
+
+Second, he sold his Reapers at a _Known Price_. He announced the price
+in newspapers and posters. This, too, has since become an established
+rule in business; but it was not so sixty years ago. The Oriental method
+of chaffering and bargaining was largely in vogue. The buyer got as high
+a price as he could in each case. Among merchants, A. T. Stewart was
+probably the first to abolish this practice of haggling, and to mark his
+goods in plain figures. And in the selling of farm machinery, it was
+McCormick who laid down the principle of equal prices to all and special
+rebates to none--a principle which has been very generally followed ever
+since, except during periods of over-strenuous competition.
+
+Third, he was one of the first American business men who believed
+heartily in a policy of _Publicity_. As early as September 28, 1833, he
+began to advertise his Reaper; and his advertisement was nearly a column
+in length. Also, in the same paper, he had a half-column advertisement
+of his hillside plow. This was publicity on a large scale, according to
+the ideas of advertising that were then prevalent. Even George
+Washington, when advertising an extensive land scheme in 1773, had not
+thought of using more than half a column of a Baltimore paper.
+
+McCormick was an efficient advertiser, too, as well as an enterprising
+one. When he talked to farmers, he knew what to say. He told the story
+of what one of his Reapers had done, and named the time and the farm and
+the farmers. He made great use of the argument that the Reaper pays for
+itself, and showed that it would cost the farmer less to buy it than
+_not_ to buy it.
+
+Among the many testimonials that he got from farmers the one that
+pleased him most, and which he scattered broadcast, was one in which a
+farmer said: "My Reaper has more than paid for itself in one harvest."
+
+[Illustration: PANORAMIC VIEW SHOWING THE McCORMICK REAPER WORKS BEFORE
+THE CHICAGO FIRE OF 1871, ON CHICAGO RIVER, EAST OF RUSH STREET BRIDGE]
+
+In 1849, when the rush to the new gold mines of California began, he was
+quick to see his opportunity. This sudden exodus of a hundred thousand
+men to the Pacific coast meant much to him, and he knew it. It meant a
+decrease in the number of farm laborers and an increase in the amount of
+money in circulation. More than this, it meant that Chicago was no
+longer a city of the Far West. It was _central_. It was the link between
+the banks and factories of the East and the gold mines and prairies of
+the West. So McCormick quickly prepared an elaborate advertisement,
+warning the farmers that labor would now become scarce and expensive,
+that the coming grain crop promised to be a large one, and giving the
+names and addresses of ninety-two farmers who were now using his
+machines.
+
+The fourth factor in the McCormick System was the appointment of a
+_Responsible Agent_ and the building of a storage warehouse at every
+competitive point. He did not wait for the business to grow. He pushed
+it. He thrust it forward by sending an agent to every danger-spot on the
+firing-line. As one of his competitors complained, in an 1848 lawsuit,
+McCormick "flooded the country with his machines." He knew that many
+farmers would be undecided until the very hour of harvest, when there
+would be no time to get a Reaper from Chicago; and therefore he had
+supplies of machines stored in various parts of the country. By 1849 he
+had nineteen of these agencies.
+
+His plan, with regard to these agents, was to fasten them to him by
+exclusive contracts, which forbade them to sell Reapers made by any
+other manufacturers. Each agent was given free scope. He was not worried
+by detail instructions. He was picked out for his aggressive,
+self-reliant qualities, and the whole responsibility of a certain
+territory was put upon him. Once a month he made a report; but he stood
+or fell by the final showing for the year, which he made in October.
+This plan of leaving his men free and putting them upon their mettle,
+developed their mental muscle to the utmost. Also, it made them
+intensely loyal and combative--a regiment, not of private soldiers, but
+generals, each one in charge of his own province, blamed for his defeats
+and rewarded for his victories.
+
+The fifth factor in the McCormick System was the _Customers' Good-Will_.
+For the good-will of other capitalists or for the applause of the
+public in general, no men cared less than McCormick. But he always stood
+well with the farmers. "I have never yet sued a farmer for the price of
+a Reaper," he said in 1848. This heroic policy he pursued as long as
+possible, knowing the fear that all farmers have of contracts that may
+lead them into litigation. More than this, he freely gave them credit,
+without being safeguarded by any Dun or Bradstreet. He allowed them to
+pay with the money that was saved during the harvest. "It is better that
+I should wait for the money," he said, "than that you should wait for
+the machine that you need." So he borrowed money in Chicago to build the
+Reapers, borrowed more money to pay the freight, and then sold them on
+time to the farmers.
+
+In some cases he lost heavily, as in Kansas and North Dakota, where the
+first settlers were driven off by drought. But as a rule he lost little
+by bad debts. Immigrants of twenty nationalities swarmed westward upon
+the free land offered to them by the United States Government, and
+usually each man found waiting for him at the nearest town one of the
+McCormick agents, ready to supply him with a Reaper, whether he had the
+money to pay for it or not. As may be imagined, the effect of this
+policy upon the settlement and welfare of the West was magical. There
+are to-day tens of thousands of Western farmers who date the era of
+their prosperity from the day when a McCormick Reaper arrived in all the
+glory of its red paint and shining blade, and held its first reception
+in the barn-yard.
+
+One instance of this deserves to be embodied in the history of the
+Reaper. In 1855 a poor tenant farmer, who had been evicted from his
+rented land in Ayrshire, Scotland, arrived with his family at the banks
+of the Mississippi. There was then no railroad nor stage-coach, so the
+whole family walked to a quarter section of land farther west, not far
+from where the city of Des Moines stands to-day. The first year they cut
+the wheat with the cradle and the scythe, and the following year they
+bought a McCormick Reaper. They prospered. The father went back for a
+visit to Ayrshire and paid all his creditors. And the eldest son,
+James, became first Speaker of the Iowa Legislature, then a professor
+in an agricultural college, and finally the founder of the Department of
+Agriculture in all its present completeness. To-day we know him as the
+Honorable James Wilson, the first official farmer of the United States.
+
+There was one other method in the marketing of farm machinery, which
+seems to have been originated by McCormick--the _Field Test_. As a means
+of stirring up interest in an indifferent community, this was the most
+electrical in its effects of any plan that has ever been devised. As a
+pioneering advertisement, it was unsurpassed. It was nothing less than a
+contest in a field of ripe grain between several machines that belonged
+to rival manufacturers. Sometimes there were only two machines, and in
+one grand tournament there were forty. And all the farmers in the county
+were invited to come and witness the battle free of charge.
+
+The first of these field tests occurred near Richmond in 1844. McCormick
+had challenged Obed Hussey, a Baltimore sailor who had invented a
+practical mowing-machine, and who was offering it for sale to cut grain
+as well as grass. In this instance McCormick won easily. The judges said
+that while the Hussey machine was stronger and simpler, having no reel
+nor divider, the McCormick Reaper was lighter, cheaper, scattered less
+grain, and was better at cutting grain that was wet and in its method of
+delivering the grain.
+
+"Meet Hussey whenever you can and put him down," Cyrus McCormick wrote
+to his brothers. In one letter, written the following year, he is so
+enthusiastically aggressive in the pursuit of Hussey that he proposes to
+his brothers a grand final contest. Hussey is to be dared to sign an
+agreement that in case of defeat, he will pay McCormick $10,000 and
+become the Maryland agent for the McCormick Reaper. McCormick, on his
+part, is to agree that if he is beaten he will pay Hussey $10,000 and
+become the Virginia agent for the Hussey machine. Nothing came of this
+confident proposal, either because it was not put into effect by
+McCormick, because Hussey refused to accept it.
+
+But the field test flourished for more than forty years. It did more in
+the earlier days than any other one thing to make talk about the Reaper
+and to move the farmers out of the old-fashioned ruts. It provided the
+vaudeville element which is necessary in salesmanship where people are
+not interested in the commodity itself. As often happens, it was in the
+end carried too far. It became the most costly weapon of competition. It
+introduced all manner of unfairness and often violence. The most absurd
+tests were frequently agreed to. Mowers would be chained back to back
+and then forcibly torn apart. Reapers were driven into groves of
+saplings. Machines of special strength were made secretly. And so the
+warfare raged, until by general consent the field test was abandoned.
+
+These six factors of the McCormick System became the six commandments of
+the farm machinery business. They were largely adopted by his
+competitors, and exist to-day, with the exception of the exclusive
+contract and the field test.
+
+By 1850 McCormick had not only solved the problem of the Reaper; he had
+worked out a method of distribution. He had established a new business.
+But even this was not enough. He was now beset by a swarm of
+manufacturers who sought to deprive him of his patents and of a business
+which he naturally regarded as his own. It remained to be seen whether
+he could stand his ground when opposed by several hundred rivals; and
+whether he could duplicate in the courts the victories that he had won
+in the fields.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE STRUGGLE TO PROTECT PATENTS
+
+
+In 1848 Cyrus McCormick's original patent expired. He applied to have it
+extended, and at once there began one of the most extraordinary legal
+wars ever known in the history of the Patent Office. It continued with
+very little cessation until 1865. It enlisted on one side or the other
+the ablest lawyers of that period--such giants of the bar as Lincoln,
+Stanton, Seward, Douglas, Harding, Watson, Dickerson, and Reverdy
+Johnson. The tide of battle rolled from court to court until the final
+clash came in the chamber of the Supreme Court and the halls of
+Congress. It was perhaps the most Titanic effort that any American
+inventor has ever made to protect his rights and to carry out the
+purpose of the Patent Law.
+
+McCormick had strong reasons for believing that his patent should be
+extended. He was asking for no more than the Patent Office, on other
+occasions, had granted to other inventors. A patent was supposed to
+protect an inventor for fourteen years, and he had lost half of this
+time in making a better machine, and in finding out the best way to
+carry on the business. He had received from all sources nearly $24,000,
+and most of it had been swallowed up in expenses. He was still a poor
+man in 1848. He was no more than on the threshold of prosperity. And his
+peculiar difficulty, which gave him a special claim upon the Patent
+Commissioners, was the shortness of the harvest season. He had only
+three or four weeks in each year in which he could make experiments.
+
+For eight years McCormick's claim was tossed back and forth like a
+tennis ball between the Patent Office and Congress. This delay threw the
+door wide open to competition. A score of manufacturers built factories
+and began to make McCormick Reapers, with trifling variations and under
+other names. If McCormick had won his case, they would have had to pay
+him a royalty of $25 on each machine. Consequently, they combined
+against him. They hired lawyers and lobbyists, secured petitions from
+farmers, and raised a hue and cry that one man was "trying to impose a
+tax of $500,000 a year upon the starving millions of the world."
+
+One firm of lawyers in Cincinnati sent a letter to these manufacturers
+in 1850, saying that, "McCormick can be beaten in the Patent Office, and
+must be beaten now or never. If funds are furnished us, we shall surely
+beat him; but if they are not furnished us, he will as certainly beat
+us. Please, therefore, take hold and help us to beat the _common enemy_.
+The subscriptions have ranged from $100 to $1,000.... Send in also to
+Patent Office hundreds of remonstrances like this: We oppose the
+extension of C. H. McCormick's patent. He has made money enough off of
+the farmer."
+
+Towards the end of this famous case, the anti-McCormick lobby at the
+Capitol became so rabid that Senator Brown, of Mississippi, made an
+indignant protest on the floor of the Senate. He said: "Why, Mr.
+President, if it were not for the people out of doors, people without
+inventive genius, people without the genius to invent a mouse-trap or a
+fly-killer, who are pirating on the great invention of McCormick, there
+would never have been an hour's delay in granting all that he asks. I
+know, and I state here, in the face of the American Senate and the
+world, that these men have beset me at every corner of the street with
+their papers and their affidavits--men who have no claim to the ear of
+the country, men who have rendered it no service, but who have invested
+their paltry dollars in the production of a machine which sprang from
+the mind of another man; and who now, for their own gain, employ lawyers
+to draw cunning affidavits, to devise cunning schemes, and to put on
+foot all sorts of machinery to defeat McCormick."
+
+What worried McCormick most was not this consolidation of competitors,
+but the fact that a few farmers had signed petitions of protest against
+his claim. This was "the most unkindest cut of all." But he made no
+attack upon them. Manufacturers he would fight, and inventors and
+lawyers and judges--any one and every one, if need be, except farmers.
+"How can the farmers be against me?" he asked in amazement. "They save
+the price of the Reaper in a single harvest."
+
+McCormick lost his suit, as he did a second time in 1859, and a third
+time in 1861. Not one of his patents was at any time renewed. Up to 1858
+he had received $40,000 in royalties, but it had cost him $90,000 in
+litigation. From first to last he did not get one dollar of net profit
+from the protection of the Patent Office.
+
+Many other inventors were fairly treated by Congress. Fulton, for
+example, was presented with a bonus of $76,300. Willmoth, who improved
+the turret of a battleship, received $50,000. Professor Page, for making
+an electric engine, was given $20,000. Morse was awarded $38,000. The
+patents of Goodyear, Kelly, Howe, Morse, Hyatt, Woodworth, and Blanchard
+were extended. The protection of inventors had been a national
+policy--an American tradition. In the phrasing of Daniel Webster: "The
+right of an inventor to his invention is a natural right, which existed
+before the Constitution was written and which is above the
+Constitution."
+
+The benefit of the Reaper to the nation, and the fact that McCormick was
+its inventor, were admitted freely enough. Senator Johnson, of Maryland,
+estimated in 1858 that the Reaper was then worth to the United States
+$55,000,000 a year. D. P. Holloway, the Commissioner of Patents, sang an
+anthem of eloquent praise to McCormick in 1861. "He is an inventor whose
+fame, while he is yet living, has spread through the world," he said.
+"His genius has done honor to his own country, and has been the
+admiration of foreign nations. He will live in the grateful recollection
+of mankind as long as the reaping-machine is employed in gathering the
+harvest." Then, in an abrupt postscript to so fine a eulogy, this
+extraordinary Commissioner adds: "But the Reaper is of too great value
+to the public to be controlled by any individual, and the extension of
+his patent is refused."
+
+[Illustration: PAINTING BY C. SCHUSSELE, PHILADELPHIA, 1861
+
+ENGRAVED ON STEEL BY JOHN SARTAIN, PHILADELPHIA, 1862
+
+MEN OF PROGRESS
+
+STANDING, LEFT TO RIGHT: 1, Dr. W. T. G. Morton, first man to administer
+ether to a patient; 2, J. Bogardus, invented ring spinner (for cotton
+spinning), an engraving machine, and dry gas meter; 3, S. Colt,
+revolver; 4, Cyrus Hall McCormick, reaper; 5, Joseph Saxton, locomotive
+differential pulley and deep sea thermometer; 6, Peter Cooper, founder
+of Cooper Union and inventor machine for mortising hubs for carriage
+wheels; 7, Prof. J. Henry, inventor of communication by electricity; 8,
+E. B. Bigelow, power loom for spinning jenny.
+
+SITTING, LEFT TO RIGHT: 1, C. Goodyear, vulcanizer of rubber; 2, J. L.
+Mott, iron manufacturer and inventor; 3. Dr. E. Nott, base burner for
+stoves: 4, F. E. Sickles, inventor of cut-off of steam in engine; 5, S.
+F. B. Morse, telegraph; 6, H. Burden, cultivator, and machine for making
+horseshoes; 7, R. M. Hoe, printing press; 8, I. Jennings; 9, T.
+Blanchard, machine for cutting and heading tacks, and lathe for turning
+irregular forms: 10, E. Howe, sewing machine.]
+
+The truth seems to be that McCormick was too strong, too aggressive, to
+receive fair play at the hands of any legislative body. The note of
+sympathy could never be struck in his favor. He personally directed his
+own cases. He dominated his own lawyers. And he fought always in an
+old-fashioned, straight-from-the-shoulder way that put him at a great
+disadvantage in a legal conflict. Also, he was supposed to be much
+richer than in reality he was. He had made money by the rise in Chicago
+real estate. By 1866 he had become a millionaire. And his entire fortune
+was assumed by opposing lawyers to be the product of the Reaper
+business.
+
+It is to be said, to the lasting honor of South Carolina, that she gave
+a grant of money to Whitney, out of the public treasury, as a token of
+gratitude for the invention of the cotton gin. But no wheat State ever
+gave, or proposed to give, any grant or vote of thanks to Cyrus
+McCormick for the invention of the Reaper. The business that he
+established was never at any time favored by a tariff, or franchise, or
+patent extension, or tax exemption, or land grant, or monopoly.
+Single-handed he built it up, and single-handed he held it against all
+comers. If, as Emerson has said, an institution is no more than "the
+lengthened shadow of one man," we may fairly say that the immense
+McCormick Company of to-day is no more than the lengthened shadow of
+this farm-bred Virginian.
+
+By 1855 McCormick realized that the Federal Government was not the
+impartial tribunal that he had believed it to be. He saw that he could
+not depend upon it for protection, so he made a characteristic
+decision--he resolved to protect himself. He, too, would hire a battery
+of lawyers and charge down upon these manufacturers who were
+unrighteously making his Reaper and depriving him of his patents. He
+engaged three of the master lawyers of the American bar, William H.
+Seward, E. N. Dickerson, and Senator Reverdy Johnson, and brought suit
+against Manny and Emerson, of Rockford, Illinois, for making McCormick
+Reapers without a license.
+
+Then came a three-year struggle that shook the country and did much to
+shape the history of the American people. Manny and Emerson, who were
+shrewd and forceful men, hired twice as many lawyers as McCormick and
+prepared to defend themselves. They selected as the members of this
+legal bodyguard, Abraham Lincoln, Stephen A. Douglas, Edwin M. Stanton,
+Peter H. Watson, George Harding, and Congressman H. Winter Davis.
+
+It was a battle of giants. Greek met Greek with weapons of eloquence.
+But Stanton out-classed his great co-debaters in a speech of
+unanswerable power which unfortunately was not reported. The speech so
+vividly impressed McCormick that in his next lawsuit he at once engaged
+Stanton. It awoke the brain of Lincoln, as he afterwards admitted; and
+drove him back to a more comprehensive study of the law. It gave Lincoln
+so high an opinion of Stanton's ability that, when he became President
+several years later, he chose Stanton to be his Secretary of War. And it
+gripped judge and jury with such effect that McCormick lost his case. It
+was a wonderful speech.
+
+Abraham Lincoln, who made no speech at all, was the one who derived the
+most benefit in the end from this lawsuit. It not only aroused his
+ambitions, but gave him his first big fee--$1,000. This money came to
+him at the precise moment when he needed it most, to enable him to enter
+into the famous debate with Douglas--the debate that made him the
+inevitable candidate of the Republican party. It is interesting to note
+how closely the destinies of Lincoln and McCormick were interwoven. Both
+were born in 1809, on farms in the South. Both struggled through a youth
+of adversity and first came into prominence in Illinois. Both labored to
+preserve the Union, and when the War of Secession came it was the Reaper
+that enabled Lincoln to feed his armies. Both men were emancipators, the
+one from slavery and the other from famine; and both to-day sleep under
+the soil of Illinois. No other two Americans had heavier tasks than
+they, and none worked more mightily for the common good.
+
+Of all McCormick's lawsuits, and they were many, the most extraordinary
+was the famous Baggage Case, which lasted for twenty-three years--from
+1862 to 1885. It was probably the best single instance of the man's
+dogged tenacity in defence of a principle. The original cause of this
+trial was a comedy of mishaps. A McCormick family party of six, with
+nine trunks, boarded a train at Philadelphia for Chicago. The train was
+about to start, when the baggage-master demanded pay for 200 pounds of
+surplus baggage. The amount was only $8.70, but McCormick refused to pay
+it. He called his family out of the train and ordered that his trunks be
+taken off. The conductor refused to hold the train, and the trunks were
+carried away. Mr. McCormick at once saw the president of the railroad,
+J. Edgar Thompson, who telegraphed an order for the trunks to be put off
+at Pittsburg. The McCormicks set out for Chicago by the next train. At
+Pittsburg they learned that the trunks had been carried through to
+Chicago. And the next day, in Chicago, when McCormick went to the Fort
+Wayne depot, he found it a mass of smoking cinders. It had caught fire
+in the night, and the nine trunks had been destroyed.
+
+McCormick sued the railroad for $7,193--the value of the trunks and
+their contents. Repeatedly he won and repeatedly the railroad appealed
+to higher courts. After twenty years the worn and battered case was
+carried up to the nine Justices of the United States Supreme Court. They
+decided for McCormick. But even then the railroad evaded payment for
+three years, until after McCormick's death. Then the president of the
+road signed a check for $18,060.79, which was the original value of the
+nine trunks plus twenty-three years' interest.
+
+McCormick did not for a moment regard this case as trivial. It involved
+a principle. Once when a friend bantered him for fighting so hard over a
+small matter, he replied, "My conscience, sir! I don't know what would
+become of the American people if there were not some one to stand up for
+fair dealing." His victory did much to teach the railroads better
+manners and a finer consideration of the travelling public. Soon after
+the conclusion of the case, a trunk belonging to a relative of the
+McCormicks was destroyed on the New York Central. It value was $1,300,
+and one of the railroad's lawyers promptly sent a check, saying, "We
+don't want to have a lawsuit with the McCormicks."
+
+For these numerous lawsuits McCormick paid a terrible price, both in
+money and friendship. He acquired a reputation as "a man who would law
+you to death." He brought down upon himself to a remarkable degree the
+hostility of his competitors, and prevented himself from receiving the
+full credit and prestige that he deserved. Instead of being revered as
+the father of the Reaper business, he was feared as an industrial
+Bismarck--a man of unyielding will and indomitable purpose, who regarded
+his competitors as a pack of trespassers in an empire that belonged by
+right to him.
+
+The truth is that this situation did not arise because of the natural
+perversity of either McCormick or his competitors. In his later life,
+McCormick proved that he could co-operate with his equals in the most
+harmonious way, in a new business enterprise. His competitors, too, were
+for the most part men of ability and uprightness. Neither in their
+public nor private lives, was there any stain upon the honor of such men
+as Wood, Osborne, Adriance, Manny, Emerson, Huntley, Warder. Bushnell,
+Glessner, Jones, and Lewis Miller. But these men were all newcomers.
+They were beardless striplings compared to McCormick. He had made and
+exhibited a successful Reaper twenty years before the first of them
+began. His father had grappled with the problem of the Reaper before
+most of them were born. It was inevitable, therefore, that there should
+have been an unspanable gap between the two points of view. McCormick
+stood alone because he _was_ alone. He and the Reaper had grown up
+together in long hazardous years of pioneering, through ridicule and
+poverty and failure. It was his dream come true. And in the same spirit
+with which he had fought to create it, he also fought to hold it, and to
+protect it from men to whom it was not a dream and a life-mission, but a
+mere machine.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE EVOLUTION OF THE REAPER
+
+
+Of all the varieties of difficulties that confronted Cyrus H. McCormick
+during his strenuous life, the most baffling and disconcerting
+difficulty was when his Reaper began to grow. For fifteen years--from
+1845 to 1860--it had remained unchanged except that seats had been added
+for the raker and the driver. It did no more than cut the grain and
+leave it on the ground in loose bundles. It had abolished the sickler
+and the cradler; but there yet remained the raker and the binder. Might
+it not be possible, thought the restless American brain, to abolish
+these also and leave no one but the driver?
+
+This at once became a most popular and fascinating problem for
+inventors. There was by this time everything to gain and nothing to lose
+by improving the Reaper. There was no opposition and no ridicule. To cut
+grain by horse-power had become, of course, the only proper way of
+cutting it. As many as 20,000 Reapers of all kinds were made in 1860;
+and McCormick's factory had grown to be the pride of Chicago. It was 90
+by 150 feet in size, two stories high, and gave work to about a hundred
+and twenty men.
+
+As early as 1852 a fantastic self-rake Reaper had been invented by a
+mechanical genius named Jearum Atkins. This man was a bed-ridden
+cripple, who, to while away the tiresome hours of his confinement,
+bought a McCormick Reaper, had it placed outside his window, and
+actually devised an attachment to it which automatically raked off the
+cut grain in bundles. It was a grotesque contrivance. The farmers
+nicknamed it the "Iron Man." It consisted of an upright post, with two
+revolving iron arms. These arms whirled stiffly around, windmill
+fashion, and scraped the grain from the platform to the ground.
+
+An amusing anecdote of this machine was told by Henry Wallace, known to
+all farmers of the Middle West as the founder of _Wallace's Farmer_.
+"The first Reaper that my father bought," said Mr. Wallace, "was a
+McCormick machine that had an 'Iron Man' on it. The first day that it
+was driven into the grain it made such a clatter that the horses ran
+away. It was certainly a terrifying sight as it rattled through the
+wheat, with its long, rake-fingered arms flying and hurling the cut
+grain in the wildest disorder. It was as good as a chariot race in a
+circus to the crowd of farmers, who had come to see how the new machine
+would operate. The next day my father tried again. There had been rain
+during the night, and the heavy machine stuck fast in the mud. It had
+cost $300, but my father took the 'Iron Man' off, and during the
+remainder of that harvest we raked off the grain by hand."
+
+A great variety of self-rake Reapers soon appeared, and after 1860 the
+farmers would buy no other kind. Thus a part of the problem had been
+solved. The raker was abolished. There now remained the much more
+difficult work of supplanting the binder--the man, or sometimes woman,
+who gathered up the bundles of cut grain, and, making a crude rope of
+the grain itself, bound it tightly around the middle, making what was
+called a sheaf. This was hard, back-breaking work, intolerable when the
+sun was hot, except to men of the strongest physique. It required not
+strength only, but skill. Ninety-nine farmers out of a hundred believed
+that it would always have to be done by hand. "How can it be possible,"
+they asked, "that a machine which is being dragged by horses over a
+rough field can at the same time be picking up grain and tying knots?"
+
+Just then two young farmers near De Kalb came to the rescue by inventing
+a new species of machine. It was neither a Reaper nor a self-binder. It
+was half-way between the two. It was the missing link. It appeared that
+an inventor named Mann had taken a McCormick Reaper and built a moving
+platform upon it, in such a way that the grain was carried up to a wagon
+which was drawn alongside. These two young farmers had bought a Mann
+machine, and one of them, when he saw it in operation, originated a
+brilliant idea.
+
+"Why should the grain be carried up to a wagon?" he asked. "Why can't
+we put a foot-board on the machine, for two of us to stand on, and then
+bind the grain as fast as it is carried up?"
+
+This was the origin of the "Marsh Harvester," which held the field for
+ten years or longer. It did not abolish the man who bound, but it gave
+him a chance to work twice as fast. It compelled him to be quick. It
+saved him the trouble of walking from bundle to bundle. It enabled him
+to stand erect. And best of all, it put half a dozen inventors on the
+right line of thought. Plainly, what was needed now was to teach a Marsh
+Harvester to tie knots.
+
+One evening in 1874 a tall man, with a box under his arm, walked
+diffidently up the steps of the McCormick home in Chicago, and rang the
+bell. He asked to see Mr. McCormick, and was shown into the parlor,
+where he found Mr. McCormick, sitting as usual in a large and
+comfortable chair.
+
+"My name is Withington," said the stranger. "I live in Janesville,
+Wisconsin. I have here a model of a machine that will automatically
+bind grain." Now, it so happened that McCormick had been kept awake
+nearly the whole of the previous night by a stubborn business problem.
+He could scarcely hold his eyelids apart. And when Withington was in the
+midst of his explanation, with the intentness of a born inventor,
+McCormick fell fast asleep.
+
+At such a reception to his cherished machine, Withington lost heart. He
+was a gentle, sensitive man, easily rebuffed, and so, when McCormick
+aroused from his nap, Withington had departed and was on his way back to
+Wisconsin. For a few seconds McCormick was uncertain as to whether his
+visitor had been a reality or a dream. Then he awoke with a start into
+instant action. A great opportunity had come to him and he had let it
+slip. He was at this time making self-rake Reapers and Marsh Harvesters;
+but what he wanted--what every Reaper manufacturer wanted in 1874--was a
+self-binder. He at once called to him one of his trusted workmen.
+
+"I want you to go to Janesville," he said. "Find a man named Withington,
+and bring him to me by the first train that comes back to Chicago."
+
+The next day Withington was brought back and treated with the utmost
+courtesy. McCormick studied his invention and found it to be a most
+remarkable mechanism. Two steel arms caught each bundle of grain,
+whirled a wire tightly around it, fastened the two ends together with a
+twist, cut it loose and tossed it to the ground. This self-binder was
+perfect in all its details--as neat and effective a machine as could be
+imagined. McCormick was delighted. At last, here was a machine that
+would abolish the binding of grain by hand.
+
+A bargain was made with Withington on the spot; and the following July a
+self-binder was tried on the Sherwood farm, near Elgin, Illinois. It cut
+fifty acres of wheat and bound every bundle without a slip. From this
+time onwards no one was needed but a man, a boy, a girl, anybody, who
+could hold the reins and drive a team of horses. Of the ten or twelve
+sweating drudges who toiled in the harvest-field, all were now to be set
+free--the sicklers, cradlers, rakers, binders--every one except the
+driver, and he (or she) was to have the glory of riding on the triumphal
+chariot of a machine that did all the work itself.
+
+"There were ten men working in my wheat-field in the old days," said an
+Illinois farmer. "But to-day our hired girl climbs upon the spring seat
+of a self-binder and does the whole business."
+
+McCormick was not the first to make one of these magical machines. There
+was an able and enterprising manufacturer in New York State, Walter A.
+Wood, who in 1873 had made three Withington binders, under the
+supervision of Sylvanus D. Locke, who had been a co-worker with
+Withington. McCormick had given Wood his start, as early as 1853, by
+selling him a license to make Reapers; and Wood, by his high personal
+qualities, had built up a most extensive business. But McCormick was the
+first to make self-binders upon a large scale. He made 50,000 of the
+Withington machines, and pushed them with irresistible energy.
+
+[Illustration: THE FIRST McCORMICK SELF-RAKE REAPING MACHINE]
+
+He originated a new method of advertising the self-binders among the
+farmers. Special flat-cars were provided for him by the railroads. Upon
+each one of these cars a binder was placed, in the charge of an expert.
+These cars, during the harvest season, were attached to ordinary freight
+trains; and whenever the train came to a busy wheat-field it was stopped
+for an hour or more, the self-binder was rushed from the car to the
+field, and an exhibition of its skill given to the wondering farmers.
+Then it was put back on its car, and the train resumed its leisurely
+course until it arrived at the next scene of harvesting.
+
+The sensitive-natured inventor, Charles B. Withington, who gave such
+timely aid to McCormick, was one of the most romantic knights-errant of
+industry in his generation. Born near Akron a year before McCormick
+invented his Reaper, he was trained by his father to be a watchmaker. At
+fifteen, to earn some pocket-money, he went into the harvest field to
+bind grain. He was not robust, and the hard, stooping labor under a hot
+sun would sometimes bring the blood to his head in a hemorrhage. There
+were times after the day's work was done when he was too weary to walk
+home, and would throw himself upon the stubble to rest.
+
+At eighteen he set out to find his fortune in the far West, became a
+Forty-niner, drifted to Australia, and in 1855 came back to Janesville,
+Wisconsin, with three thousand dollars or more in his belt. All this
+money he proceeded to fritter away on the invention of a self-rake
+Reaper--"a crazy scheme," as the townspeople called it. As it happened,
+the whole southern region of Wisconsin was being stirred up at that time
+by the speeches of an inventive Madison editor, who went by the name of
+"Pump" Carpenter. Carpenter's hobby was that the binding of grain must
+be done by machinery. He was eloquent and popular, and his arguments
+were substantiated by a little model which he was accustomed to carry
+about with him. Withington heard him speak and was converted. He dropped
+his self-rake reaper and went to work upon a self-binder. He completed
+his first machine in 1872, and was thrust from one discouragement to
+another until two years later he met McCormick.
+
+It is a most interesting fact, and certainly not an accidental one, that
+the group of noted inventors who together produced the self-binder all
+appeared from the region south of Madison, which had been so aroused by
+the eloquence of "Pump" Carpenter. Besides C. B. Withington, there were
+Sylvanus D. Locke, also of Janesville, H. A. Holmes, of Beloit, John F.
+Appleby, of Mazomanie, W. W. Burson, Jacob Behel, George H. Spaulding,
+and Marquis L. Gorham, of Rockford.
+
+Until 1880, all went well with McCormick and the Withington self-binder.
+Apparently, the process of invention had ceased. The Reaper had become
+of age. This miraculous wire-twisting machine was working everywhere
+with clock-like precision, and was believed to be the best that human
+ingenuity could devise. Then, like a bolt of lightning from a blue sky,
+came the news that William Deering had made and sold 3,000 _twine_
+self-binders, and that the farmers had all at once become prejudiced
+against the use of wire. Wire, they said, got mixed with the straw and
+killed their cattle. Wire fell in the wheat and made trouble in the
+flour-mills. Wire cut their hands. Wire cluttered up their barn-yards.
+They would have no more to do with wire. What they wanted and must have
+was _twine_.
+
+William Deering, the newcomer who had caused this disturbance, became in
+a flash McCormick's ablest competitor. He had entered the business eight
+years before with a running start, having been a successful dry goods
+merchant in Maine. His geneology in the harvester industry shows that he
+had become an active partner of E. H. Gammon in 1872. Gammon, who had
+formerly been a Methodist preacher in Maine, had started as an agent for
+Seymour and Morgan of Brockport, which firm had been licensed by
+McCormick in 1845. Deering was the first highly skilled business man to
+enter the harvester trade. He was not a farmer's son, like McCormick. He
+was city-bred and factory trained. And in 1880 he staked practically his
+whole fortune upon the making of 3,000 twine self-binders, and won.
+
+Cyrus McCormick saw at a glance that the wire self-binder must go. It
+was his policy to give the farmers what they wanted, rather than to
+force upon them an unpopular machine. So he called to his aid a
+mechanical genius named Marquis L. Gorham--one of those who had been
+lured into the quest of a self-binder by the insistence of "Pump"
+Carpenter. Gorham's most valuable contribution was a self-sizing device,
+by which all bound sheaves were made to be the same size. By the time
+that the grain stood ripe and yellow the following season, Gorham had
+prepared a twine self-binder that worked well, and McCormick, yielding
+to this sudden hostility against wire, pushed the Gorham machine with
+the full force of his great organization.
+
+This evolution of the Reaper into the twine self-binder was a momentous
+event. It tremendously increased the sales. There were 60,000 machines
+of all kinds sold in 1880, and 250,000 in 1885. And it strikingly
+decreased the number of manufacturers. There were a hundred or more
+until the appearance of the twine binder: and all but twenty-two fell
+out of the race. Some of these were driven out by the expensive war of
+patents that now ensued. But most of them gave up the contest for lack
+of capital. The era of big production had arrived, and the little
+hand-labor shops could not produce an intricate self-binder for the low
+price at which they were being sold.
+
+Even McCormick lost heavily at first, before a truce was called in this
+battle of the binders. One lawsuit cost him more than $225,000 and one
+experiment, with what was called a "low-down" binder, cost him $80,000.
+He was as determined as ever not to be beaten; and although he was at
+this time over seventy years of age, and sorely crippled by rheumatism,
+he straightway entered into a trade war with Deering, which was not
+ended until 1902. Many of the older workmen who are now employed in the
+McCormick works can remember the stress and strain of those battling
+years, and how their indomitable old leader, at times when he was
+unable to walk, would have himself pushed in a wheeled chair through the
+various buildings of his immense plant, to make sure that every part of
+the great mechanism was working smoothly.
+
+Of all the competitors who had fought him in the early days, before the
+Civil War, there were few now remaining. Hussey, his first antagonist,
+had sold out to a mowing machine syndicate in 1861. Emerson, Seymour,
+and Morgan had decided not to make self-binders. Jerome Fassler, of
+Springfield, Ohio, took his fortune of two million dollars and went to
+New York City in 1882 with a scheme to build a subway. Manny was dead,
+and very few were living of those who had seen the Reaper of 1831.
+
+John P. Adriance, of Poughkeepsie, had survived. He was a gentle-natured
+man, who was content with a small and safe percentage of the business.
+Byron E. Huntley, of Batavia, had also built up a small, but solidly
+based, enterprise. He had been the office-boy, in 1845, in the factory
+where the first hundred McCormick Reapers were made; and he had been a
+manufacturer on his own account since 1850. He, too, was a quiet,
+dignified man, very highly esteemed in both the United States and
+Europe. Lewis Miller, who deserves most credit as the creator of the
+mower, continued to do business at Akron. Mr. Miller was almost equally
+famous as a Methodist and the originator of the Chautauqua idea. At
+Auburn, N. Y., David M. Osborne was fighting manfully to keep in the
+race. He had built seven Reapers as early as 1856; and had made many
+friends by his ability and uprightness. At Hoosick Falls, N. Y., there
+was Walter A. Wood--a most competent and enterprising man; at Plano,
+Illinois, there was William H. Jones--self-made and as honest as the
+soil; and at Springfield, Ohio, were the picturesque William N. Whiteley
+and the powerful company of Warder, Bushnell, and Glessner. Whiteley was
+an inventor who had changed a McCormick Reaper into what he called a
+"combined machine"--a combined Reaper and mower. And Warder, Bushnell,
+and Glessner had begun to make McCormick Reapers, by means of a license
+from Seymour and Morgan, in 1852.
+
+[Illustration: CYRUS HALL McCORMICK, 1858]
+
+Such were the most notable men who, together with McCormick and Deering,
+began in 1880 or soon afterwards to manufacture the new knot-tying
+device that had become necessary to the Reaper. As for Cyrus H.
+McCormick himself, he lived to see it the universal grain-cutter of all
+civilized countries. He lived to see it perfected into one of the most
+astonishing mechanisms known to man--an almost rational machine that
+cuts the grain, carries it on a canvas escalator up to steel hands that
+shape it into bundles, tie a cord around it as neatly as could be done
+by a sailor, and cut the cord; after which the bound sheaf is pushed
+into a basket and held until five of them have been collected, whereupon
+they are dropped carefully upon the ground.
+
+Since 1884 there has been no essential change in the fashion of the
+self-binder. It is the same to-day as when McCormick was alive. In the
+span of his single life the Reaper was born and grew to its full
+maturity. He saw its Alpha and its Omega. Best of all, he saw not only
+its humble arrival, in a remote Virginia settlement, but, as we shall
+see, he saw it become the plaything of Emperors, the marvel of Siberian
+plainsmen, the liberator of the land-serf in twenty countries, and the
+bread-machine of one-half of the human race.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE CONQUEST OF EUROPE
+
+
+By 1850 Cyrus H. McCormick was ready for new business. He now had a
+factory of his own, and the assistance of his brothers, William and
+Leander. He had a score of busy agents and a few thousand dollars in the
+bank. He had fought down the ridicule of the farm-hands. It was only six
+years since he had set out from his Virginian farm with $300 in his belt
+and the Idea of the Reaper in his brain; but in those six years he had
+worked mightily and succeeded. His Reapers were now clicking merrily in
+more than three thousand American wheat-fields. So, it was a natural
+thing that in the first flush of victory, he should look across the sea
+for "more worlds to conquer."
+
+There was at that time no general demand for Reapers in any European
+country. Labor was plentiful and cheap--forty cents a day in Great
+Britain and about half as much in Germany and France. In Austria and
+Russia the farm laborers received no wages at all. They were serfs.
+There was no economic reason why serfs should be replaced by machinery.
+They had first to become free and expensive to employ, before this
+Reaper, this product of a free republic, could set them free from the
+drudgery of the harvest.
+
+England had been the first European country to abolish this serfdom.
+Several centuries before, the ravages of the Black Death had made farm
+laborers so scarce that their rights had begun to be respected. Also,
+the upgrowth of the factory system and the development of English
+shipping had called thousands of men away from the fields, and raised
+the wages of those who were left behind. And the falling off in profits
+was compelling many English land-owners to study better methods of
+farming, and to favor the introduction of farm machinery.
+
+Fortunately for McCormick, he had no sooner begun to think of foreign
+trade than there came the famous London Exposition of 1851. This mammoth
+Exhibition was to Great Britain what the Chicago World's Fair of 1893
+was to the United States--magnificent evidence of industrial progress.
+Its main promoter had been Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria,
+and its success gave the keenest pleasure to the young Queen. In a
+letter written to the King of the Belgians, she thus describes her
+impressions upon the opening day:
+
+"My dearest Uncle," she writes, "I wish you could have witnessed the 1st
+May, 1851, the _greatest_ day in our history, the _most beautiful_ and
+_imposing_ and _touching_ spectacle ever seen, and the triumph of my
+beloved Albert. Truly it was astonishing, a fairy scene. Many cried, and
+all felt touched and impressed with devotional feelings. It was the
+_happiest, proudest_ day in my life, and I can think of nothing else.
+You will be astounded at this great work when you see it. The beauty of
+the building and the vastness of it all!"
+
+The crowning jewel of this Exposition was the priceless Koh-i-noor
+diamond, which the Queen had received from India the previous year, and
+had loaned to the Exposition managers. For five thousand years, so the
+legend ran, this diamond had been one of the most precious treasures of
+Asia. It had been worn by the hero Karna. And it had been so often the
+most coveted prize in war that there was a Hindoo saying--"Whoever
+possesses the Koh-i-noor has conquered his enemies."
+
+Most of the courts of Europe had sent some dazzling treasure. There were
+tapestries from the Viceroy of Egypt, and rugs from the Sultan of
+Turkey, and silks from the King of Spain. There were marbles from Paris,
+and paintings from Dresden, and embroideries from Vienna. And in the
+midst of this resplendent Exposition, surrounded and outshone by the
+exhibits of Russia, Austria, and France, lay a shabby collection of odds
+and ends from the United States.
+
+For three weeks the American department was the joke of the Exposition.
+It was nicknamed the "Prairie Ground." It had no jewels, nor silks, nor
+golden candelabra. There were only such preposterous things as Dick's
+Press, Borden's Meat Biscuit, St. John's Soap, and McCormick's Reaper.
+This last contraption was the most preposterous of all. It was said to
+be "a cross between an Astley chariot, a wheelbarrow, and a
+flying-machine." It was unlike anything else that English eyes had ever
+seen, and by all odds the queerest and most ungainly thing that lay
+under the glass roof of the Crystal Palace. Undeniably it was the "Ugly
+Duckling" of the American exhibit.
+
+But one day there came to the Reaper booth a remarkable Anglo-Italian
+named John J. Mechi. His father had been the barber of George III., and
+he himself, by the invention of a "Magic Razor Strop," had made a
+fortune. His hobby was scientific farming, and he was hungry for new
+methods and new ideas. At the time of the Exposition, his farm, which
+lay not far from London, had become the most famous experimental ground
+in England. Therefore, when he spied this new contrivance called a
+Reaper, he proposed that it be taken out to his farm and put to the
+test.
+
+This was done on July twenty-fourth. In spite of a pouring rain, there
+were present a group of judges and two hundred farmers. Lord Ebrington
+was there, and Prince Frederick of Holstein, and several other titled
+agriculturists. One other machine was to be tested, besides McCormick's.
+It was put into the grain first and was at once seen to be a failure. It
+broke down the grain instead of cutting it. Seeing this mishap, several
+of the farmers said to Mr. Mechi, "You had better stop this trial,
+because it is destroying your grain." Whereupon Mr. Mechi made one of
+the noblest replies that can be found in the annals of progress.
+"Gentlemen," he said, "this is a great experiment for the benefit of my
+country. When a new principle is about to be established, individual
+interests must always give way. If it is necessary for the success of
+this test, you may take my seventy acres of wheat."
+
+Then came the McCormick Reaper, driven by an expert named Mackenzie. It
+swept down the field like a chariot of war, with whirling reel and
+clattering blade--seventy-four yards in seventy seconds. It was a
+miracle. Such a thing had never before been seen by Europeans. "This is
+a triumph for the American Reaper," said the delighted Mechi. "It has
+done its work completely; and the day will come when this machine will
+cut all the grain in England. Now," he continued, swinging his hat, "let
+us, as Englishmen, show our appreciation by giving three hearty English
+cheers."
+
+Horace Greeley, who was present on this occasion, described the victory
+of the McCormick Reaper as follows:--"It came into the field to confront
+a tribunal already prepared for its condemnation. Before it stood John
+Bull--burly, dogged, and determined not to be humbugged,--his judgment
+made up and his sentence ready to be recorded. There was a moment, and
+but a moment, of suspense; then human prejudice could hold out no
+longer; and burst after burst of involuntary cheers from the whole crowd
+proclaimed the triumph of the Yankee Reaper. In seventy seconds
+McCormick had become famous. He was the lion of the hour; and had he
+brought five hundred Reapers with him, he could have sold them all."
+
+Suddenly the "Ugly Duckling" had become a swan. The glory of the Reaper
+began to rival that of the Koh-i-noor. McCormick was given not only a
+First Prize but a Council Medal, such as was usually awarded only to
+Kings and Governments. The London _Times_, which had led the jeering,
+became now the loudest in the chorus of approval. "The Reaping machine
+from the United States," said the _Times_ editor, "is the most valuable
+contribution from abroad, to the stock of our previous knowledge, that
+we have yet discovered. It is worth the whole cost of the Exposition."
+Also, speaking on behalf of the English people, Sir Henry Lytton Bulwer
+said, "For all manly and practical purposes, the place of the United
+States is at the head of the poll. Where, out of America, shall we get a
+pistol like Mr. Colt's, to kill our eight enemies in a second, or a
+reaping machine like Mr. McCormick's, to clear out twenty acres of wheat
+in a day?"
+
+On the whole, this Exposition gave the United States its first
+opportunity to answer the unpleasant questions that Sidney Smith had
+asked in 1820. What have the Americans done, he had asked, for the arts
+and sciences? Where are their Arkwrights, their Watts, their Davys?
+Here he was answered by the McCormick Reaper, the Colt revolver, the
+Hobbs lock, the Morse telegraph, the Howe sewing-machine, the Deere
+plow, and the Hoe press. And, as if to make the triumph of American
+invention complete, it was in this year that the yacht _America_ easily
+out-classed the famous yachts of England in a great race at Cowes, and
+that the American steamer _Baltic_, of the Collins Line, broke all the
+ocean records and became the speediest vessel on the high seas.
+
+This Exposition did much for McCormick. It was the first appreciation of
+his work, in a large way, that he had received. It was a welcome change
+after twenty strenuous years. It gave him the distinction that a
+naturally strong nature craved, and secured the friendship of such
+eminent men as Junius Morgan, George Peabody, J. J. Mechi, and Lord
+Granville. From a business point of view, also, the Exposition was of
+great service to McCormick. It enabled him to draw up a new plan of
+campaign for the foreign trade.
+
+In the United States, he had made his appeal directly to the mass of the
+farmers. In Europe he could not do this. The vast bulk of the farmers
+here were tenants or serfs. But it was also true, he observed, that the
+Kings of Europe, and the members of the nobility, were land-owners. Here
+was his chance. He would begin at the top. He would sell his Reapers to
+the kings.
+
+He noticed that kings and queens were not the remote and inaccessible
+personages that he had believed them to be. Prince Albert was plainly
+more interested in farm machinery than in the Koh-i-noor. The one prize
+which was awarded to him personally was for a model cottage, in which a
+workingman's family might live with greater comfort. And one morning,
+while McCormick was giving attention to his Reaper, the Queen and her
+ten-year-old son (now the King of England) walked past and had a view of
+the American Reaping machine that had been so widely ridiculed and
+praised.
+
+McCormick had to hurry back to the United States, on account of a
+patent suit that was then in full swing; but before he left England he
+established an agency in London, and started a vigorous campaign among
+the titled land-owners. He prepared a statement, showing that even at
+the low rate of wages that were paid on English farms a Reaper would
+mean a handsome saving to English wheat-growers. But he did not depend
+upon the argument of economy. He placed his reliance also upon the fact
+that the Reaper had become the playtoy of kings, and that their fancy
+would presently make it the fashion.
+
+Four years later he went with another Reaper to an Exposition at Paris,
+won the Gold Medal, and sold his machine to the Emperor. Then, in 1862,
+with his wife and young son and daughter, he made his headquarters in
+London, and opened up a two-years' campaign in Great Britain, Germany,
+and France. Up to this time the foreign trade had grown but slowly. All
+European countries combined were not buying more than half a million
+dollars' worth of farm machinery a year from Americans--less than we
+sell them now in five days. So McCormick exerted himself to the utmost.
+
+He held field tests to awaken the farmers. He advertised and organized.
+There were now several dozen other manufacturers in the field, all
+making Reapers more or less like McCormick's; and he gave battle to them
+at London, Lille, and Hamburg. After the Hamburg contest, Joseph A.
+Wright, the United States Commissioner, cabled to New York: "McCormick
+has thrashed all nations and walked off with the Gold Medal."
+
+Again, in 1867, McCormick had a notable time at Paris. The Emperor
+Napoleon III., then in the last days of his inherited glory, permitted
+McCormick to give a sort of Reaper _matinée_ on the royal estate at
+Châlons. The Emperor was present, at first on horseback, and then on
+foot. The sun was hot, and presently he said to McCormick, "If you will
+allow me, I'll come under your umbrella." So the two men, dramatically
+different in the tendencies they represented, walked arm in arm behind
+the Reaper, and watched it automatically cut and rake off the grain. The
+Emperor was delighted. He forgot for the moment his impending troubles,
+and at once offered McCormick the Cross of the Legion of Honor. This
+was, in all probability, the last time that the coveted Cross was
+conferred in France by the hand of a sovereign; and the meeting of the
+two men was a highly impressive event, the one man typifying a falling
+dynasty that had risen to greatness by the sword, and the other the
+founder of a new industry that was destined to bring peace and plenty to
+all nations alike.
+
+Two years later, because of the clamor of McCormick's competitors, a
+grand Field Test was arranged by the German Government at Altenberg.
+Thirty-eight contestants entered the lists, and after a most exciting
+tournament the judges awarded the Gold Medal and a special prize of
+sixty ducats to McCormick. Such contests, from this time onward, came
+thick and fast. Several days later McCormick swept the field at Altona.
+In 1873 he was decorated by the Austrian Emperor. And in 1878 the
+French Academy of Science elected him a member, for the reason that he
+"had done more for the cause of agriculture than any other living man."
+
+[Illustration: CYRUS HALL McCORMICK, 1867
+
+From Painting by Cabanel]
+
+From that time to the present day the making of Reapers and Harvesters
+has remained an American business. An American machine must pay twenty
+dollars to enter France, and twenty-five to enter Hungary. But try as
+they may, other nations cannot learn the secret of the Reaper. They
+cannot produce a machine that is at once so complex, so hardy, and so
+efficient. When Bismarck, at the close of his life, was inspecting
+several American self-binders which he had bought for his farm at
+Fredericksruhe, he asked, "Why do they not make these machines in
+Germany?" As we have seen, had he wished a complete answer he would have
+had to read the history of the United States. He would have seen that
+the Reaper can be produced only in countries where labor receives a high
+reward, where farmers own their own acres without fear of being
+despoiled by invading armies, and where the average of intelligence
+and enterprise is as high in the country as in the city.
+
+In 1898 Europe had become so dependent upon America for its reaping
+machinery that 22,000 machines were shipped from the McCormick plant
+alone--so many that a fleet of twelve vessels had to be chartered to
+carry them. There are now as many American Reapers and Harvesters in
+Europe as can do the work of 12,000,000 men. Of all American machines
+exported, the Reaper is at the head of the list. It has been the chief
+pathfinder for our foreign trade. Four-fifths of all the harvesting
+machinery in the world is made in the United States; and one-third,
+perhaps more, in the immense factory-city that Cyrus H. McCormick
+founded in Chicago in 1847.
+
+It was McCormick's most solid satisfaction, in his later life, to see
+foreign nations, one by one, adopt his invention and move up out of the
+Famine Zone. No news was at any time more welcome to him than the
+tidings that a new territory had been entered. And although the foreign
+trade has been vastly multiplied in the past five or six years, he
+lived long enough to see his catalogue printed in twenty languages, and
+to know that as long as the human race continued to eat bread, the sun
+would never set upon the empire of the Reaper.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+McCORMICK AS A MANUFACTURER
+
+
+"If I had given up business, I would have been dead long ago," said
+Cyrus H. McCormick in 1884, only a few weeks before his death; and this
+statement was by no means an exaggeration. His business was his life. It
+was not a definite, walled-off fraction of his life, as with most men.
+It was the whole of it. His business was his work, his play, his
+religion, his grand opera, his education. There was business even in his
+love-letters and his dreams.
+
+McCormick believed in business. He had the sturdy pride of a "John
+Halifax, Gentleman." He never wanted to be anything else but a worker.
+He never wasted a breath in wishing for an easier life. He worked hard
+for twenty-five years after he had made his fortune, because he believed
+in work and commerce and the reciprocities of trade. He was never
+dazzled nor deflected for a moment by the pomps and pageantries of the
+world, and for the glory that springs from war he had very little
+respect. In 1847, when offering a place in his factory to his brother
+Leander, he writes, "This will be as honorable an enterprise as to go to
+Mexico to be shot at." And in later life, in a conversation with General
+Lilley, of Virginia, he said, "I expect to die in the harness, because
+this is not the world for rest. This is the world for work. In the next
+world we will have the rest."
+
+In the vast mass of letters, papers, etc., left by Mr. McCormick, there
+is one mention, and only one, of recreation. After his first visit to
+the West, in 1844, he wrote to one of his brothers and described a
+hunting trip in which he shot three prairie chickens near Beloit. But
+during the rest of his life, he was too busy for sport. His energy was
+the wonder of his friends and the despair of his employees. His brain
+was not quick. It was not marvellously keen nor marvellously intuitive.
+But it was at work every waking moment, like a great engine that never
+tires.
+
+"He was the most laborious worker I ever saw," said one of his
+secretaries. One of the words that annoyed him most was _to-morrow_. He
+wanted things done to-day. With regard to every important piece of work,
+it was his instinct to "do it now." He abhorred delay and dawdling. Even
+as a boy, when sent on an errand, he would set off upon a run. Walking
+was too slow. And although he was in France on many occasions, the
+French phrase that he knew best was "_Depechez-vous_."
+
+His plan of work, so far as he could be said to have a plan, was
+this--_One Thing at a Time, and the Hardest Thing First_. He followed
+the line of _most_ resistance. If the hardest thing can be done, he
+reasoned, all the rest will follow. And as for all work that was merely
+routine, he left as much as possible of it to others.
+
+He was not an organizer so much as a creator and a pioneer. His problem
+was not like that which troubles the business men of to-day. He was not
+grappling with the evils of competition, nor with the higher questions
+of efficiency and "community of interest." He was making a business that
+had not existed. He was clearing away obstacles that are now wholly
+forgotten. Consequently, as each new difficulty appeared, he had to
+consider it in all its details. He could not pass it over to Lieutenant
+Number One or Lieutenant Number Two.
+
+McCormick was like a general who was leading an army into an unknown
+country rather than like the business man of the twentieth century, who
+can travel by time-table and schedule. When an obstacle blocked his
+path, it had to be removed; and until it was out of the way, nothing
+else mattered. Thus it was impossible for McCormick to have business
+hours. Once his mind had applied itself to a problem, he cared nothing
+for clocks and watches. Sometimes he would work on through the night,
+hour after hour, until the gray light of another day shone in the
+window. On all these arduous occasions, he had no idea of time, and he
+would allow no distractions nor interruptions. So rigid was this grasp
+of his mind that if his body rebelled and he fell asleep, he would
+invariably when he woke take up the matter in hand at the exact point at
+which it had been left. Not even sleep could detach his mind from a
+task that was unfinished.
+
+When anything was going well, he let it alone. As soon as his factory
+was in good running order, he gave it little attention. It was managed
+first by his brothers, William and Leander, and afterwards by such
+thoroughly competent men as Charles Spring and E. K. Butler. The work
+that he chose to do himself was invariably new business. He cared little
+for the mere making of money. The success always pleased him much more
+than the profit. He was at heart a builder, and therefore when he had
+finished one structure, he moved off and began another.
+
+It is a remarkable fact that as an investor, also, he had no interest in
+businesses that were already established. Stocks were offered to him,
+stocks that were safe and sure, but he bought none of them. The money
+that he invested outside of his own business was put into pioneering
+enterprises. He bought land in Chicago and Arizona. He opened up gold
+mines in South Carolina and Montana. He supplied the capital for a
+company which set out to bring mahogany from San Domingo. He invested
+$55,000 in the Tehuantepec Inter-Ocean Railroad, an ambitious attempt to
+join the Atlantic and Pacific oceans by rail, which was begun in 1879
+and came to an inglorious end several years later. And he was one of
+that daring group of Americans who planned and financed the Union
+Pacific Railway--the first road that really joined sea to sea and
+reached to the farthest acre in the West.
+
+[Illustration: McCORMICK REAPER CUTTING ON A SIDE HILL IN PENNSYLVANIA]
+
+In all these undertakings he lost money, except in the instances of
+Chicago real estate and the Union Pacific. By 1883 he had several
+hundred thousand dollars invested in gold mines, and yet had not
+received one dollar of profit. It was the fascination of pioneering that
+had lured him. He saw no charm, as the gambler does, in the risk itself.
+The Wall Street game he regarded as child's play. The thing that gripped
+him was the developing of new material resources--the colonization of
+new lands--the mastery of whatever is hostile to the welfare of the
+human race.
+
+Another McCormick trait, which is not usually found in men who have the
+pioneering instinct, was _Thoroughness_. He never said, "This is good
+enough," or "Half a loaf is better than no bread." He wanted what was
+_right_ whether it came to him or went from him. He never believed in a
+ninety per cent success. He wanted par. Once his mind was fully aroused
+upon a subject, there was no detail too petty for him to consider. He
+labored hard to be correct in matters that appeared trifling to other
+men. Even in his letters to members of his family, the sentences were
+carefully formed, and there were no misspelled words. Once he gave
+advice to a younger brother on the importance of spelling words
+correctly. "You should carry a dictionary, as I do," he said.
+
+All slovenliness, whether of mind or body, he abhorred. To take thought
+about a matter and to do it as it ought to be done, was to him a matter
+of character as well as of business. When a telegram was submitted to
+him for approval, it was his custom to draw a circle around the
+superfluous words. This was a little lesson to his managers on the
+importance of brevity and exactness. He insisted that clocks and watches
+should be correct, and in his later life carried a fine repeater which
+could strike the hour in the night and in which he took an almost boyish
+pride. Once, when he had been given the management of a political
+campaign in Chicago, he created consternation among the politicians by
+the rigid way in which he supervised the expense accounts. "This will
+never do," he said. "Things are at loose ends." If a bill was ten cents
+too much it went back. One bill for $15 was held up for a week because
+it was not properly drawn. The amazed politicians could not understand
+such a man,--who would readily sign a check for $10,000, and put it in
+the campaign treasury, and yet make trouble about the misplacing of a
+dime of other people's money.
+
+McCormick demanded absolute honesty from his employees. One young man
+lost his chance of promotion because he was seen to place a two-cent
+stamp, belonging to the firm, on one of his personal letters. But once
+he had tested a man, and found him to be pure gold, he trusted him
+completely. A new employee would be pelted with questions and complete
+answers insisted upon. This was often a harsh ordeal. It was irritating
+to a man of independent spirit, until he realized that it was a sort of
+discipline and examination.
+
+McCormick was always an optimist. He was not one of those who said, "Let
+well enough alone."
+
+He never endured unsatisfactory business conditions. When he found that
+the freight charges on Reapers from Virginia to Cincinnati were too
+high, he arranged to have Reapers built in Cincinnati. When he found
+that other manufacturers were apt to be careless as to the quality of
+their materials, he built a factory of his own. Again and again in the
+course of his life, came the temptation to be satisfied with what he had
+already achieved. But he could not endure the thought of being beaten.
+Instead of being content and complacent, he was far more likely to be
+planning a wholly new policy, on larger lines.
+
+A daring proposition from a competent man always caught his attention.
+Once, when he was sitting in his office, he heard E. K. Butler, who was
+at that time the head of his sales department, protest that the factory
+was not making as many machines as it should. "It is sheer nonsense,"
+said Butler, "to say that the factory is producing as much as it can. If
+I were at the head of it, I could double the output with very little
+extra expense." Most employers would have regarded this sort of talk as
+mere boastfulness, but not so McCormick. He knew that Butler was a most
+adaptable and competent man, so he called him into the office and
+straightway appointed him to be the superintendent of the factory.
+Butler was thus put upon his mettle. He went out to the factory resolved
+that McCormick's confidence in him should not be overthrown. He routed
+the wastes and inefficiencies, and keyed the whole plant up to such a
+pitch that, in a remarkably short period, he had made good his boast and
+doubled the output without hiring an extra man.
+
+But the preëminent quality in the character of Cyrus McCormick was not
+his power of concentration, nor his spirit of pioneering, nor his
+thoroughness. It was his strength of will--his _Tenacity_. This was the
+motif of his life.
+
+He was not at all a shrewd accumulator of millions, as many have
+imagined him. He had not an iota of craft and cunning. Neither was he a
+financier, in the modern sense. It would be nearer the truth to say that
+he was a farmer-manufacturer, of simple nature but tremendous
+resolution, whose one overmastering life-purpose was to teach the wheat
+nations of the world to use his harvesting machinery.
+
+"The exhibition of his powerful will was at times actually terrible,"
+said one of his lawyers. "If any other man on this earth ever had such a
+will, certainly I have not heard of it."
+
+A drizzle of little annoyances and little matters always irritated him,
+but he could stand up alone against a sea of adversity without a
+whimper. In fact, he would sooner be asked for a thousand dollars than
+for fifty cents. He would storm over the loss of a carpet slipper and
+smile blandly at the loss of a lawsuit. "He made more fuss over a
+pin-prick," said one of his valets, "than he did over a surgical
+operation." He disliked the petty odds and ends of life. His mind was
+too massive to adapt itself readily to small matters. But when a great
+difficulty came in view, he rose and went at it with a sort of stern
+satisfaction and religious zeal. He was so confident of his own
+strength, and of the justice of his cause, that it was almost a joy to
+him to--
+
+    "Breast the blows of circumstance,
+    And grasp the skirts of happy chance,
+    And grapple with his evil star."
+
+A defeat never meant anything more to McCormick than a delay. Often, the
+harder he was thrown down the higher he would rebound. Again and again
+he was thwarted and blocked. In the race of competition, there was a
+time when he was beaten by Whiteley, and there was a time when he was
+beaten by Deering. Most of his lawsuits were decided against him. But no
+one ever saw him crushed or really disheartened. In 1877, after he had
+made a long hard struggle to become a United States Senator, the news
+came to him that he was defeated. "Well," he said, "that's over. What
+next?"
+
+[Illustration: REAPER DRAWN BY OXEN IN ALGERIA]
+
+Usually, McCormick was at his best when the situation was at its worst.
+His Titanic work immediately after the great Chicago Fire of 1871 is the
+most striking evidence of this. He had been living at the corner of
+Tenth Street and Fifth Avenue, in New York City, for four years before
+the Fire; but he was in Chicago during the greatest of all Illinois
+disasters. In one day of fire and terror he saw his city reduced to a
+waste of ashes. It was no longer a city. It was two thousand acres of
+desolation. He was himself in the midst of the fire-fighting. When his
+wife, in response to his telegraphic message, came to him in Chicago two
+days later, he met her wearing a half-burned hat and a half-burned
+overcoat. His big factory, which was at that time making about 10,000
+harvesters a year, was wholly destroyed. In a flash he found himself
+without a city and without a business.
+
+But McCormick never flinched. The arrival of a great difficulty was
+always his cue. First he ascertained his wife's wishes. Did she wish
+the factory to be rebuilt, or did she want him to retire from active
+business life? She, thinking of her son, said--"Rebuild." At once
+McCormick became the most buoyant and confident citizen in the ruined
+city. His great spirit was aroused. He called up one of his attorneys
+and sent him in haste to the docks to buy lumber. He telegraphed to his
+agents to rush in as much money as they could collect. Every bank in the
+city had been burned, so for a time this money was kept by the cashier
+in a market basket, and carried at night to a private house. There was
+one day as much as $24,000 in the basket. Before the cinders were cool,
+McCormick had given orders to build a new factory, larger than the one
+that had been burned down. More than this, he had also given orders that
+his house in New York should be sold, and that a home should be
+established in Chicago. Chicago was his city. He had seen it grow from
+10,000 to 325,000. And in this hour of its distress he tossed aside all
+other plans and gave Chicago all he had.
+
+His unconquerableness gave heart to others. Several of the wealthiest
+citizens, who had lost courage, rallied to the help of the city. One
+merchant, who had lost his store, borrowed $100,000 from McCormick and
+started again. And so McCormick became not only one of the main builders
+of the first Chicago, but also of the second Chicago, which in less than
+three years had become larger and finer than the city that was.
+
+It was this steel-fibred tenacity that was the main factor in the
+success of McCormick, whether we consider him as a manufacturer or as a
+great American. It enabled him to establish the perilous industry of
+making harvesting machines--a business so complex and many-sided that
+out of every twenty manufacturers who set out to emulate McCormick, only
+one survives to-day. It enabled McCormick to hold his own in spite of
+adverse litigation, the hostility of Congress, the rivalry of other
+inventors, and the calamity of the Great Fire. It was so remarkable, and
+so productive of good to his country and to himself, that he will always
+remain one of the creative and heroic figures in the early industrial
+history of the United States.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+CYRUS H. McCORMICK AS A MAN
+
+
+Cyrus H. McCormick was a great commercial Thor. He was six feet tall,
+weighed two hundred pounds, and had the massive shoulders of a wrestler.
+His body was well proportioned, with small hands and feet. His hair,
+even in old age, was very dark and waving. His bearing was erect, his
+manner often imperious, and his general appearance that of a man built
+on large lines and for large affairs.
+
+Men of lesser caliber regarded him with fear, not for any definite
+reason, but because, as Seneca has said--"In him that has power, all men
+consider not what he has done, but what he may do." He was so strong, so
+dominating, so ready to crash through obstacles by sheer bulk of
+will-power, that smaller men could never quite subdue a feeling of alarm
+while they were in his presence. He was impatient of small talk and
+small criticisms and small objections. He had no tact at retail, and he
+saw no differences in little-minded people. All his life he had been
+plagued and obstructed by the Liliputians of the world, and he had no
+patience to listen to their chattering. He was often as rude as Carlyle
+to those who tied their little threads of pessimism across his path.
+
+At fashionable gatherings he would now and then be seen--a dignified
+figure; but his mind was almost too ponderous an engine to do good
+service in a light conversation. If a subject did not interest him, he
+had nothing to say. What gave him, perhaps, the highest degree of social
+pleasure, was the entertaining, at his house, of such men as Horace
+Greeley, William H. Seward, Peter Cooper, Abram S. Hewitt, George
+Peabody, Junius Morgan, Cyrus W. Field, or some old friend from
+Virginia.
+
+His long years of pioneering had made him a self-sufficient man, and a
+man who lived from within. He did not pick up his opinions on the
+streets. His mind was not open to any chance idea. He had certain clear,
+definite convictions, logical and consistent. What he knew, he knew.
+There were no hazy imaginings in his mind. The main secret of his power
+lay in his ability to focus all his energies upon a few subjects. Once,
+in 1848, he mentioned the French Revolution in one of his letters. "It
+is a mighty affair," he wrote, "and will be likely to stand." But
+usually he paid little attention to the world-dramas that were being
+enacted. He was too busy--too devoted to affairs which, if he did not
+attend to them, would not be attended to at all.
+
+McCormick was a product of the Protestant Reformation, and of the
+capitalistic development that came with it. The whole structure of his
+character was based upon the two great dogmas of the Reformation--the
+sovereignty of God and the direct responsibility of the individual.
+Whoever would know the springs at which his life was fed must read the
+story of Luther, Calvin, and Knox. They must call to mind the attitude
+of Luther at the Diet of Worms, when he faced the men who had the power
+to take his life and said, "Here I stand. I can do no other." They must
+recollect how these three men, who were leaders of nations, not sects,
+stood out alone against the kings and ecclesiasticisms of Europe,
+without wealth, without armies, without anything except a higher Moral
+Idea, and succeeded so mightily they actually changed the course of
+empires and became the pathfinders of the human race.
+
+McCormick was so essentially a result of this religio-economic movement
+that it is impossible to separate his religion and his business life. He
+was an individualist through and through--as well marked a type of the
+Covenanter in commerce as the United States has ever produced. He
+believed in presbyters in religion, private capitalists in business, and
+elected representatives in government. He was opposed to feudalism and
+bureaucracy in all their myriad forms. He held the middle ground, the
+_via media_, between the over-organization of the fourteenth century,
+when the rights of the individual were forgotten, and the lax liberalism
+of to-day, when too much is left to individual whim and caprice, and
+when duties and responsibilities are too apt to be ignored.
+
+Above all constituted authorities stood a man's own conscience. This was
+McCormick's faith, and it was this that made him the fighter that he
+was. It gave him courage and the fortitude that is rarer than courage.
+It compelled him to oppose his own political party at the Baltimore
+Convention of 1861. It made him stand single-handed against his
+fellow-manufacturers, in defence of his rights as an inventor. It
+enabled him to beat down the Pennsylvania Railroad, after a twenty-three
+year contest, and to prove that a great corporation cannot lawfully do
+an injustice to an individual.
+
+McCormick was nourished on this virile Calvinistic faith from the time
+when he first learned to read out of the Shorter Catechism and the
+Bible. It had been the faith of his fathers for generations, and it was
+bred into him from boyhood. Nevertheless, according to the practice of
+the Presbyterians, there had to come a time when he himself openly made
+his choice. This occasion came in 1834, when McCormick was twenty-five
+years of age. A four-day meeting was being held in the little stone
+church on his grandfather's farm. Three ministers were in charge. As was
+the custom, there was constant preaching from morning until sundown,
+with an hour's respite for dinner. At the close of the fourth day, all
+who wished to become avowed Christians were requested to stand up. Cyrus
+McCormick was there, and he was not a member of the church; yet he did
+not stand up. That night his father went to his bedside and gently
+reproached him. "My son," he said, "don't you know that your silence is
+a public rejection of your Saviour?" Cyrus was conscience-stricken. He
+leapt from his bed and began to dress himself. "I'll go and see old
+Billy McClung," he said. Half an hour later, old Billy McClung, who was
+a universally respected religious leader in the community, was amazed to
+be called out of his sleep by a greatly troubled young man, who wanted
+to know by what means he might make his peace with his Maker. The next
+Sunday this young man stood up in the church, and became in name what
+he already was by nature and inheritance--a Christian of the
+Presbyterian faith.
+
+After he left home his letters to the members of his family are strewn
+with scraps of religious reflection. In 1845, for instance, he writes,
+"Business is not inconsistent with Christianity; but the latter ought to
+be a help to the former, giving a confidence and resignation, after
+using all proper means; and yet I have sometimes felt that I came so far
+short of the right _feeling_, so worldly-minded, that I could wish
+myself out of the world." On another occasion, when he was struggling
+with manufacturers who had broken their contracts, he wrote, "If it were
+not for the fact that Providence has seemed to assist me in our
+business, it has at times seemed that I would almost sink under the
+weight of responsibility hanging upon me; but I believe the Lord will
+help us out." And after his first visit to New York City, he summed up
+his impressions of the metropolis in the following sentence, "It is a
+desirable place and people, with regular and good Presbyterian
+preaching."
+
+McCormick enjoyed with all his heart the logical, doctrinal sermon. His
+favorite Bible passage was the eighth chapter of Romans, that
+indomitable victorious chapter that ends like the blast of a trumpet:
+
+"Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or
+distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
+As it is written, 'for Thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are
+accounted as sheep for the slaughter.' Nay, in all these things we are
+more than conquerors through Him that loved us; for I am persuaded that
+neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor
+things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other
+creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in
+Christ Jesus, our Lord."
+
+His favorite hymn, which he sang often and with the deepest fervor, was
+that melodious prayer that begins--
+
+    "O Thou in whose presence my soul takes delight,
+    On whom in affliction I call,
+    My comfort by day, and my song in the night,
+    My hope, my salvation, my all."
+
+In his earlier journeys through the Middle West, McCormick was
+distressed at the rough immorality of the new settlements. "I see a
+great deal of profanity and infidelity in this country, enough to make
+the heart sick," he wrote in 1845. These towns and villages needed more
+preachers, and better preachers, he thought. Consequently, soon after he
+had acquired his first million dollars, he determined to establish the
+best possible college for the education of ministers. He almost stunned
+with joy the Western friends of higher education for ministers, by
+offering them $100,000 with which to establish a school of theology in
+Chicago. This offer was made in 1859--half a century ago, and resulted
+in the removal of a moneyless and decaying Seminary at New Albany,
+Indiana, to Chicago. Thus was founded the Northwestern Theological
+Seminary, afterwards named the McCormick Theological Seminary, which, in
+its fifty years of life, has given a Christian education to thousands of
+young men.
+
+Thirteen years later he bought _The Interior_ and made it what it has
+remained ever since--a religious weekly of the highest rank. These
+two--the college and the paper--were his pride and delight. He fathered
+them in the most affectionate way. No matter what crisis might be
+impending in the war of business, he always had time to talk to his
+editors and his professors. So, though McCormick had received much from
+his religious inheritance, it is also true that he gave back much. His
+last public speech, which was read for him by his son Cyrus because he
+was too weak to deliver it himself, was given at the laying of the
+corner-stone of a new building which he had given to the college. Its
+last sentence was typical of McCormick--full of hope and optimism: "I
+never doubted that success would ultimately reward our efforts," he
+said; "and now, on this occasion, we may fairly say that the night has
+given place to the dawn of a brighter day than any which has hitherto
+shone upon us."
+
+McCormick went into politics, too, with the same conscientious abandon
+with which he plunged into business and religion. He was a Democrat of
+the Jeffersonian type. One of his keenest pleasures was to go to the
+Senate and listen to its debates. He was not a fluent speaker himself,
+but he delighted in the orations of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster. He
+believed in politics. He thought it a public danger that the strong and
+competent men of the republic should willingly permit men of little
+ability and low character to manage public affairs. In fact, he was
+almost as much a pathfinder and pioneer in this matter as he had been in
+matters of business, but without the same measure of success. Politics,
+he found, was not like business. Its successes depended not upon your
+own efforts, but upon the votes of the majority.
+
+What McCormick tried to do as a citizen and a patriot was the one heroic
+failure of his life. He ran for office on several occasions, but he was
+never elected. He was not the sort of man who gets elected. He stood for
+his whole party at a time when the average politician was standing only
+for himself. He talked of "fundamental principles" while the other
+leaders, for the most part, were thinking of salaries. He gave up his
+time and his money as freely for politics as he did for religion; but
+he was out of his element. He was too sincere, too simple, too intent
+upon a larger view of public questions. He could never talk the flexible
+language of diplomacy nor suit his theme to the prejudice of his
+listeners. Usually, to the political managers and delegates with whom he
+felt it his duty to co-operate, he was like a man from another world.
+They could never understand him, and tolerated his leadership mainly
+because of his generous contributions. Again and again he astonished
+them by developing a party speech into a sermon on national
+righteousness, or by speaking nobly of a political opponent. On one
+memorable occasion, for instance, in the white-hot passion of the
+Hayes-Tilden controversy, and after he had lavished time and money in
+support of Tilden, he sprang to his feet in a Democratic convention and
+amazed the delegates by saying: "Mr. Hayes is not a Democrat, but he is
+too patriotic and honest to suit his party managers and we must sustain
+him so far as he is right."
+
+He was one of the first Americans who rose above sectional interests
+and party loyalties, and surveyed his country as a whole. No other man
+of his day, either in or out of public office, was so free from local
+prejudices and so intensely national in his beliefs and sympathies. He
+refused to stamp himself with the label of the North or of the South. He
+had been reared in the one and matured in the other. And in the ominous
+days before the Civil War he strove like a beneficent giant to make the
+wrangling partisans listen to the voice of reason and arbitration.
+
+[Illustration: THE REAPER IN HEAVY GRAIN]
+
+He went to the Democratic Convention at Baltimore, just before the war,
+and set before the Southerners the standpoint of the North. Then he
+bought a daily paper--_The Times_--to explain to Chicago the standpoint
+of the South. He wrote editorials. He made speeches. He poured into the
+newspapers, day after day for two years, a large share of the profits
+that he derived from his Reaper. He was no more popular as an editor
+than as a political candidate. He was a maker, not a collector, of
+public opinion; and instead of pandering to the war frenzy, he
+opposed it,--put his newspaper squarely in its path, and held it there
+until the feet of the crowd had trampled it into an impossible wreck.
+
+He was so strong, so indomitable, this heir of the Covenanters, that
+when the war had openly begun, he strode between the North and South and
+labored like a Titan to bring them to a reconciliation. He actually
+believed that he could establish peace. He proposed a plan. Horace
+Greeley indorsed it, and the two men, who were throughout life the
+closest of comrades, undertook to bring the severed nation back to union
+and the paths of law.
+
+The "McCormick Plan," in a word was to call immediately two
+conventions--one to represent the Democrats of the North and the other
+the Democrats of the South. These conventions would elect delegates to a
+board of arbitration, which would consider the various causes of the war
+and arrange a just basis upon which both sides could agree to disband
+their armies and reëstablish peace.
+
+After the war, too, almost before the nation had finished counting its
+dead, it was Cyrus H. McCormick whose voice was first heard in favor of
+church unity. Among the many speeches and letters of his which have been
+preserved, the most beautifully phrased paragraph is the ending of an
+article that he published in 1869, protesting against the invasion of
+political partisanism into the religious life.
+
+"When are we to look for the return of brotherly love and Christian
+fellowship," he asked, "so long as those who aspire to fill the high
+places of the church indulge in such wrath and bitterness? Now that the
+great conflict of the Civil War is past, and its issues settled,
+religion and patriotism alike require the exercise of mutual
+forbearance, and the pursuit of those things which tend to peace."
+
+For the mere game of party politics Mr. McCormick cared little or
+nothing. It was all as irksome to him as the task of governing Geneva
+was to John Calvin; but he could not help himself. His political
+convictions were bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. They were
+racial traits which his forefathers and foremothers had spent at least
+three centuries in developing.
+
+On one occasion Dr. John Hall of New York, seeing how Mr. McCormick was
+worried by political obligations, said to him:
+
+"Why do you plague yourself with these uncongenial things? What glory
+can you hope to get from politics that will add to what you now possess
+as the inventor of the Reaper?"
+
+"Dr. Hall," replied Mr. McCormick, "I am in politics because I cannot
+help it. There are certain principles that I have got to stand by, and I
+am obliged to go into politics to defend them."
+
+The form of Mr. McCormick's religious faith had been forged by such
+preacher-patriots as John Knox and Andrew Melville; and he, like them,
+found it as imperative upon his conscience to fight for both civil and
+religious liberty. With his whole heart he believed in American
+institutions as they had been established by the nation-builders of
+1776. He did not want the Constitution to be ignored by Federal
+reformers, nor the Union to be broken by secession. He was by
+temperament and tradition a conservative, and opposed especially to all
+extreme measures and sectional innovations. As he had adapted his Reaper
+so that it would cut grain in all States, he could never see why
+political policies, too, should not be lifted above the limitations of
+geography and made to conserve the welfare of the whole people. As he
+said on one strenuous occasion when laboring mightily to beat back the
+extremists in his own party: "Is not every government on the face of the
+earth established upon the principle of compromise?"
+
+To special privileges of every sort he was unalterably opposed. He asked
+for none for himself--no favoring tariff or grant of public land or
+monopolistic franchise. "I have been throughout my life," he said,
+"opposed to all measures which tend to raise one class of the American
+people upon the ruin of others, or one section of our common country at
+the expense of another. The country is the common property of all
+parties, and all are interested in its prosperity."
+
+All this shows the heroic side of McCormick; but he was not always
+heroic. He was a giant, but a most human and simple-natured giant.
+Strange as it may sound to those who knew him only with his armor on, it
+is true that he could be tender or humorous. There were tears and
+laughter in him. There was no cruelty in his strength and no revenge in
+his aggressiveness. He was a big, red-blooded, great-hearted man, who
+might to-day be threatening to cane a politician who had deceived him,
+and to-morrow be playing with his younger children and letting their two
+pet squirrels, Zip and Zoe, chase each other around his shoulders.
+
+He was fond of power, not because of its privileges and exemptions, but
+because it furthered the work that he had in hand. He was often
+surrounded by sycophants--by men who said yes to his yes and no to his
+no; and while he accepted this homage with a certain degree of
+satisfaction, he was not deceived by it. On one occasion, when he was
+attending the Democratic Convention at Cincinnati--the convention that
+nominated Hancock as candidate for President,--he was beset by a court
+of flatterers and lip-servers. After it was over, he remarked simply to
+his valet, "Well, Charlie, there is a lot of farce and humbug about
+this."
+
+Dr. Francis L. Patton, who was for years the president of Princeton
+University and also at one time editor of _The Interior_, was especially
+impressed with this direct naturalness of McCormick. "One meets with all
+sorts of men in the course of a lifetime," said Dr. Patton. "There are
+patronizing men, pompous men, men who habitually wear a mask of
+seriousness, men who clothe themselves with dignity as with a coat of
+mail lest you should presume too much or go too far, men whose position
+is never defined, and double-minded men with whom you never feel
+yourself safe. But Mr. McCormick was not like one of these. There is
+that in the possession of power which always tends to make men
+imperious. I do not mean to imply that he was altogether free from this
+tendency, for he was not. But he was approachable, companionable, and
+ready to hear what I had to say. He was not one of those men who are so
+uninterestingly self-controlled as to be always the same. There were
+times when his mirth was contagious and times when his wrath was kindled
+a little. We did not always agree, and sometimes we both grew hot in
+argument; but at the end his cheery laugh proclaimed the fact that our
+differences had only been the free and easy give-and-take of
+friendship."
+
+To see McCormick laugh was a spectacle. There was first a mellowing of
+his usual Jovian manner. His gray-brown eyes twinkled. The tense lines
+of his face relaxed. Then came a smile and soon a burst of laughter,
+shaking his powerful body and putting the whole company for the time
+into an uproar of merriment. It was the triumph of the genial and
+magnetic side of his nature--the side that was ordinarily repressed by
+the pressure of his big affairs.
+
+McCormick had humor, but not wit. His jokes were simple and
+old-fashioned, such as Luther and Cromwell would have laughed at. There
+was no innuendo and no cynicism. On one occasion two small urchins
+knocked at the door and asked for food. McCormick heard their voices
+and had them brought into the sitting-room, where he happened to be in
+consultation with his lawyer. "Now," said he to the youngsters, "we are
+going to put both of you on trial. I will be the judge and this
+gentleman will be the prosecutor." Each boy in turn was placed on the
+witness-stand, and plied with questions. It was soon clear that neither
+of them was telling the truth, so "Judge" McCormick took them in hand
+and gave them a serious talk on the folly and wickedness of lying. Then
+he gave them twenty-five cents apiece, and sent them down to the kitchen
+to eat as much supper as they could hold.
+
+[Illustration: HARVESTING NEAR SPOKANE, WASHINGTON]
+
+At another time a very dignified and self-centred military officer was
+taking supper with the McCormick family. The first course, as usual, was
+corn-meal mush and milk. This was served in Scotch fashion, with the hot
+mush in one bowl and the cold milk in another, and the practice was to
+so co-ordinate the eating of these that both were finished at the same
+time. The officer planned his spoonfuls badly, and was soon out of
+milk. "Have some more milk to finish your mush, Colonel," said
+McCormick. Several minutes later the Colonel's mush bowl was empty, at
+which McCormick said, "Have some more mush to finish your milk." And so
+it went, with milk for the mush and mush for the milk, until the
+unfortunate Colonel was hopelessly incapacitated for the four or five
+courses that came afterwards.
+
+McCormick was not by any means a teller of stories, but he had a few
+simple and well-worn anecdotes that appealed so strongly to his sense of
+humor that he told and re-told them many times. There was the story of
+the man who stole the pound of butter and hid it in his hat, and how the
+grocer saw him and kept talking in the store, beside a hot stove, until
+the butter melted and exposed the man's thievery. Another favorite story
+was about the pig that found its way into a garden by walking through a
+hollow log, and how the gardener fooled the pig by placing the hollow
+log in such a way that both ends of it were on the outside of the
+garden.
+
+Even McCormick's jokes had a certain moral tang--a flavor of the first
+Psalm and the eighth chapter of Romans. They were apt to deal with the
+troubles of the ungodly who had been caught in their wickedness. There
+were times, too, when his sense of humor and his sense of justice would
+co-operate in odd ways. Once, when a roast game bird, which had been
+sent to him as a gift from the hunter, was left over from supper, he
+ordered that his dainty be kept and served for the next day's luncheon.
+At luncheon the next day it did not appear. On asking for the game bird,
+a roast chicken was set before him, and he at once noticed that it was
+not the same bird which he had ordered to be kept. He questioned the
+butler, who protested that it was the same. After the meal McCormick
+ordered that the servants involved should be called into the
+dining-room. From them, by a series of questions, he soon obtained the
+truth and proved the butler to be the culprit. The one thing that he
+would tolerate least was a lie. As he would say at times, "A thief you
+can watch, but I detest a liar."
+
+There were very few who had the temerity to play a practical joke upon
+the great inventor himself. His two youngest sons, Harold and Stanley,
+would hide in the hallway when they saw him approaching, and pounce out
+upon him with wild yells in small-boy fashion, but they were both
+privileged people.
+
+McCormick was a most hearty and hospitable man. He was an ideal person
+for such a life-work--the abolition of famine. He was fond of food and
+plenty of it. He loved to see a big table heaped with food. The idea of
+hunger was intolerable to him. He might well have been posing for a
+statue of the deity of Plenty, as he squared himself around to the long,
+family dinner-table, with his napkin worn high and caught at his
+shoulders by a white silk band that went around his neck, and with a
+complacent, "Now, then," plunged the carving-fork into a crisp and
+fragrant fowl that lay on the platter in front of him.
+
+The fact that McCormick seldom made a social call was not due to his own
+choosing, but because of the many worries and compulsions of his life.
+Once, when confiding in an intimate friend, he said, "It pains me very
+much to think how little I am known by my neighbors, but I seem to be
+always too busy to meet them." He was not at all, as many have thought
+because of his strenuous life, a man of harsh and rough exterior. There
+was nothing rough about him except his strength. He was irreproachable
+in dress and personal appearance. He did not drink, smoke, nor swear.
+And his manners and language, on formal occasions, were those of a
+dignified gentleman of the old school--a Calhoun, or a Van Buren.
+
+He was not a hard-natured man, except when he was battling for his
+rights and his principles. He would often turn from an overwhelming mass
+of business to play with one of his children. He was as ready to forgive
+as he was to fight. He never cherished resentments or personal grudges.
+He knew that life was a conflict of interests and policies; and when he
+forgave, his forgiveness was free and full, and not a formal ceremony.
+It was as honest and as spontaneous as his wrath. He was one of the few
+men who could freely pray, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive
+those who trespass against us."
+
+His fame and honors and intimacies with people of rank never made him
+less democratic in his sympathies. He always had a profound respect for
+the man or woman who did useful work, if the work was done well. Once,
+when a poor woman went to him for advice about some trifling thing that
+she had invented, he turned from his work and explained to her, with the
+utmost patience and courtesy, the things that she wished to know. With
+his trusted employees, too, he was usually kindly and sometimes jovial.
+"I had only one brush with him in thirty-five years," said one of his
+cashiers. "The last time that I saw him, he met me on the street and
+said, 'Hello, Sellick, have you got lots of money? Can you give me a
+hundred thousand dollars to-day?' 'Yes, sir,' I answered. 'Well, I'm
+glad I don't need it,' he said with a laugh."
+
+The loyalty of his workmen and his agents was always a source of pride
+to McCormick. It was one of the favorite topics of his conversation. He
+would mention his men by name and tell of their exploits with the
+deepest satisfaction. On one occasion, when a body of agents made a
+united demand for higher salaries, there was one agent in Minnesota who
+refused to take part in the movement. "I don't want to force Mr.
+McCormick," he said. "I have worked for him for nearly thirty years, and
+I know that he is a just man, and that he will do what is right." Not
+long afterwards, McCormick was told of this man's action, and he
+immediately showed his appreciation by making the agent a present of a
+carriage and fine team of horses.
+
+There was one man who was wholly in McCormick's power--a negro named
+Joe, who, by the custom that prevailed in the South before the Civil
+War, was a slave and the property of McCormick. They were of the same
+age, and had played together as boys. Joe grew up to be a tall,
+straight, intelligent negro, and his master was very fond of him. He is
+mentioned frequently in McCormick's letters, usually in a considerate
+way. Years before the Civil War McCormick gave Joe his freedom, and some
+land and a good cabin. Now and then, even in the stress and strain of
+his business-building, he would stop to write Joe a short letter of good
+wishes and advice. There was no other one thing, perhaps, which proved
+so convincingly the essential kindliness of his nature as his treatment
+of Joe.
+
+In his family relations, too, McCormick was a man of tenderness and
+devotion. When his father died, in 1846, he was struck down by sorrow.
+"Many a sore cry have I had as I have gone around this place and found
+no father," he wrote to his brother William. And as soon as he was
+solidly established in Chicago, his first act was to send for his
+mother, and to give her such a royal welcome that she could hardly
+believe her eyes. "I feel like the Queen of Sheba," she said to her
+neighbors when she returned to Virginia; "the half was never told."
+
+McCormick helped his younger brothers--William and Leander, by making
+them his partners. William died in 1865--a great and irreparable loss.
+He was a man of careful mind and rare excellence of character,
+especially able in matters of detail--a point in which Cyrus McCormick
+was not proficient. The two men were well suited as partners. Cyrus
+planned the work in large outlines, and broke down the obstacles that
+stood in the way; while William added the details and supervised the
+carrying out of the plan. Leander, who also held a high place in the
+business in its earlier days, withdrew from it later, and died in 1900.
+
+[Illustration: CYRUS HALL McCORMICK, 1883
+
+His Last Portrait]
+
+Until 1858 McCormick had thought himself too busy to be married. But in
+that year he met Miss Nettie Fowler, of New York, and changed his mind.
+It was soon apparent that his marriage was not to be in any sense a
+hindrance to his success, but rather the wisest act of his life. Mrs.
+McCormick was a woman of rare charm, and with a comprehension of
+business affairs that was of the greatest possible value to her husband.
+She was at all times in the closest touch with his purposes. By her
+advice he introduced many economies at the factory, and rebuilt the
+works after the Great Fire of 1871. The precision of her memory, and the
+grasp of her mind upon the multifarious details of human nature and
+manufacturing, made her an ideal wife for such a man as Cyrus H.
+McCormick. As he grew older, he depended upon her judgment more and
+more; and as Mrs. McCormick is still in the possession of health and
+strength, it may truly be said that for more than half a century she has
+been a most influential factor in the industrial and philanthropic
+development of the United States.
+
+Four sons were born, and two daughters--Cyrus Hall, who is now President
+of the International Harvester Company; Robert, who died in infancy;
+Harold, Treasurer of the International Harvester Company; Stanley,
+Comptroller of the Company; Virginia; and Anita, now known as Mrs.
+Emmons Blame.
+
+Mr. McCormick was a most affectionate husband and father. He took the
+utmost delight in his home and its hospitalities; and invariably brought
+his whole household with him whenever the growth of his business obliged
+him to visit foreign countries. In the last few years of his life it
+gave him the most profound satisfaction to know that his oldest son
+would pick up the McCormick burden and carry it forward. "Cyrus is a
+great comfort to me," he said to an intimate friend. "He has excellent
+judgment in business matters, and I find myself leaning on him more and
+more."
+
+The truth is that there was a tender side to McCormick's strong nature,
+which was not seen by those who met him only upon ordinary occasions. He
+was in reality a great dynamo of sentiment. He was deeply moved by
+music, especially by the playing of Ole Bull and the singing of Jenny
+Lind, who were his favorites. He was as fond of flowers as a child. "I
+love best the old-fashioned pinks," he said, "because they grew in my
+mother's garden in Virginia." Often the tears would come to his eyes at
+the sight of mountains, for they reminded him of his Virginian home.
+"Oh, Charlie," he said once to his valet, as he sat crippled in a
+wheel-chair in a Southern hotel, "how I wish I could get on a horse and
+ride on through those mountains once again!"
+
+McCormick was not in any sense a Gradgrind of commercialism--a man who
+enriched his coffers by the impoverishment of his soul. He made
+money--ten millions or more; but he did so incidentally, just as a man
+makes muscle by doing hard work. Several of his fellow Chicagoans had
+swept past him in the million-making race. No matter how much money came
+to him, he was the same man, with the same friendships and the same
+purposes. And it is inconceivable that, for any amount of wealth, he
+would have changed the ground-plan of his life.
+
+It is strictly true to say that he was a practical idealist. He
+idealized the American Constitution, the Patent Office, the Courts, the
+Democratic Party, and the Presbyterian Church. He was an Oliver Cromwell
+of industry. All his beliefs and acts sprang from a few simple
+principles and fitted together like a picture puzzle. There was religion
+in his business and business in his religion. He was made such as he was
+by the Religious Reformation of Europe and the Industrial Revolution of
+the United States. He was all of one piece--sincere and
+self-consistent--a type of the nineteenth-century American at his best.
+He was not sordid. He was not cynical. He was not scientific. He was a
+man of faith and works--one of the old-fashioned kind who laid the
+foundations and built the walls of this republic.
+
+He felt that he was born into the world with certain things to do. Some
+of these things were profitable and some of them were not, but he gave
+as much energy and attention to the one as to the other. In 1859, for
+instance, he had a factory that was profitable, and a daily paper and a
+college that were expensive. He was struggling to extend his trade at
+home and in Europe, to protect his patents, to prevent the war between
+the North and South, and to maintain the simplicity of the Presbyterian
+faith. To contend for these interests and principles was his life. He
+could not have done anything else. It was as natural for him to do so as
+for a fish to swim or a bird to fly. Once, towards the end of his life,
+when he was sitting in his great arm-chair, reflecting, he said to his
+wife, "Nettie, life _is_ a battle." He made this announcement as though
+it were the discovery of a new fact. All his life he had been much less
+conscious of the battle itself than of the _cause_ for which he fought.
+
+In 1884 McCormick died, at that time of the year when wheat is being
+sown in Spain and reaped in Mexico. The earth-life of "the strong
+personality before whom obstacles went down as swiftly and inevitably as
+grain before the knife of his machines," was ended. His last words,
+spoken in a moment's awakening from the death-stupor, were--"Work,
+work!" Not even the dissolution of his body could relax the fixity of
+his will. And when he lay in state, in his Chicago home, there was a
+Reaper, modelled in white flowers, at his feet; and upon his breast a
+sheaf of the ripe, yellow wheat, surmounted by a crown of lilies. These
+were the emblems of the work that had been given him to do, and the
+evidence of its completion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE REAPER AND THE NATION
+
+
+When Cyrus H. McCormick died in 1884 he had provided hunger-insurance
+for the United States and the greater part of the civilized world. In
+that year his own factory made 50,000 harvesting machines, and there
+were in use, in all countries, more than 500,000 McCormick machines,
+doing the work of 5,000,000 men in the harvest fields. The United States
+was producing wheat at the rate of ten bushels per capita, instead of
+four, as it had been in 1847, when McCormick built his first factory in
+Chicago. And the total production of wheat in all lands was
+2,240,000,000 bushels--enough to give an abundance of food to
+325,000,000 people.
+
+Chicago, in 1884, was a powerful city of six hundred thousand
+population. It had grown sixty-fold since McCormick rode into it by
+stage in 1845. It had 3,519 manufacturing establishments, giving work to
+80,000 men and women and producing commodities at the rate of
+$5,000,000 worth in a week. It was then what it is to-day--the chief
+Reaper City and principal granary of the world. The wheat and flour that
+were sent out from its ports and depots in the year that the inventor of
+the Reaper died were enough to make ten thousand million loaves of
+bread, which, if they were fairly distributed, would have given about
+forty loaves apiece to the families of the human race.
+
+The United States, in 1884, had been for six years the foremost of the
+wheat-producing nations. It had also grown to be first in mining,
+railroads, telegraphs, steel, and agriculture. It was the land of the
+highest wages and cheapest bread--an anomaly that foreign countries
+could not understand. In the bulk of its manufacturing, it had forged
+ahead of all other nations, even of Great Britain; and yet, although a
+vast army of men had been drawn from its farms to its factories, it had
+produced in that year more than half a billion bushels of wheat--six
+times as much as its crop had been in the best year of the sickle and
+the scythe.
+
+So, in the span of his business life--from 1831 to 1884,--McCormick had
+seen his country rise from insignificance to greatness, and he had the
+supreme satisfaction of knowing that his Reaper had done much, if not
+most, to accelerate this marvellous progress. As we shall see, the
+invention of the Reaper was the right starting-point for the up-building
+of a republic. It made all other progress possible, by removing the fear
+of famine and the drudgery of farm labor. It enabled even the laborer of
+the harvest-field to be free and intelligent, because it gave him the
+power of ten men.
+
+[Illustration: THE WORKS OF THE McCORMICK HARVESTING MACHINE CO.]
+
+The United States as a whole, had paid no attention to the Reaper until
+the opening of the California gold mines in 1849. Then the sudden
+scarcity of laborers created a panic among the farmers, and boomed the
+sale of all manner of farm machinery. Two years later the triumph of the
+McCormick Reaper at the London Exposition was a topic of the day and a
+source of national pride. And in 1852 the Crimean War sent the price of
+wheat skywards, providing an English market for as much wheat as
+American farmers could sell.
+
+But it was not until the outbreak of the Civil War that the United
+States learned to really appreciate the Reaper. By the time that
+President Lincoln had made his ninth call for soldiers, by the time that
+he had taken every third man for the Northern armies, the value of the
+Reaper was beyond dispute. By a strange coincidence, in this duel
+between wheat States on the one side, and cotton States on the other, it
+was a Northerner, Eli Whitney, who had invented the cotton-gin, which
+made slavery profitable; and it was a Southerner, Cyrus H. McCormick,
+who had invented the Reaper, which made the Northern States wealthy and
+powerful.
+
+It was the Reaper-power of the North that off set the slave-power of the
+South. There were as many Reapers in the wheat-fields of 1861 as could
+do the work of a million slaves. As the war went on, the crops in the
+Northern States increased. Europe refused to believe such a miracle; but
+it was true. Fifty million bushels of American grain went to Europe in
+1861, and fifty-six million bushels in the following year. More than two
+hundred million bushels were exported during the four years of the war.
+Thus the Reaper not only released men to fight for the preservation of
+the Union. It not only fed them while they were in the field. It did
+more. It saved us from bankruptcy as well as famine, and kept our credit
+good among foreign nations at the most critical period in our history.
+
+After the Civil War came the settling of the West; and here again the
+Reaper was indispensable. In most cases it went ahead of the railroad.
+The first Reaper arrived in Chicago three years before the first
+locomotive. "We had a McCormick Reaper in 1856," said James Wilson; "and
+at that time there was no railroad within seventy-five miles of our Iowa
+farm. The Reaper worked a great revolution, enabling one man to do the
+work that many men had been doing, and do it better. By means of it the
+West became a thickly settled country, able to feed the nation and to
+spare bread and meat for the outside world."
+
+When McCormick was a boy, more wheat was raised in Virginia than in any
+other State. But by 1860 Illinois was ahead, and by degrees the sceptre
+of the wheat empire passed westwards, until to-day it is held by
+Minnesota. What with the Homestead Act of 1862, and the offer of
+McCormick and the other Reaper manufacturers to sell machines to the
+farmers on credit, it was possible for poor men, without capital, to
+become each the owner of 160 acres of land, and to harvest its grain
+without spending a penny in wages. Thus the immense area of the West
+became a populous country, with cities and railways and State
+Governments, and producing one-tenth of the wheat of the world.
+
+The enterprise of these Western farmers brought in the present era of
+farm machinery. It replaced "the man with the hoe" by the man with the
+self-binder and steel plow and steam thresher. It wiped out the old-time
+drudge of the soil from American farms, and put in his stead the new
+farmer, the _business_ farmer, who works for a good living and a profit,
+and not for a bare existence. Such men as Oliver Dalrymple, of North
+Dakota, led the way by demonstrating what might be done by "bonanza
+farms." This doughty Scottish-American secured 30,000 acres of the Red
+River Valley in 1876, and put it all into wheat. It was such a
+wheat-field as never before had been seen in any country. The soil was
+turned with 150 gang plows, sown with 70 drills, and reaped with 150
+self-binders. Twelve threshing-machines, kept busy in the midst of this
+sea of yellow grain, beat out the straw and chaff and in the season
+filled two freight trains a day with enough wheat in each train to give
+two thousand people their daily bread for a year.
+
+Led on by such pathfinders, American farmers launched out bravely, until
+now they are using very nearly a billion dollars' worth of labor-saving
+machinery. The whole level of farm life has been raised. It has been
+lifted from muscle to mind. The use of machinery has created leisure and
+capital, and these two have begotten intelligence, education, science,
+so that the farmer of to-day lives in a new world, and is a wholly
+different person from what he was when Cyrus McCormick learned to till
+the soil.
+
+This elevation of the farmer is now seen to be our best guarantee of
+prosperity and national permanence. It was the incoming flood of wheat
+money that put the United States on its feet as a manufacturing nation.
+The total amount of this money, from the building of the first McCormick
+Reaper factory until to-day, is the unthinkable sum of $5,500,000,000,
+which may be taken as the net profit of the Reaper to the nation.
+
+Thus the Reaper was not, like the wind-mill, for instance, a mere
+convenience to the farmer himself. It was the link between the city and
+the country. It directly benefited all bread-eaters, and put the whole
+nation upon a higher plane. It built up cities, and made them safe, for
+the reason that they were not surrounded by hordes of sickle-and-flail
+serfs, who would sooner or later rise up in the throe of a
+hunger-revolution and pull down the cities and the palaces into
+oblivion. When the first Reaper was sold, in 1840, only eight per cent
+of Americans lived in towns and cities; and to-day the proportion is
+_forty_ per cent. Yet bread is cheaper and more plentiful now than it
+was then; and there is the most genial and good-natured co-operation
+between those who live among paved streets and those who live in the
+midst of the green and yellow wheat-fields. There are no Goths and
+Vandals on American farms.
+
+Instead of the tiny log workshop on the McCormick farm, in which the
+first crude Reaper was laboriously hammered and whittled into shape,
+there is now a McCormick City in the heart of Chicago--the oldest and
+largest harvester plant in the world. In sixty-two years of its life,
+this plant has produced five or six millions of harvesting machines, and
+it is still pouring them out at the rate of 7,000 a week. If it were to
+ship its yearly output at one time, it would require a railway caravan
+of 14,000 freight-cars to carry the machines from the factory to the
+farmers.
+
+[Illustration: McCORMICK REAPER IN USE IN RUSSIA]
+
+This McCormick City is one of the industrial wonders that America
+exhibits to visiting foreigners, and it is so vast that it can only
+be glanced at in a day. It covers 229 acres of land. In its buildings
+there is enough flooring to cover a 90-acre farm, and if they were all
+made over into one long building, twenty-five feet wide and one story
+high, it would be very nearly forty miles long, as far as from Chicago
+to Joliet. The population of McCormick City, counting workers only, is
+7,000, whose average wages are $2.20 a day.
+
+Here you will find a mammoth twine-mill--the largest of its kind in any
+country. Into this mill come the bright yellow sisal fibres from Yucatan
+and the manila fibres from the Philippines. These fibres are cleaned and
+strewn upon endless chains of combs, which jerk and pull the fibres and
+finally deliver them to spindles--1,680 spindles, which whirl and twist
+19,000 miles of twine in the course of a single day, almost enough to
+put a girdle around the earth. Most of this work is done by Polish girls
+and women, who are being displaced as farm laborers in their own country
+by American harvesting machines.
+
+This plant is so vast that from one point of view it seems to be mainly
+a foundry. Thousands of tons of iron--88,000 tons, to be exact,--pour
+out of its furnaces every year and are moulded into 113,000,000
+castings. But from another point of view it appears to be a carpenter
+shop. In its yard stand as many piles of lumber as would build a
+fair-sized city--60,000,000 feet of it, cut in the forests of
+Mississippi and Missouri. And so much of this lumber is being sawed,
+planed, and shaped in the various wood-working shops that eight
+sawdust-fed furnaces are needed to supply them with power.
+
+The marvels of labor-saving machinery are upon every hand, in this
+McCormick City. The paint-tank has replaced the paint-brush. Instead of
+painting wheels by hand, for instance, ten of them are now strung on a
+pole, like beads on a string, and soused into a bath from which they
+come, one minute later, resplendent in suits of red or blue. The
+labor-cost of painting these ten wheels is two cents. Guard-fingers, for
+which McCormick paid twenty-four cents apiece in 1845, are now produced
+with a labor-cost of two cents a dozen. And as for bolts, with two
+cents you can pay for the making of a hundred. Both bolts and nuts are
+shaped by automatic machines which are so simple that a boy can operate
+five at once, and so swift that other boys with wheelbarrows are kept
+busy carrying away their finished product.
+
+There is one specially designed machine, with a battery of augurs, which
+bores twenty-one holes at once, thus saving four-fifths of a cent per
+board. Another special machine shapes poles and saves one cent per pole.
+Such tiny economies appear absurd, until the immense output is taken
+into account. Whoever can reduce the costs in the McCormick plant one
+cent per machine, adds thereby $3,500 a year to the profits, and helps
+to make it possible for a farmer to buy a magical self-binder, built up
+of 3,800 parts, for less than the price of a good horse, or for as much
+wheat as he can grow in one season on a dozen acres.
+
+The vast McCormick City has its human side, too, in spite of all its
+noise and semi-automatic machinery. Cyrus McCormick was not one of those
+employers who call their men by numbers instead of names, and who have
+no more regard for flesh and blood than for iron and steel. He had
+worked with his hands himself, and brought up his sons to do the same.
+The feeling of loyalty and friendliness between the McCormick family and
+their employees has from the first been unusually strong. In 1902, at
+the suggestion of Stanley McCormick, gifts to the amount of $1,500,000
+were made to the oldest employees of the business, as rewards for
+faithful service and tokens of good-will. Also, a handsome club-house
+was built for the comfort of the men of the McCormick City, and a
+rest-room for the women, under the mothering superintendence of a matron
+and trained nurse.
+
+But this one McCormick City, immense as it is, does not by any means
+represent the sum total of McCormick's legacy to the United States. As
+the founder of the harvesting-machine business, he deserves credit for
+an industry which now represents an investment of about $150,000,000.
+With the sole exception of the Australian stripper, every wheat-reaping
+machine is still made on the lines laid down by McCormick in 1831. New
+improvements have been adopted; but not one of his seven factors has
+been thrown aside.
+
+Fully two-thirds of this industry is still being done by the United
+States, although four-fifths of the wheat is grown in other countries.
+Our national income, from this one item of harvesting machinery, has
+risen to $30,000,000 a year--more than we derive from the exportation of
+any other American invention. No European country, apparently, has been
+able to master the complexities and multifarious details which abound in
+a successful harvester business.
+
+In 1902 the efficiency of the larger American plants was greatly
+increased by the organization of the International Harvester Company,
+which has its headquarters in Chicago. The McCormick City is the most
+extensive plant in this Company, and McCormick's son--who is also Cyrus
+H. McCormick--is its President. In this Company sixteen separate plants
+are coordinated, four of these being in foreign countries. Its yearly
+output averages about $75,000,000 in value; and in bulk is great enough
+to fill 65,000 freight-cars. It has 25,000 workmen and 35,000 agents.
+The lumber with which its yards are filled comes from its own
+80,000-acre forest; the steel comes from its own furnaces and the iron
+ore from its own mines. It is so overwhelmingly vast, this new
+famine-fighting consolidation, that the value of its output for one hour
+is greater than the $25,000 of capital with which McCormick built his
+first factory in Chicago.
+
+So, it is evident that the McCormick Reaper has been an indispensable
+factor in the making of America. Without it, we could never have had the
+America of to-day. It has brought good, and nothing but good, to every
+country that has accepted it. It has never been, and never can be, put
+to an evil use. It cannot, under any system of government, benefit the
+few and not the many. It is as democratic in its nature as the American
+Constitution; and in every foreign country where it cuts the grain, it
+is an educator as well as a machine, giving to the masses of less
+fortunate lands an object-lesson in democracy and the spirit of American
+progress.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE REAPER AND THE WORLD
+
+
+We shall now see what the invention of the Reaper means to the human
+race as a whole. We shall leave behind McCormick and the United States,
+and survey the field from a higher standpoint. The selection of wheat as
+the first world-food,--its abundance made possible by the Reaper--its
+transportation by railroads and steamships--its storage in
+elevators--the production of flour--the growth of wheat-banks,
+wheat-ports, and exchanges--the new wheat empires--the international
+mechanism of marketing--the conquest of famine and the stupendous
+possibilities of the future! These are the subjects that group
+themselves under the general title--_The Reaper and the World_.
+
+To find a world-food,--that was the beginning of the problem. All human
+beings wake up hungry every morning of their lives; and consequently the
+first necessity of the day is food. The search for food is the oldest
+of instincts. It is the master-motive of evolution. It has reared
+empires up and thrown them down. As Buckle has shown, where the national
+food is cheap and plentiful, population increases more rapidly. And as
+Sir James Crichton-Browne, in a recent book on "Parcimony in Nutrition,"
+maintains, the lack of food is a prolific cause of war, disease, and
+social misery in its various forms. "Nothing is more demoralizing," he
+says, "than chronic hunger."
+
+"For lack of bread the French Revolution failed," said Prince Krapotkin.
+For lack of bread the opium traffic flourishes in India and China; the
+secret of the prevalence of opium is that the natives use it to prevent
+hunger-pangs in time of famine. Once let those countries have cheap
+bread, and there may be no more opium sold there than there is to-day in
+Kansas. For lack of bread came the war between Russia and Japan; what
+the one nation wanted was a seaport for the grain of Siberia, and what
+the other wanted was more land for the support of her swarming
+population. For lack of bread have come most of the crimes of greed and
+violence,--most of the social systems based on sordid self-interest,
+most of the ill-humor that has postponed the coming of an era of peace
+on earth and good-will among men.
+
+Now, of the three main foods of the human race, flesh, rice, and wheat,
+wheat is the best suited to be a world-food. Flesh becomes too expensive
+once the wild game of the forests is destroyed; and it is not suitable
+for food in tropical countries. Rice, on the other hand, is not a
+flesh-forming food, and so is not suited for food in cold countries.
+Wheat is the one food that is universal, as good for the Esquimaux as
+for the South Sea Islander. It is not easily spoiled, as milk and fruits
+are; and it contains all the elements that are needed by the body and in
+just about the right proportion.
+
+Wheat, to the botanist, is a grass--"a degraded lily," to quote from
+Grant Allen. It was originally a flower that was tamed by man and
+trained from beauty to usefulness. We do not know when or where the
+prehistoric Burbank lived who undertook this education of the
+wheat-lily. But we do know that wheat has been a food for at least five
+thousand years. We find it in the oldest tombs of Egypt and pictured on
+the stones of the Pyramids. We know that Solomon sent wheat as a present
+to his friend, the King of Tyre; and we have reason to believe that its
+first appearance was in the valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates, near
+where the ancient city of Babylon rose to greatness.
+
+[Illustration: Chart Showing Relative Distribution of Values by
+Producing Countries in 1908 of World's Production of Five Principal
+Grains. Approximate Value, $9,280,000,000]
+
+[Illustration: Chart Showing Relative Values in 1908 of World's
+Production of the Five Principal Grains. Approximate Value,
+$9,280,000,000]
+
+Wheat is not a wild weed. It is a tame and transient plant--a plant of
+civilization. It could not continue to exist without man, and man,
+perhaps, could not exist except in the tropical countries without wheat.
+Each needs the other. If the human race were to perish from the face of
+the earth, wheat might survive for three years, but no longer. So close
+has this co-operation been between wheat and civilized man, that an
+eminent German writer, Dr. Gerland, maintains with a wealth of evidence
+that wheat was the original cause of civilization, partly because it was
+the first good and plentiful food, and partly because it was wheat
+that persuaded primitive man to forsake his wars and his wanderings
+and to learn the peaceful habits of agriculture.
+
+In any case, whatever its earlier history may have been, wheat is to-day
+the chief food of the civilized races of mankind. It is the main support
+of 600,000,000 people. It has overcome its natural enemies--weeds,
+fungus diseases, insects, and drought,--and attained a crop total of
+3,500,000,000 bushels a year. To the intelligent, purposeful nations
+that have become the masters of the human race, wheat is now the staff
+of life, the milk of Mother Earth, the essence of soil and air and rain
+and sunshine.
+
+But, although wheat was known to be the best food for fifty centuries,
+it did not until very recently, until thirty or forty years ago, become
+a world-food. Every community ate up its own wheat. It had little or
+none to sell, because, no matter how much grain the farmers planted,
+they could not in the eight or ten days of harvest gather more than a
+certain limited quantity into their barns. All that one man could do,
+with his wife to help him, was to snatch in enough wheat to feed ten
+people for a year. Each family could do no more than feed one other
+family and itself. This was the Tragedy of the Wheat. There was never
+enough of it. It was so precious that none could be sure of it except
+the kings and the nobilities. As for the masses of peasantry who sowed
+the wheat and reaped it with hand-sickles, they would almost as soon
+have thought of wearing diamonds as of eating white bread.
+
+Then, in 1831, came the Reaper. It was not invented in any of the older
+countries, nor in any of the great cities of the world. For five
+thousand years neither the peasants nor the kings had conceived of any
+better way of reaping wheat than with the sickle and the scythe. The man
+who had cut the Gordian knot of Famine was the son of a citizen-farmer,
+Cyrus Hall McCormick by name, Scotch-Irish by race, American by birth,
+and inventor by heredity and early training.
+
+This new machine, the Reaper, when it was full-grown into the
+self-binder, was equal to forty sickles. With one man to drive it, it
+could cut and bind enough wheat in one season to feed four hundred
+people. In its most highly developed form, the combined harvester and
+thresher, it has become so gigantic a machine that thirty-two horses are
+required to haul it. This leviathan cuts a fifty-foot roadway through
+the grain, threshes it and bags it at the rate of one bag every
+half-minute. And the total world production of Reapers of every
+sort--self-binders, mowers, headers, corn-binders, etc.,--is probably as
+many as 1,500,000 a year, two-thirds of them being made in the United
+States.
+
+Because of this harvesting machinery, the wheat crop of the world is now
+nearly twice what it was in 1879. The American crop has multiplied six
+and a half times in fifty years. Western Canada, Australia, Siberia, and
+Argentina have become wheat producers. The cost of growing one bushel in
+America, with machinery and high wages, is now about half a dollar,
+which is less than the cost in Europe and as low as the cost in India,
+where laborers can be hired for a few pennies a day. With a sickle, the
+time-cost of a bushel of wheat was three hours; with a self-binder, it
+is now ten minutes. And so, because of these amazing results, the rattle
+of the harvester has become an indispensable part of the music of our
+industrial orchestra, harmonious with the click of the telegraph key,
+the ring of the telephone bell, the hum of the sewing-machine, the roar
+of the Bessemer converter, the gong of the trolley, the whistle of the
+steamboat, and the puff of the locomotive.
+
+Next to the Reaper, the most important factors in this world-mechanism
+of the bread, are the Railroad and the Steamboat. These arrived on the
+scene just at the right time to distribute the surplus that the Reaper
+produced. The Steamboat, and its humble relative, the barge, came first.
+The Erie Canal of 1825, the Suez Canal of 1869, and the Sault Ste. Marie
+Canal of 1881, were built largely for the carrying of the wheat. By 1856
+wheat was on its way from Chicago to Europe; and four years later the
+first wheat-ship curved around Cape Horn from California. Ten years ago
+an entirely new kind of ship, a sort of immense steel bag called a
+"whaleback," was built to carry 250,000 bushels of wheat in a single
+load. By this means a ton of wheat is actually carried thirteen miles
+for one cent. There are to-day small barges on the canals of Holland,
+large ones on the river Volga, and several thousand steamships on the
+world's main water-ways, all carrying burdens of wheat. Enough is now
+being transported from port to port to give steady work to fully three
+hundred steamships and summer work to very nearly as many more.
+
+There was an exciting contest between the ship and the car in the
+earlier days of transportation, to see which should carry the largest
+share of the wheat. About 1869 the car won. In this year, too, the
+United States was belted with a railway, east to west, which meant the
+opening up of the first great wheat-empire. Other railways pushed out
+into the vast prairies of the West, lured by the call of the wheat. They
+were the pioneers of the world's wheat-railways. Wheat was their chief
+freight and wheat farmers were their chief passengers. At the outset the
+grain was shipped in bags. Then some railway genius invented the
+grain-car, which holds as much as twenty or twenty-five wagons. And
+to-day one of the ordinary moving pictures of an American railroad is a
+sixty-car train travelling eastward with enough wheat in its rolling
+bins to give bread to a city of ten thousand people for a year.
+
+The trans-Siberian railway, which is the longest straight line of steel
+in the world, was built largely as a wheat-conveyor. So were the
+railways of western Canada, Argentina, and India. Ever since the advent
+of the Reaper wheat has been the prolific mother of railways and
+steamships. While the rice nations are still putting their burdens on
+ox-carts and on the backs of camels and elephants, the wheat nations
+have built up a system of transportation that is a daily miracle of
+cheapness, efficiency, and speed. This system is not yet finished. A new
+line of steamships is about to be set afloat between Buenos Ayres and
+Hamburg. The Erie Canal is being re-made, at a fabulous cost, so that a
+steamer with 100,000 bushels of wheat can go directly from Buffalo to
+New York. And an adventurous railway is now pushing its way north from
+the wheat-fields of western Canada to the unknown water of Hudson Bay,
+whence the wheat will be carried by boat to London and Liverpool.
+
+To-day it is not the long haul of wheat, but the short haul, that is
+more expensive. It is cheaper to carry wheat from one country to another
+than from the barn to the nearest town. The average distance that an
+American farmer has to haul his grain is nine and a half miles, and the
+average cost of haulage is nine cents per hundred pounds. Thus it has
+actually become true that to carry wheat ten miles by wagon costs more
+than 2,300 miles by steamship. Such is the tense efficiency of our
+wheat-carrier system that a bushel of grain can now be picked up in
+Missouri and sent to the cotton-spinners of England for a dime.
+
+Associated with this transportation problem was the matter of storage.
+There was no sort of a building known to man, fifty years ago, in which
+a million bushels of wheat might be conveniently kept. An entirely new
+kind of building had to be invented. All the wheat barns were
+overflowing. All the warehouses were outgrown. The difficulty was to
+make a huge building that could be quickly filled and emptied. Then, at
+the precise moment when he was needed, an inventor, F. H. Peavey,
+appeared with a device for elevating grain--an endless carrier to which
+metal cups were fastened. From this idea the _elevator_ was born.
+
+[Illustration: MAMMOTH WHEAT-FIELD IN SOUTH DAKOTA WITH TWENTY
+HARVESTERS IN LINE]
+
+The first city that appreciated the usefulness of this new, unlovely
+building was Chicago. It became not only the home of the Reaper, but
+also the main storehouse of the wheat. It erected one after another of
+these mastodonic buildings until to-day thirty-six of them stand along
+the water-front, roomy enough to hold the entire crop of Holland,
+Sweden, Greece, Egypt, Mexico, and New Zealand. What these immense
+grain-bins have done for the prosperity of Chicago would require many
+books to tell completely. It was largely because of them that Chicago
+outgrew Berlin and became the central metropolis of North America, with
+twenty-six railways emptying their freight at her doors and seven
+thousand vessels a year arriving at her harbor.
+
+At present Chicago has swung from wheat to corn and oats, and enabled
+Minneapolis to become the greatest actual wheat-storage city of the
+world. In Minneapolis the owning of elevators has become a profession.
+There are not only forty-four elevators in the city itself, but also
+forty elevator companies that have built more than two thousand
+elevators in the wheat States of the Northwest. The Jumbo of all
+elevators is here--a stupendous granary that holds 6,000,000 bushels, as
+much as may be reaped by two thousand self-binders from seven hundred
+square miles of land.
+
+Of all American cities, there are only five others that can put roofs
+over 10,000,000 bushels of grain. Duluth-Superior stands at the head of
+these, with twice the storage capacity of New York. This double city,
+with the picturesque location, Duluth on her Minnesota hillside and
+Superior on her Wisconsin plain, has in recent years overtaken all
+competitors and is now the leading wheat-shipping port in the world.
+Buffalo comes next as an elevator city, having twenty-eight towering
+buildings of steel operated by the energy of Niagara Falls. Even this
+famous cataract helps a little in the making of cheap bread. New York
+follows closely after Buffalo; with Kansas City and St. Louis running
+neck and neck at quite a distance behind. It is an odd fact that there
+is not one elevator on the Pacific coast. Because of the rainless
+weather, the wheat is put into bags and piled outdoors until the day of
+shipment. This is an expensive method of handling, as the bags cost four
+cents apiece and no machine has as yet been invented that will pick up
+and handle a sack of grain.
+
+The American elevator has now been very generally adopted as the ideal
+wheat-bin. Two Roumanian cities, Braila and Galatz, have suggested an
+improvement by using concrete instead of steel. And one Russian city,
+Novorossisk, on the Black Sea, has introduced a most original feature in
+the building of elevators by erecting a very large one a quarter of a
+mile back from the dock, because of the better view that this site
+affords of the harbor.
+
+London has no elevators, and never has had, although it buys more wheat
+than any other city. It has six million mouths to feed, so that the
+grain is devoured as fast as it arrives. To give bread to London would
+take the entire crop of Indiana or Siberia. Neither are there any
+elevators of any importance in Paris, Berlin, or Antwerp. Whatever wheat
+arrives at these cities is either hurried to the mill or re-shipped.
+Wheat is too precious in Europe to be stored for a year or for two
+years, as may happen in Minnesota. Rotterdam has one elevator only and
+of moderate size. Neither Odessa nor Sulina have any of the large
+proportions, for the reasons that in Odessa the labor unions have an
+unconquerable prejudice against elevators, and in Sulina the grain is
+held only a short time and then forwarded elsewhere. This Sulina, as a
+glance at the map of Europe will show, is the loneliest of all the
+wheat-cities. It stands on a heap of gravel at the mouth of the
+Danube--an oasis of human life in a vast marshy wilderness. The
+children born there have never seen a railway; but 1,400 ships leave the
+stone docks of Sulina every year laden with enough wheat to feed London,
+Paris, and Berlin. To find the exact reverse of Sulina, we must go to
+Buenos Ayres--the premier wheat-city of South America and the gayest of
+them all. Built up at first by the cattle trade, and now depending
+mainly upon wheat, this superb city has become the topmost pinnacle of
+South American luxury and refinement. It has several new elevators,
+erected by the railway companies.
+
+After the Reaper, the Railway, the Steamship, and the Elevator, came the
+Exchange. This, too, came first in Chicago, in its modern form. There
+was one little grain Exchange in the Italian city of Genoa, several
+centuries ago, and England points back to 1747 as the year when her
+first Corn Exchange was born. But it was the Exchange in Chicago,
+started by thirteen men in 1848, that first came into its full growth
+and became an arena of international forces.
+
+A wheat Exchange is to-day much more than a meeting-place for brokers.
+It is a mechanism. It is a news bureau--a parliament--a part of the
+whispering-gallery of the world. It not only provides a market where
+wheat can at once be bought and sold, but it obtains for both buyer and
+seller all the news from everywhere about the wheat, so that no bargain
+may be made in the dark. Before Exchanges were organized there were
+times when a farmer would drive twenty miles to the nearest town with a
+load of wheat, and find no one to buy it. Even in Chicago, in the early
+forties, a farmer ran the risk of not being able to trade his wheat for
+a few groceries.
+
+At present, when a buyer or a seller of wheat arrives at an Exchange, he
+goes at once to consult the weather map of the day. From here he passes
+to a series of bulletin-boards, which inform him of the arrival or outgo
+of wheat at many cities. One board tells him the visible supply of wheat
+in the world, so that he can easily ascertain, if he wishes to do so,
+_how much bread the human race ate last week_. Other boards have
+telegrams and cablegrams of disaster--frost in Alberta, hail in
+Minnesota, green bug in Texas, rust in Argentina, drought in Australia,
+locusts in Siberia, monsoon in India, and chinch bug in Missouri. Good
+news is here, too, as well as bad. There may be reports of a
+record-breaking crop in Roumania, an opulent rain in Kansas, a new
+steamship line from Kurrachee to Liverpool, and the plowing of a million
+acres of new land in western Canada. And also there are, of course, the
+records of the latest sales and prices in other Exchanges.
+
+Thus the farmer can not only find a ready buyer for his wheat. He can,
+by means of a newspaper or a telephone, know what price he ought to
+receive, as all the news gathered by the Exchanges is freely given to
+the public. Such is the perfection of the news mechanism that has been
+built up around the marketing of the wheat, that before a Dakota farmer
+starts out for town with a load of grain, he can go to the telephone
+under his own roof and learn the prices at various cities and the
+world-conditions of the wheat trade.
+
+The paper which best deserves to be called the official journal of the
+wheat is the _Corn Trade News_, of Liverpool; and the building which
+best deserves to be called the international headquarters of the wheat
+business is the handsome new Baltic Exchange, near by the Bank of
+England in London. This Baltic market is so practically international,
+in fact, that it is never closed. Whoever wishes to buy or sell wheat
+may do so here at any hour of the day or night. There are no days in
+this building and no seasons, for the reason that it is always noonday
+and harvest-time in some part of the world. In this Baltic Exchange,
+too, there is now a nucleus for a Wheat Parliament, organized under the
+name of the Corn Trade Association. This society has undertaken to put
+the wheat business in order, by establishing standard contracts,
+collecting samples of all wheats, arbitrating disputes, and condemning
+all dishonesties of whatever sort.
+
+As wheat Exchange cities, London, Liverpool, and Chicago outclass all
+others. Neither Italy nor France have any central or dominating market.
+In Paris, Antwerp, Hamburg, and Amsterdam the Bourses, as the Exchanges
+are called, are public buildings, and the members of each Bourse
+represent the local situation and nothing more. One of the most
+ambitious and speculative of the European Exchanges is the one at
+Budapest, which stands beside a dainty little park where the brokers eat
+their lunch in fine weather; and the youngest of all Exchanges is the
+one that was born in Buenos Ayres in 1908, representing a surplus of a
+hundred million bushels a year.
+
+Besides the brokers, in their Exchanges, there must also be inspectors
+in the marketing of the wheat. In some countries these inspectors are
+government officers, as in Germany and Canada; and elsewhere they are
+local officials or private employees, as in the United States. A carload
+of wheat, passing from Dakota to New York, will probably have from three
+to six inspections.
+
+[Illustration: HARVESTING IN ROUMANIA]
+
+Also, the insurance agent takes his place in the circle of
+co-operation when the wheat begins to move from barn to bakery. He
+insures the wheat in the elevators, on the cars, or in the steamships.
+He may even insure it against hail and tornadoes while it is growing. It
+is so precious, this brown seed, that we watch over every step of its
+progress.
+
+It is the bankers' busy season, too, when the wheat begins to move. The
+marketing of the grain ties up more money than any other yearly event.
+"It threatens us with disaster every fall," said one of the Secretaries
+of the Treasury, when making a plea for a more elastic currency. "We
+ship half a million dollars a day during harvest," said the president of
+a Chicago bank. "We drew more than five millions of currency from the
+East and sent thirty-eight millions to the country during September and
+October of last year," said a third financier, who spoke for Chicago as
+a whole. In short, the movement of the wheat means a matter of five
+hundred millions to American bankers; and it is the most important
+occurrence of the year to the bankers of Russia, Canada, Argentina, and
+Australia. Many a bank, as well as many a railroad, was founded upon
+the moving of the wheat.
+
+The broker, the banker, the inspector, and the insurance agent--these
+four render a useful service to the wheat that has left home; but there
+is a fifth man about whose usefulness there is the widest possible
+difference of opinion--the speculator. From one point of view, the
+speculator is the driving-wheel of the whole wheat trade. By his energy
+and his impetus he steadies and equalizes the conflicting forces, and
+gives the entire mechanism a continuous movement. From another point of
+view, he is a gambler, reckless and parasitical, who interferes with the
+natural laws of supply and demand, and snatches an unearned toll from
+the wheat bins of the world.
+
+Some of the wheat nations not only permit speculation in wheat, but
+practically encourage it by allowing more privileges to the speculator
+than to the ordinary business man. Others are resolutely stamping it
+out, as a nuisance and a crime. The nations that have voted "Yea" on
+speculation are Great Britain, Hungary, Sweden, Norway, France, and the
+United States; and the nations that have voted "Nay" are Germany,
+Holland, Belgium, Australia, Switzerland, Greece, and Argentina. Canada
+has been divided on the question, since the Province of Manitoba broke
+up the Winnipeg Grain Exchange by legislation in 1908.
+
+In the end, as organization increases, speculation will decline. Chicago
+will try to push prices up and London will try to pull them down; but
+there will be fewer violent fluctuations. Better methods of farming and
+a more reliable system of news-gathering will eliminate the element of
+chance to such an extent that the wheat trade will offer less and less
+scope for speculation and no inducements at all to the reckless plunger.
+Already the frantic methods of marketing wheat have been outgrown in the
+Exchanges of Liverpool and London. In neither of these places is there
+any Wheat Pit, or any maelstrom of frenzied brokers. Without any
+shouting or jostling or wild tumult of any kind, the English brokers are
+buying two hundred million bushels of wheat a year, and controlling the
+situation to a greater extent than any other body of men. This, too,
+without any restrictive legislation.
+
+Before wheat was made plentiful by the Reaper, it was possible for a
+daring man to establish a corner or monopoly; but no one has succeeded
+in doing this for more than forty years. The last wheat corner that did
+not fail was in 1867. Since then every would-be cornerer has been caught
+in his own trap. The wheat-machinery of the world has now become so vast
+that no individual can master it. Whoever has tried it has found that he
+was being cornered by the wheat; for as soon as he had raised the price
+to an artificial level, the grain has flowed in upon him and covered him
+up. The price of wheat to-day may be temporarily deflected by schemes
+and conspiracies, but not for long. Ultimately it is decided by the
+state of the crop and the state of public opinion in the thirty-six
+countries that grow wheat and eat bread.
+
+Within the last thirty years, since the Reaper has come into universal
+use, the area of the world's wheat-field has doubled. New countries
+have arisen, that were only waste places before. The habitable earth has
+grown immensely larger. There is more room for both wheat and men to
+grow, and less scope for the forestaller and the monopolist. Just as the
+Reaper was the advance-machine of civilization across the prairies of
+the West, so it is to-day opening up new territories and developing new
+resources.
+
+Northwestern Canada, for instance, was a dozen years ago supposed to be
+a barren wilderness of snow and ice, in which none but the hunter and
+the fur-trader might earn a living. Then several adventurous Minnesotans
+went across and planted wheat. It grew--forty bushels to the acre, and
+the acres, there were two hundred million of them, were waiting for the
+plow and almost to be had for the asking. Since then, more than three
+hundred thousand American farmers have swept across the line and joined
+in the greatest wheat-rush of this generation. Twelve hundred grain
+elevators have been built along the line of the Canadian Pacific; and
+Chicago self-binders rattled through the yellow wheat last Summer two
+thousand miles north of St. Louis.
+
+In Argentina, too, and Australia, where the wheat ripens just in time to
+decorate the Christmas trees, there is to be seen the same conquest of
+nature. Desolate plains are being tamed by the plow and exploited by the
+harvesters. In the semi-arid belt that lies east of the Rocky Mountains,
+new kinds of wheat, less thirsty, are being taught to grow. In Russia
+and Siberia a vast tract of twenty-five million acres has been rescued
+from idleness in the last fifteen years. And even in the valley of the
+Euphrates, where wheat, so it is believed, was born, a new railway is
+now being constructed which, when it is finished, will carry oil and
+wheat.
+
+By thus opening up new regions to settlement, the wheat-farmer not only
+thwarts the monopolist and makes the world a larger place to live in, he
+does more: he compels the gold to come out of its vaults in the great
+cities and to flow to the outermost parts of the earth. For every
+eighteen thousand pounds of wheat that go to the city, there will go
+back to the farmer one pound of gold. For every loaf of bread upon a
+Londoner's table, there will go a cent and a half to the man behind the
+Reaper. And so, the sale of every wheat-crop means that the gold will
+come throbbing out into the arteries of business, like the blood from
+the heart, and on its way back and forth nourish the whole body of the
+nation.
+
+It is in the very nature of the wheat trade to benefit the masses and
+not the few. The more wheat that grows, the less danger there is of an
+aristocracy of wheat. More wheat means more luxury in the farm-house,
+more traffic on the railway, and more food in the slums. It means busier
+factories and steel-mills, because the farmer, when he receives his
+wheat-money, becomes the customer of the manufacturer. Thus it was not
+at all accidental that the wealth of Buenos Ayres came with the
+exportation of wheat, or that the commercial awakening of Canada
+followed the opening up of her western prairies, or that the industrial
+supremacy of the United States dates from the immense wheat harvests
+that began in 1880 to push the whole country forward with the power of
+$500,000,000 a year. As one of McCormick's competitors, J. D. Easter of
+Evanston, once declared, "It seems as though the McCormick Reaper
+started the ball of prosperity rolling, and it has been rolling ever
+since."
+
+[Illustration: HARVESTING HEAVY GRAIN, SOUTH AMERICA]
+
+If we wish to know what the Reaper will eventually do for these new
+wheat countries, we have but to glance back over the short history of
+our ten prairie States. Here, by the use of both science and machinery,
+the New Farmer has reached his highest level of success. By 1884 these
+ten States had twenty million thriving settlers, riding on forty-two
+thousand miles of railway, raising as much wheat in a day as New England
+could in a year, and storing their profits in twenty-five hundred banks.
+Incredible as it may seem to Europe and Asia, it is true that even the
+poorhouses in Iowa and Kansas were used last year as storehouses for
+wheat. And it is true that in the co-operative commonwealth called
+Kansas, at the last assessment, there were found to be forty-four
+thousand pianos and six million dollars' worth of carriages and
+automobiles. This in a State where there are no Grand Dukes and where
+every man works for a living!
+
+If the lords of Siberia wish to know what may be done with that
+famine-swept vastitude they may come and see that bed of an ancient sea,
+which in thirty years has been transformed into the world's greatest
+bread-land--the Red River Valley. Here the banks are not only packed
+with millions, but hundreds of millions, belonging to the shirt-sleeved
+proprietors of the soil. Here, in the yellow days of August, a man may
+travel for days and see no limit to the ocean of waving, shimmering
+wheat, that ripples around him in a vast sky-bounded circle.
+Wheat--wheat--wheat! Nothing but wheat! It is a Field of the Cloth of
+Gold, that adds nothing to the glory of kings, but much to the glory of
+the common people. Drop the German Empire down upon this valley and its
+expanse of dizzying, swirling wheat, and the wheat would not be wholly
+eclipsed. There would still be enough grain around the edges to make a
+golden fringe.
+
+The children born and bred in this Red River Valley have never seen,
+except in pictures, a sickle or a flail. Their only conception of a
+harvest time is that a battery of red self-binders, with reels whirling
+and knives clacking, shall charge upon the wheat as though each acre
+were a battalion of hostile infantry, and make war until the land is
+strewn with heaps of fallen sheaves. Famine, to these children of the
+wheat, seems as remote a danger as the cooling of the sun. Even the one
+young State of North Dakota, not yet of age, is now growing food for
+herself, and for twelve million people besides.
+
+So, the urgent world-problem is to teach other nations the lesson of the
+Red River Valley. There is not yet enough bread so that we may put a
+loaf at every plate. To feed the whole race according to the present
+American standard of living would require ten thousand million
+bushels--three times as much as we are raising now; and the demand is
+fast outgrowing the supply. Sooner or later the Chinese will learn to
+eat at least one loaf a week apiece, and when they do, it will mean
+that the world's wheat crop must be increased ten per cent.
+
+More wheat and a more efficient organization of wheat agencies--that is
+the programme of the future. Already one unsuccessful effort has been
+made to hold an international Wheat Congress; and the second attempt may
+end more happily. Now that the world has become so small that a
+cablegram flashes completely around it in twelve minutes; now that there
+are forty-four nations united by The Hague Conferences and fifty-eight
+by the Postal Union; now that war has grown to be so expensive that one
+cannon-shot costs as much as a college education and one battleship as
+much as a first-class University,--it is quite probable that the march
+of co-operation will continue until there is a Congress, and a central
+headquarters and a Tribunal, which will represent nothing less than an
+international fellowship of the wheat.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD
+
+
+We have now seen the machinery by which the wheat is cut, moved, stored,
+financed, and marketed. Its next and last step, as wheat, is to the
+Flour-mill, whence it goes to the bakeries, the groceries, and the homes
+of six hundred million people. Here, too, there have had to come new
+methods since the advent of the Reaper.
+
+In the Dark Ages of the sickle and the flail, two flat stones did well
+enough for a flour-mill. Even the bread that was found in the ruins of
+Pompeii had been made of wheat that was merely crushed. Later came the
+mill run by horse-power or by the energy of a little stream. Such were
+the first American mills. The mill that was operated by George
+Washington at Mount Vernon, for instance, was run by water-power and
+produced flour that sold for thirteen dollars a barrel. Rochester, N.
+Y., was the first American "Flour City"; but the modern flour-mill did
+not come until it was compelled to come by the deluge of Reaper wheat
+that flooded the markets in 1870.
+
+As usually happens in the case of inventions, it came where it was not
+expected. It made its arrival in the Hungarian city of Budapest in 1874.
+The "new process," as it was called, was based upon the use of steel
+rolls instead of stones. It was as superior to the old-fashioned way as
+the Reaper had been to the sickle or as the thresher was to the flail.
+It was amazingly quick and produced a better flour. By reason of these
+new mills, Budapest became at a bound the foremost "Flour City" of the
+world, and held its place against all comers until 1890.
+
+Then the prestige passed to Minneapolis--a young city on the head-waters
+of the Mississippi, the recent home of the prairie-dog and the buffalo.
+Shortly before the Civil War, a youthful lawyer named William D.
+Washburn drifted westwards from Maine until he came to Minneapolis, at
+that time a tiny village on the frontier. He found no clients here, and
+no law; but he did find a ledge of limestone rock jutting across the
+Mississippi and making the only large water-fall in all that region. So
+he threw aside his legal education and became the organizer of a
+water-power company and the owner of a little flour-mill. Soon the long
+line of Reapers reached Minneapolis and swept on westwards into the
+richest wheat lands that had ever been known. The wheat overwhelmed
+the slow old-fashioned mills, so the ex-lawyer in 1878 adopted the
+Budapest system and built a roller-mill that was the quickest and
+most automatic of its kind. Other millers had by this time come to
+Minneapolis--Pillsbury, Crosby, Christian, and Dunwoody; and all
+together they pushed the flour business until in twelve years they had
+become the main millers of the world.
+
+[Illustration: INDIANS REAPING THEIR HARVEST, WHITE EARTH, MINNESOTA]
+
+To-day the river of wheat is deepest at Minneapolis. Its twenty-two
+great mills roll 120,000,000 bushels into flour as an ordinary year's
+work. While the swiftest mill in Athens, in the age of Pericles,
+produced no more than two barrels a day, there is one mill of incredible
+size in Minneapolis that fills _seventeen thousand_ barrels in a
+twenty-four hours' run--enough to give bread to New York State and
+California. What the Greeks did in a day the Minnesotans do in ten
+seconds. Five million barrels of this Minneapolis flour is each year
+scattered among foreign nations, a fact which informs us that flour is
+now not a local product, but part of the real currency of nations. No
+doubt the people who dwell by the Sea of Galilee, whose fathers were
+once miraculously fed upon seven loaves of bread and a few fishes, are
+now being fed miraculously upon loaves of bread made from the flour of
+Minneapolis.
+
+The making of the bread--that is the final step in this movement of the
+wheat. As yet, this is a local process, though not wholly so. Certain
+ready-to-eat foods are now being made from wheat and boxed in such a way
+that they may be sent from one country to another. If we trace back the
+original of a loaf of bread of ordinary size, we shall find that it was
+made from two-thirds of a pound of flour, which was rolled from one
+pound of wheat, containing about twelve thousand grains that were grown
+on forty-eight square feet of land and reaped by a self-binder in two
+seconds. When the wheat was cut in the old-fashioned way, with a
+hand-sickle, every loaf of bread required eighty seconds' labor instead
+of two.
+
+In a public test made last year in the State of Washington, wheat was
+cut, threshed, ground into flour, and baked into biscuits in
+twenty-three minutes. This is an evidence that all the machinery for
+handling grain has now been brought up to the same high level of speed
+and efficiency as the self-binder. It also helps us to understand the
+daily marvel of cheap bread--the fact that a hundred loaves of bread are
+now delivered one by one at an American workingman's door for the cost
+of a seat at the opera or a couple of song-records by Caruso.
+
+So plentiful is this bread that the loaves baked from American flour in
+1907 would have made a wall of bread around the earth, or have given
+thirty loaves apiece to every human creature; and so cheap has it become
+in these latter days that even in the United States it is not more than
+three cents a day per capita. The unskilled laborer who receives $1.50 a
+day, earns his bread in the first ten minutes, every work day morning.
+And the total tax he pays to the men who make the self-binders is not
+more than one tenth of a cent per loaf.
+
+Three-sevenths of the people of the world are now on a wheat basis. They
+are the lesser fraction in point of numbers, but the larger in point of
+prosperity and progress. A wheat map of the globe would be very nearly a
+map of modern civilization. As yet, there are many peasants who grow
+wheat and cannot afford to eat it. But the number of bread-eaters is
+steadily increasing, probably at the rate of four or five million a
+year.
+
+The nation that eats most bread per capita is Belgium. After her come
+France, England, and the United States. As the Belgians, with their
+scanty acres, cannot grow more wheat than would support them for nine
+weeks, they are compelled to import nearly fifty million bushels a year;
+and it is this continual influx of grain that has done most to make
+Antwerp the third busiest port in the world and the home of forty
+steamship lines.
+
+France is second as an eater, and third as a grower, of wheat. But it is
+not an important factor in the international market, as there is usually
+almost an even balance between what it grows and what it eats. It has
+very little either to buy or to sell. Its crops are steady and large,
+and by intensive cultivation the thrifty French are obtaining the same
+amount of grain from less and less land.
+
+There are two countries only, Great Britain and Holland, that impose no
+tariff upon either wheat or flour. Neither the British nor the Dutch
+will tolerate a bread tax. Both countries have barely enough land to
+grow one-quarter as much wheat as they need, although there was a period
+in the early history of England when it was nicknamed "the Granary of
+the North," because of its many wheat-fields. To-day the bread on three
+British tables out of four is made of wheat brought in a British ship
+from some foreign country; and the total amount of wheat consumed in the
+United Kingdom is so great that it requires an army of 93,000 men with
+self-binders to cut it and tie it into sheaves. If it had to be reaped
+with sickles, it would be a ten-day harvesting for half the able-bodied
+men in the two islands.
+
+Germany eats less wheat than Great Britain, and raises more than twice
+as much. The Germans are skilled wheat-farmers. They grow as much on
+half an acre of poor soil as Americans grow on a whole acre of good
+soil. The Italians eat very nearly as much as the Germans, and raise a
+larger crop by dint of great labor on the tiny farms and terraced
+hillsides of Italy. Both countries tax the bread of the poor by a tariff
+of thirty-eight to forty-eight cents a bushel on foreign wheat. The
+Austrians and Hungarians, in spite of a climate of extremes and sudden
+changes, manage to supply themselves with more than ten billion loaves
+of bread by the tillage of their own fields, and usually have some flour
+to sell to the neighboring countries. The Spanish cannot quite feed
+themselves; in addition to the wheat they grow, they are obliged to buy
+about a hundred ship-loads a year. Denmark comes out even. Portugal buys
+her bread for four months of the year. Greece, Norway, and Sweden raise
+half enough wheat. The Swiss can get no more from their valley-farms
+than will feed them for ten weeks. And the peasants of Russia and
+Roumania, who raise wheat in abundance, have unfortunately not yet risen
+to that luxurious level of life in which white bread is the every-day
+food of the people. Although Russia has more wheat to sell than any
+other nation, a Russian eats one-third as much wheat as a Belgian, and
+there is a famine somewhere in the vast Russian Empire almost every
+winter.
+
+[Illustration: A HARVEST SCENE UPON A RUSSIAN ESTATE]
+
+Africa is not yet a wheat-eating continent. Egypt, which was, in the
+Golden Age of the Pharaohs, the wheat-centre of the world, now grows
+less grain than Oregon; Algeria raises less than Ohio; and Tunis, from
+the fields that surround the ruins of ancient Carthage, produces less
+grain than Tennessee. India is slowly shifting from rice to wheat. Many
+of the fields that once grew indigo are now yellow with grain. At
+present India is the most uncertain factor in the situation, as it may
+have eighty million bushels to sell or none. As it is one-third as large
+as the United States, and crowded with three times the population,
+there is always need of its grain at home. As yet, the Reaper has not
+been allowed to extend its benefits to India. Most of the grain is
+reaped in the old slow, wasteful way. It is sown by hand, cut by
+sickles, stored in pits, and transported on the backs of camels. Little
+Japan is falling into line as a bread-eating country, growing now as
+much wheat as California. And even China, which is not as a whole on the
+wheat-map of the world, has recently begun to grow wheat in Manchuria
+and to build flour-mills at Hong-Kong.
+
+So, the human race will soon be able to feed itself. It has learned how
+and needs only to use to the full the agencies that are already invented
+and established. Beginning with the McCormick Reaper in 1831, there has
+been constructed a world mechanism of the bread, which promises to
+wholly abolish Famine and its brood of evils. The crude machine that was
+hammered and whittled into shape in a log workshop on a Virginian farm,
+has now become a System--a _McCormick System_, that cuts ten million
+bushels of ripe wheat a day and transports it hither and thither as
+handily as though the whole round earth were girt with belt-conveyors.
+
+That young Virginian farmer who awoke from his dream and made his dream
+come true, made it possible for a few in each country to provide enough
+food for all. He found a cure for Hunger, which had always persisted
+like a chronic disease. He heaped the plates on the tables of thirty-six
+nations. He took a drudgery and transformed it into a profession. He
+instructed the wheat-eating races how to increase the "seven small
+loaves" so that the multitudes should be fed. He picked up the task of
+feeding the hungry masses--the Christly task that had lain unfulfilled
+for eighteen centuries, and led the way in organizing it into a system
+of international reciprocity.
+
+To-day there is no longer in most countries any tragic note in the Epic
+of the Wheat. There is no sweating peasant with a hoe. The plowman may
+even sit, if he wishes, upon the sliding steel knife that slices the
+soil into furrows, or upon the steel harrow that combs the clods into
+soft, loose earth. The sower is no heavy-footed serf, scattering his
+grain in handfuls upon the surface of the soil, where the birds of the
+air may devour it. He, too, rides upon a machine with steel fingers that
+plant the living seed securely in the living earth. And when, at the
+call of the sun and the rain, the black field becomes green and ripens
+from green to gold, its yellow fruitage is swept down and into barns,
+not by a horde of stooping laborers, but by the Grand March of the
+Harvesters, the drivers of painted chariots, who ride against the grain
+and leave it behind them in bound sheaves.
+
+Henceforth civilization may be based upon higher motives than the Search
+for Food. The struggle for existence may become the struggle of the
+nobler nature for its full development. The gentle need not be
+eliminated by the strong. Instead of contending with one another in an
+unbrotherly competition, men may move upward to the higher activities of
+social self-preservation and organized self-help. By mastering the
+problem of the bread, they have opened up such opportunities for
+education, for travel, for happier homes, for the prosperity and
+friendship of the nations, as no previous generation has ever had. And
+it is here, it is in this larger and kindlier civilization, that is now
+made possible by the Reaper and the wheat-mechanism which has grown up
+around it, that we shall find the full spiritual value to the world of
+that stout-hearted bread-winner of the human race whose life began among
+the hills of Old Virginia one hundred years ago.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+  A
+
+  Adams, John, 15
+
+  Adriance, John P., 103, 119
+
+  Advertisements of Reaper, 54, 81-83, 112, 134
+
+  Africa not a wheat-eating country, 242
+
+  Agencies established for sale of Reapers (about 1844), 63
+
+  Agents, Cyrus H. McCormick's plan in regard to, 83, 84, 86
+
+  Agriculture, Department of, 87
+
+  Albert, Prince, 125, 132
+
+  Algeria, 242
+
+  Allen, Grant, 205
+
+  _America_, yacht, 131
+
+  Amsterdam, 222
+
+  Antwerp, no grain stored in, 217;
+    Bourse in, 222;
+    third busiest port in world, 239
+
+  Appleby, John F., 115
+
+  Argentina, 209, 212, 225, 228
+
+  Arkwright, inventor, 53, 131
+
+  Armagh massacre of 1641, 22
+
+  Athens, mills at, 236
+
+  Atkins, Jearum, 106
+
+  Augusta County, Virginia, 3
+
+  Australia, wheat crop of, 209;
+    legislation against speculation in, 225;
+    development of, 228
+
+  Australian stripper, 200
+
+  Austria in 1809, 4;
+    farm laborers received no wages in, 123;
+    climate and wheat production in, 241
+
+  Austrian Emperor decorated Cyrus H. McCormick, 135
+
+  Ayrshire, Scotland, 86
+
+
+  B
+
+  Babylon, 206
+
+  Baggage Case, 1862-1885, 100-102;
+    _see also_ Pennsylvania Railroad
+
+  Baltic Exchange, London, 221
+
+  _Baltic_, holder of ocean record, 131
+
+  Baltimore and Ohio Railway, 49
+
+  Baltimore Convention of 1861, 158, 166
+
+  Bankers concerned in moving of wheat, 223, 224
+
+  Barbary pirates, 4
+
+  Barclay, Col. A. T., 40
+
+  Barge, invention of, 210
+
+  Battleship turret, improver of, 95
+
+  Bavarians in the Tyrol (1809), 4
+
+  _Beagle_, H. M. S., Darwin's voyage in, 51
+
+  Bear, Henry, 66
+
+  Behel, Jacob, 115
+
+  Belgian method of reaping, 6
+
+  Belgians, King of the, 125
+
+  Belgium, legislation against speculation in, 225;
+    consumption of bread per capita in, 239, 242
+
+  Berlin, 214, 217
+
+  Berthelot, 51
+
+  Bessemer converter, 17, 49, 69, 210
+
+  Bismarck, 136
+
+  Black Death in England, 124
+
+  Blackie, 1
+
+  Blame, Mrs. Emmons, 183
+
+  Blanchard, inventor, 95
+
+  Blue Ridge Mountains, 2, 36
+
+  Board of Trade, none in Chicago when Cyrus H. McCormick came, 70
+
+  Bonanza farms, 194
+
+  Bull, Ole, 184
+
+  Bonar, 1
+
+  Bonner, Henry, publisher, 21
+
+  Bottgher, 53
+
+  Bourses, or European Exchanges, 222
+
+  Bowyer, Col. John, 40
+
+  Braila, Roumania, 216
+
+  Bradshaw, Prof., 40
+
+  Brains, John, 59
+
+  Bread, making of, 237, 238;
+    record time from standing grain to, 238;
+    cheapness of, 238
+
+  Bread tax, 240, 241
+
+  Brokers, wheat, 219, 222, 224
+
+  Brooks, Absalom, 58
+
+  Brown, A. C., 66
+
+  Brown, Senator, of Miss., 93
+
+  Bryant, 76
+
+  Buckle, 204
+
+  Budapest, Bourse in, 222;
+    "new process" mills in, 235, 236
+
+  Buenos Ayres, 218, 222, 229
+
+  Buffalo, N. Y., 69, 216
+
+  Bulwer, Sir Henry Lytton, 130
+
+  Burson, W. W., 115
+
+  Bushnell, Reaper manufacturer, 103, 120
+
+  Butler, E. K., 143, 148
+
+  Butler, Gen., 36
+
+
+  C
+
+  Cablegrams, 233
+
+  Calhoun, 164, 178
+
+  California, 51, 82, 190, 243
+
+  Calvin, John, 156, 157, 168
+
+  Canada, grain inspectors in, 222;
+    grain speculation in, 225
+
+  Canada (western), wheat crop of, 209;
+    railways of, 212, 213;
+    development of, 227, 229
+
+  Canadian Pacific Railway, 227
+
+  Canal, first, in Chicago, 75
+
+  Carlyle, 155
+
+  Carnegie, Andrew, 56
+
+  Carpenter, "Pump," 114, 115, 117
+
+  Carson, Miss Polly, 40, 41
+
+  Carthage, ruins of, 242
+
+  Cash, John, 35
+
+  Cavaliers of Virginia, 20
+
+  Châlons, Emperor Napoleon's estate, 134
+
+  Chautauqua idea, originator of, 120
+
+  Chicago, 4, 30, 31, 37, 50, 67, 68, 70-78, 83, 85, 97, 106, 137,
+        144, 146, 151-153, 162, 166, 188, 189, 192, 196, 201, 214,
+        215, 218, 219, 222, 223
+
+  Chicago fire of 1871, 30, 151-153, 182
+
+  China, opium traffic of, 204;
+    future use of wheat in, 232, 243
+
+  Chopin, 1, 51
+
+  Christian, Minneapolis miller, 236
+
+  Cincinnati Democratic Convention, 171
+
+  Circus, first, in Chicago, 71
+
+  City and town dwellers, proportion of, 195, 196
+
+  Civil War, _see_ Secession, War of
+
+  Clay, Henry, 15, 164
+
+  _Clermont_, Fulton's steamboat, 7
+
+  Cleveland, Ohio, 73
+
+  Collins Line, 131
+
+  Colt's pistol, 130, 131
+
+  Columbus, Reaper traced back to, 17
+
+  Congress, first recognition of Chicago by, 72;
+    Lincoln elected to, 72;
+    patent suits carried to, 91, 92;
+    how inventors have been treated by, 95
+
+  Cooper, Peter, 11, 155
+
+  Corn stored at Chicago, 215
+
+  Corn Trade Association, London, 221
+
+  _Corn Trade News_, of Liverpool, 221
+
+  Corners in wheat, 226
+
+  Cort, 53
+
+  Cotton-gin, 52, 97, 191
+
+  Covenanters, Scotch, 19, 23, 157
+
+  Cradle, 5, 27, 45
+
+  Crichton-Browne, Sir James, 204
+
+  Crimean War, 190
+
+  Criminals in period of 1809, 8
+
+  Cromwell, 173, 185
+
+  Crosby, Minneapolis miller, 236
+
+  Cross of the Legion of Honor given Cyrus H. McCormick by Emperor
+        Napoleon III., 135
+
+  Crystal Palace, London, 127
+
+
+  D
+
+  Dalrymple, Oliver, 193, 194
+
+  Darwin, 1, 51
+
+  Davis, H. Winter, 99
+
+  Davy, 131
+
+  Debates between Lincoln and Douglas, 100
+
+  Deere, John, 49, 131
+
+  Deering, William, 115, 116, 118, 121, 150
+
+  De Lesseps, 70
+
+  Denmark, 241
+
+  Department store, free trial given by, 80
+
+  Des Moines, Iowa, 6, 86
+
+  Dickerson, E. N., 91, 98
+
+  Diet of Worms, 156
+
+  Diseases prevalent in 1809, 7
+
+  Divider, origin of, 32, 46
+
+  Douglas, Stephen A., 91, 99, 100
+
+  Driving-wheel of Reaper, 34
+
+  Drunkenness in 1809, 7
+
+  Duluth-Superior, 215
+
+  Dunfermline, Scotland, Andrew Carnegie's birthplace, 56
+
+  Dunwoody, Minneapolis miller, 236
+
+  Duties imposed on American machines entering Europe, 136
+
+
+  E
+
+  Eager, Samuel, 58
+
+  Easter, J. D., 230
+
+  Eastern States, labor and money in (about 1839), 58
+
+  Ebrington, Lord, 127, 128
+
+  Edward, King, 132
+
+  Egypt once wheat-centre of world and present production in, 242
+
+  Egyptian tombs, wheat found in, 206
+
+  "1800-and-starve-to-death" period, 51
+
+  Elastic currency, demands for, 223
+
+  Electric engine, builder of, 95
+
+  Electrical experiments, 50
+
+  Elevators, grain, 214-217
+
+  Embargo (1809), 8-10
+
+  Emerson, Ralph, 45, 46, 98, 103, 119
+
+  Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 97
+
+  England, riots in (1809), 3, 4;
+    U. S. flag flouted by, 4;
+    at war with Scotland, 18, 19;
+      with Ireland, 19;
+    Scotch-Irish ready for war with, 20;
+    conditions in (1831), 50;
+    price of labor in, 123;
+    labor conditions and farm machinery in, 124;
+    Corn Exchange in, 218;
+    speculation in, 224;
+    consumption of bread in, 239;
+    no tariff on wheat or flour in, 240;
+    has lost place as "granary of the North," 240;
+    contrasted with Germany, 241
+
+  Erie Canal, 210, 212
+
+  Ether, use of, 69
+
+  Euphrates, valley of, 228
+
+  Europe, introduction of Reaper into, and trade with, 123-138;
+    cost of growing wheat in, 209;
+    American wheat exported to, 210;
+    wheat stored in, 217
+
+  Exchanges, grain, 218-222
+
+
+  F
+
+  Factories in 1831, 48, 49
+
+  Factory, rebuilding of, after fire, 31, 152, 182;
+    present size of, 47, 196-200;
+    in Virginia, poor transportation from, 64;
+    McCormick's plan to build his own, 67;
+    Chicago chosen as site of, 77, 137, 202;
+    largest in Chicago, 77;
+    in 1860, 106;
+    output of, 137;
+    at time of Chicago fire, 151;
+    in 1884, 188
+
+  Famine of 1846 in Ireland, 71
+
+  Famines, local, 51;
+    in Russia, 242
+
+  Farm laborers drawn by 1849 gold rush, 82, 83, 190
+
+  Farm machinery, none in 1809, 5, 11;
+    invention of, 17;
+    profession of making, 22;
+    none in 1831, 49;
+    farmers not using (about 1839), 57, 58;
+    fixed prices for, 81;
+    field test as method of marketing, 87;
+    McCormick's system of selling, 89;
+    introduction of, in England, 124;
+    sale of, boomed after 1849, 190;
+    present era of, 193-195
+
+  Farmers, increase of (1810-1820), 11, 21;
+    their opinions of early types of mowers and reapers, 43;
+    McCormick's confidence in, 80;
+    advertising among, and testimonials from, 82;
+    McCormick stood well with, 85;
+    his business methods with, 85;
+    McCormick hurt by petitions of protest from, 94;
+    credit extended to, 193;
+    farm machinery used by, 193-195
+
+  "Farmer's Register," 43
+
+  Fassler, Jerome, 119
+
+  Federal bankrupt law of 1842, 71
+
+  Field, Cyrus W., 155
+
+  Field tests, 87-89, 134, 135
+
+  Fingers on cutting blade, origin of, 33
+
+  Fire department, Chicago, 1846, 72
+
+  Fiske, John, 21
+
+  Fitch & Co., 66
+
+  FitzGerald, 1
+
+  Fixed price, Reapers sold at, 80, 81
+
+  Flesh food, 205
+
+  "Flour Cities," 234, 235
+
+  Flour, manufacture of, 234-237
+
+  Flour-mills, 234-237
+
+  Food, first necessity, 203, 204;
+    relation between population and, 204;
+    three principal articles of, 205
+
+  Foreign trade in Reapers, 123, 124, 131-138
+
+  Fowler, Miss Nettie, _see_ McCormick, Mrs. Cyrus H.
+
+  France, U. S. flag flouted by, 4;
+    price of labor in, 123;
+    no central wheat market in, 222;
+    speculation in, 225;
+    consumption of bread in, 239, 240;
+    wheat grown in, 240;
+    intensive cultivation in, 240
+
+  Frederick of Holstein, Prince, 128
+
+  Frederick, Virginia, 3
+
+  Fredericksruhe, Bismarck's estate, 136
+
+  Free library, none in 1831, 50
+
+  Free trial of Reaper, 80
+
+  French Academy of Science elected Cyrus H. McCormick a member, 136
+
+  French Revolution, 156, 204
+
+  Froude, 21
+
+  Fulton, Robert, 7, 11, 21, 53, 95
+
+  Fulton's steamboat, 7
+
+
+  G
+
+  Galatz, 216
+
+  Galena, Ill., 76
+
+  Galilee, Sea of, people who dwell by the, 237
+
+  Gammon, E. H., 116
+
+  Garrison, William Lloyd, 51
+
+  Gas not used in Chicago when Cyrus H. McCormick came, 70
+
+  Genoa, 218
+
+  Gerland, Dr., 206
+
+  Germany in 1809, 4;
+    price of labor in, 123;
+    reasons why Reapers are not made in, 136;
+    grain inspectors in, 222;
+    legislation against speculation in, 225;
+    compared with Red River Valley, 231;
+    compared with Great Britain, 240;
+    intensive cultivation in, 241
+
+  Gilkerson, David, 58
+
+  Gladstone, 2, 51
+
+  Glanders, a contagious disease, 5
+
+  Glessner, Reaper manufacturer, 103, 120
+
+  Gold put in circulation by wheat, 228, 229
+
+  Gold rush to California, 1849, 82, 190
+
+  Goodyear, 53, 95
+
+  Gorham, Marquis L., 115, 117
+
+  Grain-car, invention and use of, 211, 212
+
+  Granville, Lord, 131
+
+  Gray & Warner, 66
+
+  Great Britain, _see_ England
+
+  Greece, 225, 241
+
+  Greeley, Horace, 72, 129, 155, 167
+
+  Gutenberg, 53
+
+
+  H
+
+  Hague, The, Conferences, 233
+
+  Hall, Dr. John, 169
+
+  Hall, Patrick, 22, 23
+
+  Hamburg, 222
+
+  Hancock, candidate for President, 171
+
+  Hand-labor, Reaper invented in era of, 48, 49
+
+  "Hard Times" measures in Legislature, 71
+
+  Harding, George, 91, 99
+
+  Hargreaves, inventor of weaving machinery, 53
+
+  Harper, Henry, publisher, 21
+
+  Hart, Eli, & Co., 52
+
+  Harvest season only opportunity of testing Reaper, 61, 92
+
+  Haussemann, Baron, 1
+
+  Hayes, President, 165
+
+  Hayes-Tilden controversy, 165
+
+  Heathcoat, inventor of weaving machinery, 53
+
+  Henry, Joseph, 21, 50
+
+  Herald Square, New York, 6
+
+  Hewitt, Abram S., 155
+
+  Hite, James M., 63
+
+  Hitt, Dr. N. M., 37
+
+  Hobbs lock, 131
+
+  Hoe press, 49, 69, 131
+
+  Holland in 1809, 4;
+    legislation against speculation in, 225;
+    no tariff on wheat or flour in, 240
+
+  Holloway, D. P., 96
+
+  Holmes, 1, 51
+
+  Holmes, H. A., 115
+
+  Homestead Act of 1862, 193
+
+  Hong-Kong, flour-mills at, 243
+
+  Houghawout, John W., 40
+
+  Houghton, Lord, 1
+
+  Howe, 69, 95, 131
+
+  Hudson Bay, 213
+
+  Hulled corn, use of, 69
+
+  Hungary, speculation in, 224;
+    climate and wheat production of, 241
+
+  Hunger, evils due to, 204, 205
+
+  Huntley, Byron E., 103, 119
+
+  Hussey, Obed, 87, 88, 119
+
+  Huxley, 51
+
+  Hyatt, inventor, 95
+
+
+  I
+
+  Illinois, 64, 65, 69, 100, 151, 193
+
+  Immigrants supplied with Reapers on credit, 85, 86
+
+  India, opium traffic of, 204;
+    cost of wheat production and labor in, 209, 242;
+    railways of, 212;
+    area and population of, 242, 243;
+    wasteful methods practised in, 243
+
+  Indian Confederacy of Tecumseh, 4
+
+  Indian Massacre (1764) in Rockbridge County, Virginia, 2
+
+  Indiana wheat crop, 217
+
+  Indigo displaced by wheat in India, 242
+
+  Inspectors of grain, 222, 224
+
+  Insurance agents for wheat, 222-224
+
+  Intensive cultivation, 240, 241
+
+  _Interior, The_, 162, 163, 172
+
+  International Harvester Company, 183, 201
+
+  Inventors not encouraged, 6;
+    how treated by Congress and the Patent Office, 95;
+    rights of, as stated by Webster, 95
+
+  Iowa, 50, 63, 69, 230
+
+  Ireland, Scotch Covenanters in, 19, 21;
+    famine of 1846 in, 71
+
+  Irish immigrants in Chicago, 71
+
+  Iron furnace operated by Cyrus H. McCormick, 55-57
+
+  "Iron Man," Atkins's self-rake Reaper, 106, 107
+
+  Iron, price of, about 1833, 55, 56
+
+  Italy, no central wheat market in, 222;
+    wheat consumption and production in, 241
+
+
+  J
+
+  Jacquard, inventor of weaving machinery, 53
+
+  Jails, conditions in, 8, 9
+
+  Jamestown colony, 36
+
+  Janesville, Wis., 114
+
+  Japan, object of, in war with Russia, 204;
+    more wheat consumed and raised in, 243
+
+  Jefferson, President, 8, 10, 11, 15, 16
+
+  Jenks, Joseph, of Lynn, 5
+
+  Johnson, Reverdy, 91, 98
+
+  Johnson, Senator, of Maryland, 96
+
+  Jones, William H., 104, 120
+
+
+  K
+
+  Kansas, 51, 85, 204, 230, 231
+
+  Kansas City, 216
+
+  Kay, inventor of weaving machinery, 53
+
+  Kelly, inventor, 95
+
+  Kentucky, Scotch-Irish in, 20
+
+  Kinglake, 1
+
+  Kinzie, John, 77
+
+  Knox, John, 18, 58, 156, 157, 169
+
+  Koh-i-noor diamond, 125, 126
+
+  Krapotkin, Prince, 204
+
+  Kurtz, Jacob, 58
+
+
+  L
+
+  Land sales from 1810 to 1820, 11
+
+  Law-school, first in, Chicago, 71
+
+  Lexington Female Academy, 40
+
+  _Lexington Union_, 54
+
+  Lexington, Virginia, 37, 39, 40
+
+  Licenses to manufacturers of McCormick's Reaper, 66, 98, 112, 116,
+        120
+
+  Lilley, General, 140
+
+  Lincoln, Abraham, 1, 2, 51, 72, 91, 99, 100, 191
+
+  Lind, Jenny, 184
+
+  Liverpool, 221, 222, 225
+
+  Livingstone, 70
+
+  Locke, Sylvanus D., 112, 115
+
+  Locomotives, early, 49, 50, 192, 210
+
+  London Exhibition of 1851, 124-127, 130, 131, 190
+
+  London, no grain elevators in, 217;
+    wheat consumption of, 217;
+    Baltic Exchange in, 221, 222;
+    methods of wheat marketing in, 225
+
+  "Low-down" binder, 118
+
+  Luther, Martin, 156, 157, 173
+
+
+  M
+
+  Mackenzie, expert Reaper operator, 128
+
+  Mail-order houses, free trial given by, 80
+
+  Manchuria, wheat raised in, 243
+
+  Manitoba, Province of, 225
+
+  Mann, inventor, 108
+
+  Manny and Emerson, of Rockford, Ill., 98, 103, 119
+
+  Manufacturers licensed to build McCormick's Reapers, _see
+        under_ Licenses
+
+  Marsh, C. W., 45, 46
+
+  "Marsh Harvester," 109, 110
+
+  Martineau, Miss, 76
+
+  Mary, Queen of Scots, 18
+
+  Masses benefited by wheat trade, 229
+
+  Massie, William, 60
+
+  Mazzini, 51
+
+  McChesney, Adam, 28
+
+  McClung, Billy, 159
+
+  McClurg, Alexander C., publisher, 21
+
+  McCormick, Miss Anita, _see_ Blame, Mrs. Emmons
+
+  McCormick Centenary, 45
+
+  McCormick City, 196-202
+
+  McCormick Company, present, 98
+
+  McCormick, Cyrus Hall, 2, 3, 11-13, 16-18, 21, 22, 25-28, 30-35,
+        37-48, 51-68, 71-85, 87-105, 109-113, 115-119, 121-124,
+        129-191, 193, 195, 198-202, 208, 230, 244, 246
+
+  McCormick, Mrs. Cyrus H., 182, 183
+
+  McCormick, Cyrus H., Jr., 163, 183, 184, 201
+
+  McCormick, Davis, 29
+
+  McCormick family, 13, 17, 22-25, 64, 66, 78
+
+  McCormick, Harold, 183
+
+  McCormick home in Rockbridge County, Virginia, 2, 3, 13-16, 25,
+        35-37, 40, 48, 62
+
+  McCormick, Leander, 37, 123, 140, 143, 181, 182
+
+  "McCormick Plan," 167
+
+  McCormick, Robert, 13-17, 22, 25, 28-31, 40, 45, 104, 181
+
+  McCormick, Mrs. Robert, 23-25, 181
+
+  McCormick, Robert, son of Cyrus H. McCormick, 183
+
+  McCormick, Stanley, 183, 200
+
+  McCormick System, 243
+
+  McCormick Theological Seminary, 162, 163
+
+  McCormick, Thomas, 22
+
+  McCormick, Miss Virginia, 183
+
+  McCormick, William, 37, 123, 143, 181, 182
+
+  McDowell, Col. James, 40
+
+  Mechi, John J., 127-129, 131
+
+  Mecklenburg, Virginia, 20
+
+  Melville, Andrew, 169
+
+  Mendelssohn, 1, 51
+
+  Mexican War, Chicago organized regiment for, 71
+
+  Michigan white ash used in manufacture of Reapers, 74
+
+  Miller, Lewis, 104, 120
+
+  Milwaukee, 73
+
+  Minneapolis, 215, 235-237
+
+  Minnesota, 51, 193, 217
+
+  Mississippi River, 50
+
+  Missouri, 63
+
+  Moore, James, 40
+
+  Morgan, Junius, 131, 155
+
+  Mormons, 69
+
+  Morse, 21, 95, 131
+
+  Morton, Dr., 69
+
+  Mount Vernon flour-mill, 234
+
+  Mower, Miller's, 120
+
+
+  N
+
+  Napoleon, 4, 10
+
+  Napoleon III., Emperor, 134, 135
+
+  Nebraska, 51
+
+  New Albany, Ind., Seminary, 162
+
+  New England, 230
+
+  "New process" flour-mills, 235
+
+  New York City, 4, 6, 8, 9, 37, 52, 119, 160, 216
+
+  Newspapers in 1831, 50
+
+  Newton, John, 59
+
+  Niagara Falls, power from, 216
+
+  North Dakota, 85, 232
+
+  Northwestern Theological Seminary, 162
+
+  Norway, speculation in grain in, 225;
+    wheat production in, 241, 242
+
+  Novorossisk, Russia, grain elevator at, 216, 217
+
+
+  O
+
+  Oats stored at Chicago, 215
+
+  Odessa, 217
+
+  Ogden, William B., 75-78
+
+  Ohio, 64, 67, 242
+
+  Oklahoma, 69
+
+  Oliver, James, 49
+
+  Opium traffic, 204
+
+  Oregon, 242
+
+  Oriental method of chaffering and bargaining, vogue of, 81
+
+  Osborne, David M., 103, 120
+
+
+  P
+
+  Pacific coast, no grain elevators on, 216
+
+  Page, Prof., 95
+
+  Palissy, 53
+
+  Papers in 1831, 48
+
+  "Parcimony in Nutrition," 204
+
+  Paris Exposition (1855), 133
+
+  Paris, no grain stored in, 217;
+    Bourse in, 222
+
+  Parker, J., 63
+
+  Pasteur, 51
+
+  Patent, Cyrus H. McCormick's first, on Reaper, 59;
+    expiration of original, 91;
+    suits over extension of, 91-98
+
+  Patent Law, 91
+
+  Patent Office, 91-93, 95, 185
+
+  Patents for Reaper and mower inventions, 34, 41;
+    suits over, 45, 90-98;
+    for self-binders, 118
+
+  Patton, Dr. Francis L., 172
+
+  Paupers in period of 1809, 8
+
+  Paved streets, none in Chicago when Cyrus H. McCormick came, 70
+
+  Peabody, George, 131, 155
+
+  Peavey, F. H., 214
+
+  Pennsylvania Railroad, 158;
+    _see also_ Baggage Case
+
+  Pericles, mills in time of, 236
+
+  Peterborough, N. H., 50
+
+  Photography, 49
+
+  Pillsbury, Minneapolis miller, 236
+
+  Pittsburg, Pa., 74
+
+  Platform on Reaper, origin of, 33
+
+  Plow, hillside, 45, 81
+
+  Plow, iron, thought to poison soil, 5;
+    invention of, 49
+
+  Plow, self-sharpening, 45
+
+  Poe, 1, 51
+
+  Police force of Chicago in 1847, 70
+
+  Polish female laborers, 197
+
+  Pompeii, bread found in ruins of, 234
+
+  Poorhouses used as storehouses for wheat, 230
+
+  Portugal, 241
+
+  Post-office, Chicago, in 1847, 70
+
+  Postage in 1831, 50
+
+  Postage stamps, 70
+
+  Postal Union, 233
+
+  "Prairie Ground," American display at London Exhibition of 1851, 126
+
+  Prairies, need of Reapers to harvest on the, 65, 73;
+    uncultivated before advent of Reaper, 67
+
+  Prairie States, ten, 230
+
+  Presbyterian Church, 158, 185, 186
+
+  Princeton University, 172
+
+  Protestant Reformation, 156, 185
+
+  Proudhon, 1, 51
+
+  Publicity, Cyrus H. McCormick believed in policy of, 81
+
+  Puddling-furnace, 17
+
+  Pyramids, wheat pictured on, 206
+
+
+  R
+
+  Railway from Chicago to Galena, 76
+
+  Railways in 1831, 49;
+    extending westward, 67;
+    none reaching Chicago when Cyrus H. McCormick came, 70;
+    Chicago becomes a centre for, 73;
+    preceded by Reaper in West, 192;
+    distribution of food-stuffs by, 210, 211;
+    building of trans-continental, 211;
+    across Siberia, 212;
+    in western Canada, Argentina, and India, 212;
+    as wheat-conveyors, 212;
+    converging at Chicago, 214;
+    in Prairie States, 230
+
+  Ready-to-eat foods, 237
+
+  Reaper, McCormick, 13, 17, 28-48, 52-67, 73-76, 78-86, 88, 89, 92,
+        95-98, 100, 103-108, 110-113, 115, 117, 119-124, 126-135, 137,
+        138, 147, 166, 169, 170, 188-193, 195, 196, 200-203, 208, 210,
+        212, 214, 226, 227, 230, 243-246
+
+  Reapers of all makes, total annual production of, 209
+
+  Reciprocating blade, origin of, 32
+
+  Red River Valley, 194, 231, 232
+
+  Reed, Col. Samuel, 40
+
+  Reel, origin of, 33, 46
+
+  Republican party, 100
+
+  Revolutionary War, 3, 20
+
+  Rice, 205, 212, 242
+
+  Riots in 1837, 52
+
+  "River and Harbor Convention," Chicago, 71, 72
+
+  Rochester, N. Y., 234
+
+  Rockbridge County, Virginia, McCormick farm in, 2
+
+  Rotterdam, wheat stored in, 217
+
+  Roumania, 242
+
+  Roumanian cities use concrete grain elevators, 216
+
+  Rubber manufacture, inventor of, 53
+
+  Ruff, John, 38, 40
+
+  Russia, farm laborers received no wages in, 123;
+    in war with Japan, 204;
+    development of, 228;
+    wheat production, consumption, and exportation in, 242;
+    famines in, 242
+
+  Russian army in Sweden (1809), 4
+
+  Russo-Japanese War, 204
+
+
+  S
+
+  Sailors become farmers, 11
+
+  St. Louis, Mo., 73, 216
+
+  Sales system of Cyrus H. McCormick, 47, 78 _et seq._
+
+  Saratoga, N. Y., 7
+
+  Sault Ste. Marie Canal, 210
+
+  Sauvage, inventor of screw propeller, 53
+
+  School attended by Cyrus H. McCormick, 26
+
+  Scotch-Irish, the, 17-23, 25, 29
+
+  Scotland, 18, 74
+
+  Screw propeller, inventor of, 53
+
+  Scribner, Charles, publisher, 21
+
+  Scythe, invention of, 5
+
+  Secession, War of, 100, 166-168, 191, 192
+
+  Self-binders, 110-115, 117, 118, 121, 208-210, 238
+
+  Self-rake Reapers, 106, 107, 110, 114
+
+  Self-sizing device, Gorham's invention of, 117
+
+  Seneca, quoted, 154
+
+  Serfs, 15, 124
+
+  Servia, conditions in (1809), 4
+
+  Sèvres porcelain, 53
+
+  Seward, William H., 91, 98, 155
+
+  Sewerage, none in Chicago when Cyrus H. McCormick came, 70
+
+  Sewing-machine, 17, 49, 69, 131, 210
+
+  Seymour, Morgan & Co., 66, 116, 119, 120
+
+  Sheffield steel used in manufacture of Reapers, 74
+
+  Sherwood farm, near Elgin, Ill., 111
+
+  Shipping, Chicago becomes centre for, 73, 215
+
+  Siberia, Russia seeking seaport for, 204;
+    wheat crop of, 209, 217;
+    railway across, 212;
+    development of, 228;
+    might take lesson from Red River Valley, 231
+
+  Sickle, its use in 1809, 5
+
+  Side-draught construction of Reaper, 33, 34
+
+  Side-delivery machine, first practical, 46
+
+  Skulls, pyramid of, 4
+
+  Slaves, work of, 191
+
+  Smith, Abraham, 60, 62
+
+  Smith, Joshua, 57
+
+  Smith, Sidney, 130
+
+  Social conditions in 1809, 7-9
+
+  Solomon, 206
+
+  South Carolina, 97
+
+  Spain, in 1809, 4;
+    wheat imported by, 241
+
+  Spaulding, George H., 115
+
+  Speculators, grain, 224, 225
+
+  Spencer, Herbert, 51
+
+  Spring, Charles, 143
+
+  Stanton, Edwin M., 91, 99
+
+  Staunton, Virginia, 2, 40, 57, 58, 60
+
+  Steamboat, invention of, 210
+
+  Steele, Eliza, 37
+
+  Steele, John, 37, 40
+
+  Steele's Tavern, Virginia, 37
+
+  Stewart, A. T., 21, 81
+
+  Stock-yards not located at Chicago when Cyrus H. McCormick came, 70
+
+  Storage of wheat, 213, 214
+
+  Suez Canal, 70, 210
+
+  Sulina, 217, 218
+
+  Surveying, Cyrus H. McCormick's study of, 27
+
+  Sweden in 1809, 4;
+    speculation in grain in, 224;
+    wheat production in, 241, 242
+
+  Switzerland, 225, 242
+
+
+  T
+
+  Taylor, Dr., 40
+
+  Taylor, Hon. William, 39, 40
+
+  Tecumseh, 4
+
+  Tehuantepec Inter-Ocean Railroad, 144
+
+  Telegraph, 49, 50, 70, 131, 210
+
+  Telephone, 210
+
+  Temperance society at Saratoga, 7
+
+  Tennessee, Scotch-Irish in, 20;
+    first Reaper purchased in, 63;
+    comparison of grain production of, 242
+
+  Tennyson, 1, 51
+
+  Texas, Scotch-Irish in, 20;
+    not in the Union in 1831, 51
+
+  Theatres in early Chicago, 70, 71
+
+  Thompson, J. Edgar, 101
+
+  Tilden, 76, 165
+
+  _Times_, Chicago, 166
+
+  _Times_, London, 130
+
+  Town and city dwellers, proportion of, 195, 196
+
+  Town laborers become farmers, 11
+
+  Trans-Siberian railway, 212
+
+  Transportation charges on wheat, 213
+
+  Transportation of Reapers from Virginia farm, 64
+
+  _Tribune_, of Chicago, founded, 71
+
+  Trolley, introduction of, 210
+
+  Tunis, 242
+
+  Turks in Servia (1809), 4
+
+  Tutwiler, Colonel, 63
+
+  Twine-mill in McCormick factory, Chicago, 197
+
+  Twine self-binders, 115-118, 121
+
+  Tyre, King of, 206
+
+  Tyrol, riot in (1809), 4
+
+
+  U
+
+  Ulster, county of, 19, 21, 22
+
+  Union Army in Rockbridge County, Virginia, 36
+
+  Union Pacific Railway, 144
+
+  United States, in 1809, 4 _et seq._;
+    Scotch-Irish in, 18-21;
+    papers printed in (1831), 48;
+    railways in (1831), 49;
+    extent and development of (1831), 50;
+    Buffalo chief grain market of, 69;
+    London Exposition display from, 126;
+    inventions credited to, 130;
+    reasons why Reapers were invented in, 136, 201;
+    McCormick's place in history of, 153;
+    production of wheat in, 188, 189;
+    manufacturing and labor in (1884), 189;
+    Reaper little used in, until after 1849, 190;
+    Reaper appreciated in, 191;
+    industrial supremacy of, 195, 229;
+    harvesting machinery industry in, 201;
+    wheat crop of, 209;
+    cost of production of wheat in, 209;
+    railway across, 211;
+    grain inspection in, 222;
+    speculation in, 225;
+    cultivation of semi-arid land in, 228;
+    consumption of bread in, 239;
+    area and population of, compared with India, 242, 243
+
+
+  V
+
+  Van Buren, Martin, 76, 178
+
+  Vermont hay crop, relative value of, 5
+
+  Victoria, Queen, 125, 132
+
+  Virchow, 51
+
+  "Virginia Reapers," 64
+
+  Virginia, Scotch-Irish in, 20;
+    main wheat State in 1831, 51, 193;
+    supremacy passing to Ohio, 67
+
+
+  W
+
+  Wages of harvesters at time of introduction of Reaper, 38
+
+  Wallace, Andrew, 40
+
+  Wallace, Henry, 106, 107
+
+  _Wallace's Farmer_, 106
+
+  Walton, N. Y., 76
+
+  Warder Reaper manufacturer, 103, 120
+
+  Warehouses at Reaper agencies, 83, 84
+
+  Warfare, expenses of modern, 233
+
+  Washburn, William D., 235, 236
+
+  Washington, George, 5, 6, 11, 15, 17, 20, 81, 234
+
+  Washington State, 238
+
+  Watson, Peter H., 91, 99
+
+  Watt, 131
+
+  Weaving machinery, inventors of, 53
+
+  Webster, Daniel, 15, 76, 95, 164
+
+  Weed, Thurlow, 72
+
+  West, orders for Reapers from the, 63;
+    transportation to the, 64;
+    McCormick visits the, 65;
+    need of quicker method of cutting grain in the, 65, 66;
+    Chicago helped by use of Reaper in, 73;
+    McCormick's policy developed the, 86;
+    Reaper preceded railway in the, 192;
+    wheat crop of the, 193;
+    railways in the, 211;
+    Reaper advance-machine of civilization in, 227
+
+  Wet grain, adaptation of the Reaper to cut, 33, 61, 62
+
+  "Whaleback" grain ships, 210
+
+  Wheat, 51, 67, 69, 70, 73, 188-196, 201, 203, 205 _et seq._
+
+  Wheat Congress, international, 233
+
+  Wheat-ships, 210-213
+
+  Whiteley, William N., 45, 46, 120, 150
+
+  Whitney, Eli, 52, 97, 191
+
+  Whittier, 51
+
+  Willmoth, improver of battleship turret, 95
+
+  Wilson family from Ayrshire, Scotland, 86
+
+  Wilson, Hon. James, 86, 87, 192
+
+  Winnipeg Grain Exchange, 225
+
+  Wire self-binders displaced by twine self-binders, 115-117
+
+  Wisconsin, 50, 63, 114
+
+  Withington, Charles B., 109-115
+
+  Wood, Jethro, 49, 53
+
+  Wood, Walter A., 103, 112, 120
+
+  Woodworth, inventor, 95
+
+  World's Fair, Chicago, 1893, 124
+
+  Wright, Joseph A., 134
+
+  Written guarantees given with McCormick Reapers, 79
+
+
+  Y
+
+  Yellow fever in the McCormick family, 16
+
+
+
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+Simple typographical errors were corrected.
+
+Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant
+preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.
+
+Page 91: "Beverdy Johnson" corrected to "Reverdy Johnson."
+
+Page 256: "see Blaine" corrected to "see Blame."
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41953 ***