The Romance of the Reaper Part 10

From such beginnings the harvester has advanced, to make in Russia the greatest conquests it has achieved anywhere. More business is now being done in the land of the Czar than was done with the whole world in 1885.

One recent s.h.i.+pment, so large as to break all records, was carried from Chicago to New York on 3,000 freight-cars, and transferred to a chartered fleet of nine steam-s.h.i.+ps, $5,000,000 worth of hunger-insurance.

During the Russo-j.a.panese War a striking incident occurred that showed the respect of the government for American harvesters. Several troop-trains that were on their way to the front were suddenly side-tracked, to make way for a long freight train, loaded with heavy boxes. The war generals and grand dukes in charge of the troops were furious. Why should their trains be pushed to one side and delayed, to expedite a mere consignment of freight? They telegraphed their indignation to St. Petersburg, and received a reply from Count Witte. "The freight train must pa.s.s," he said.

"It is loaded with American harvesters. _It means bread._"

As a result of this att.i.tude, there are now some provinces in southern Russia where not even Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson would find much fault with the farming. I have secured the figures for the Province of Kuban, in the Caucasus. Here there are 3,500 thras.h.i.+ng-machines, 5,000 grain-drills, 37,000 harvesters, 50,000 harrows, 70,000 grain-cleaners, and 65,000 cultivators. This is a region where, one generation ago, were only the wooden plough, the sickle, and the flail.

There is, to be sure, still a dense ma.s.s of Russians whose yearly habit it is to wait until their wheat is dead ripe, then in a few days of frantic labour to cut down half of it with sickles, leaving the rest to rot in the fields. And in one Caucasian province, richer in its soil than Iowa, it is the custom of the wandering natives to move every three years to a new tract of land, in order to avoid the trouble of fertilising the soil.

"I have seen farmers ploughing in Russia with a piece of board," said one agent. "And I have seen their thras.h.i.+ng done by the feet of oxen." But the new idea has been planted and is growing. "Russia is the land of to-morrow," said another expert. "We have been educating the farmers there for seventeen years, yet we have only scratched the surface. We who have lived among the Russian peasants expect great things from them."

They have succeeded, then, in their campaign for the supremacy of the American reaper--the Reaper Kings who enlisted the crowned heads and the n.o.bility of Europe in their service. By 1899 Europe was a customer at our farm machinery factories to the extent of twelve millions a year. This figure was doubled in 1906, and is now increasing by leaps and bounds. All told, this one industry has brought us $150,000,000 of foreign money in less than fifty years.

Europe has sent us emigrants--twenty-five million in the past seventy-five years. But we have more than replaced them with labour-saving farm machinery. There were in 1907 as many American harvesters in Europe as would do the work of eleven million men.

If our foreign trade goes ahead at its present rate of speed, we shall soon have Europe hopelessly in our debt, in this exchange of men for machinery. In the past four years, for instance, Europe has sent us less than four million emigrants, but we have sent to Europe, in that time, enough agricultural automata to equal the labour of five million men.

And this means much to Europe. What with her 4,500,000 soldiers and her 4,000,000 public officials, she has to serve more than twenty-five million meals a day to men who are non-producers. She has to clothe and house these governmental millions and their families. How could she do this if it were not for the eleven million man-power of her American harvesters, and the half billion bushels of reaper-wheat that she can buy from other countries?

France must have our harvesters because she has been short of men since the wars of Napoleon. She has half a million soldiers and nine-tenths of a million officials. Even now, with harvesters clicking merrily in all their largest grain-fields, she and Germany cannot feed themselves. Spain at one time exported wheat, but at present is buying 10,000,000 bushels a year.

England grows less than a quarter as much as will feed her people. And Russia would be famine-swept from end to end, in spite of her 30,000,000 farmers and her illimitable acres, if she had to depend wholly upon the sickle and the scythe.

But the story is by no means ended with Europe. To-day the sun never sets and the season never closes for American harvesters. They are reaping the fields of Argentina in January, Upper Egypt in February, East India in March, Mexico in April, China in May, Spain in June, Iowa in July, Canada in August, Sweden in September, Norway in October, South Africa in November, and Burma in December. It is always harvest somewhere. The ripple of the ripened grain goes round the world and the American harvester follows it.

Even from this incomplete list one may begin to understand how tremendous is the task that the International Harvester Company has a.s.sumed in undertaking to cater to the farmers of fifty countries--to adapt itself to their various customs.

In Holland, for instance, where the gra.s.s is short and thick, a mower must cut as close as a barber's clippers; and in Denmark, where moss grows under the gra.s.s, it must cut so high as to leave the moss untouched. The careful Germans of Wisconsin will buy a light harvester, such as the "Milwaukee"; but in Argentina a light machine would be racked into junk in a season. The Argentinians, having raised cattle for generations, rush to the harvest in cowboy fas.h.i.+on. It is the joy of their lives to hitch six or eight horses to a big "header," crack the long whip, and dash at full gallop over the rough ground.

There are small horses in Russia, big ones in France, oxen in India, and camels in Siberia, and the harvesters must be adapted to each. Certain backward countries demand a reaper without a reel. Australia must have a monster machine called a "stripper," which combs off the heads of the grain. California and Argentina, because of their dry climate, can use "headers," a combination of reaper and thras.h.i.+ng-machine. And so the American harvester has become a citizen of the world, adopting the national dress of each country.

The men who are dealing hand to hand with these problems are no longer the Reaper Kings, personally introducing their harvesters through royalty and n.o.bility. These have been succeeded by an army of fifteen hundred American harvester experts. They are all salaried, most of them by the "International"; and their work is to put the farmers of the world to school. They are the teachers of a stupendous kindergarten. As an example of the rapidity with which they are sometimes able to teach, take the Philippines. Nine years ago the Filipinos spent nothing whatever for farming machinery; in 1905 they bought $90,000 worth. Even yet, however, they do not raise enough rice to feed themselves; and although half of them are farmers, only one-twentieth of their land is cultivated.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BISMARCK HAVING HIS FIRST VIEW OF AN AMERICAN SELF-BINDER]

"Many of our agents are now living in Siberia with their families," said C. S. Funk, the General Manager of the International. "They are teaching the mujiks to grow wheat and harvest it. We have similar missionaries in South Africa and South America and most of the countries of the world.

Some of them have gone as far as water and rail would carry them, and have then crossed the mountains with their machinery on the backs of mules, so that they might teach the natives how to farm on the American plan. All told, we have more than a thousand such missionaries in foreign countries."

In Chicago, I met two of the leaders who are in control of this army of teachers. One was a strong-faced young Illinoisan named Couchman, who handles several nations from Hamburg; and the other was a courteous commercial diplomat named La Porte, who supervises France, Spain, Italy, and Northern Africa from his office in Paris. Each is in charge of several hundred American mechanics, who are exiled from home for the sake of our harvester trade.

No renown comes to these men. No medals are pinned upon their coats. They are only one regiment in the great pay-envelope army of American mechanics. But they are on the firing-line of the greatest battle against ignorance and famine that has ever been fought. They are the pioneers of the new farmer. To show the world's peasantry how to work with brains and machinery, to bring them up to the American farmer's level--that is their task. What could be more essentially American, or more profitable to the human race?

Many European farmers, of course, are easily up to the Kansas level; but the vast majority have been mistaught that the path of the farmer must forever be watered with sweat. Many of them are so cramped by the shackles of drudgery that they cannot even conceive of the value of leisure.

"Why don't you use a scythe? Then you could cut twice as much," said Horace Greeley, who was deeply interested in farm machinery and agriculture, to a French peasant. The peasant scratched his head. This was a new idea.

"Because," he answered stodgily, "I haven't got twice as much to cut."

The quick, handy ways of American farmers are seldom found in other countries. A Swiss will put a big stone upon a land-roller, to give it weight, and then walk behind it. To ride on the roller himself does not occur to him. A South German will usually take the reel off his reaper, and handle the grain by hand. Operating five levers is too great a tax upon his mind. An Argentinian wastes his pesos by hiring drivers--one on the seat and another astride one of the horses.

"A Spanish farmer sent for me on one occasion," an expert told me, "and I found him in great trouble. He had bought a new harvester, and put it together _inside_ his barn, which had only one narrow door. He had to choose between taking the machine to pieces and pulling his barn down."

Next to Russia, in the list of countries that this army of experts has won to the harvester, comes Canada. Like the trek of the Boers into the Transvaal, and of the j.a.panese into Korea, there has been a trek of three hundred thousand American farmers into Western Canada--into the new forty-bushel-to-the-acre wheat-land of Alberta. Most of these emigrants were Minnesotans and Dakotans; therefore they are not poor. They carried two hundred millions across the border. And they are now uprearing a harvester-based civilisation in a vast region that will probably some day have a population of twenty-five million people.

That billiard-table country--Argentina--stands third among the foreign patrons of our Harvester Kings. As a wheat nation it is little older than Alberta. It was only about eighteen years ago, after three centuries of revolution, that Argentina settled down to raise wheat and be good.

To-day the Argentinians raise more wheat than Germany, and their country has become a land of milk and honey. It is a South American Minnesota, but eleven times larger, made fertile by the slow-moving Platte River--a hundred miles wide when it reaches the sea--which moves through its plains like an irrigating ca.n.a.l.

The fourth in rank of our harvester buyers is Australia, which is now sending a yearly tribute of more than a million to the International Company. This profitable reciprocity between Chicago and the island continent was greatly furthered when the International bought the sixty-five-acre Osborne plant, at Auburn, New York, which had been remarkably successful in its Australian, as well as its French, trade.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AN AMERICAN HARVESTER AT WORK IN ARGENTINA]

Ride along any of the historic roadways of the world and you will see the painted automata from Chicago. "On the road to Mandalay," and along the Appian Way, and the trail of death that marks the flight of Napoleon from Moscow, you will find these indispensable machines. They are cutting gra.s.s and wheat on the battle-fields of Austerlitz and Sedan and Waterloo.

Scutari, near the Adriatic Sea, bars out foreign machinery by law; but Roumania has been using our reapers and mowers for more than fifteen years. Once in a while a reaper is sent over the Andes on muleback; or into Central China via the wheelbarrow express. And now that there are irrigation pumps at the base of the Sphinx, that ancient female, who has been staring at sand-hills for three thousand years may soon look across yellow fields in which American binders are clicking cheerfully. They are for sale, too, in the holy cities of Rome, Jerusalem, Mecca, and Benares--almost everywhere but Lhasa, the sacred capital of Tibet. So far as I can learn, not one harvesting machine of any kind has entered that land of mystery and superst.i.tion. In a few other countries harvesters are not numerous. Very few have been sold or will be in j.a.pan. Here are the smallest farms in the world. A fork and a pair of scissors would seem much more appropriate implements for such tiny plots. Take the whole arable area of j.a.pan, multiply it by three, and you will have only the state of Illinois.

In India, where a family "lives" on fifty cents a week, where one acre makes three farms and an entire farm outfit means no more than a ten-dollar bill, a harvester is still almost as great a curiosity as an Indian tiger is to us. One of the harvester agents told me of a rich Hindoo who bought a complete set of American farm machines, and had them set in a row near his house, apparently regarding them only as curios from a foreign land. They have never been used, and a mob of starving labourers reap his grain by hand within sight of his idle machines.

There are few harvesters in Asia Minor, where farmers live almost like groundhogs--a whole family in one windowless hut of burnt clay. And there are fewer still in Africa, where five million idle acres of fertile land will some day be made to work for the human race.

But since the formation of the big Chicago company, every foreign nation is being reached and taught to throw away its reaping-hooks and to cut its grain in a civilised way. There is now practically no great city anywhere in which a farmer cannot buy one of the handsome red harvesters that have done so much to give a "full dinner-pail" to the civilized nations.

"The world is mine oyster," says the International Harvester Company. In the first five years of its career, it has sent to foreign countries 920,000 harvesters of all sorts, for which it has been paid $70,000,000.

It has doubled its foreign sales and now makes two-third of the harvesters of the world.

What with the profits, and the big orders, and the medals, and the appreciation of monarchs, the Harvester men have found their foreign trade from the first a business _de luxe_. In fact, one of the princ.i.p.al reasons why they quit fighting was that they might handle this world commerce in an organised way.

To-day they are not battling with one another on the royal farms of Europe, like gladiators who make sport for emperors. There is more business and less adventure. They have a geography of their own, and have divided the whole world into eight provinces. The "Domestic" Department of the International comprises the United States and Canada and is managed from Chicago. Central Europe, with Russia and Siberia, has its headquarters at Hamburg; Western Europe and Northern Africa are handled from Paris; Great Britain is directed from London; South America from Buenos Ayres; Australia from Melbourne; New Zealand from Christchurch; and Mexico from Mexico City. Such is the commercial empire that has its seat at the foot of Lake Michigan.

Other countries can sell us automobiles and bric-a-brac. They may even get over our tariff wall with hay and cotton and steel and lumber. But they have never dared to try to sell us farm machinery. Every harvester in the United States was made at home.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GATHERING IN A FINLAND HARVEST]

Either one of the two immense harvester plants of Chicago is larger than the combined plants of England, Germany, and France. France, recently, made a brilliant dash toward success in the harvester business. M.

Racquet, a journalist, built a great factory at Amiens. He bought the best American machinery. He allied himself with a savings bank and sold stock to the farmers. He was protected by a high tariff. But, alas for his eloquent prospectus! His selling force was too small. His American machinery made more reapers in a month than he could sell in a year. And in 1904 he fell into bankruptcy under a debt of ten million francs.

An American harvester is practically above compet.i.tion in foreign countries, and commands an exceptional price. As for tariffs, there is a wide open door in Great Britain, Holland, Norway, Bulgaria, Brazil, Servia, and South Germany. But there is a toll-gate fee of $25 per harvester in Hungary, and $20 in France; and for lack of a commercial treaty, the tax has lately been increased in part of Germany, in Hungary, Switzerland, and Rumania. The harvester companies feel that they have a substantial grievance against a government that allows them to be not only hazed and harried at home by tariffs on raw material, but driven out of foreign markets as well. "The whole world is doing business on a single street to-day," said one harvester maker; "but the trouble is that there are two hundred tariff toll-gates along that street."

In self-defence, against these tariffs, the "International" has been forced to build two foreign factories, one in Canada and one in Sweden.

The Swedish plant is a small affair as yet, making rakes and mowers only; but the Canadian enterprise supports one-tenth of the city of Hamilton, and holds about half the Canadian trade. Its worst vexation, so far as I can tell from a hasty visit, is a lack of Canadian raw materials. Its chains, bolts, nuts, and canvas ap.r.o.ns come from Chicago, its steel and coal from Pittsburg, and three-fourths of its lumber from the Southern states.

The country that perhaps most disturbs the dreams of our harvester companies, is as far as possible from being one of the great nations. It is scarcely a country at all--only a sc.r.a.p of coral reef uprisen at the foot of Mexico--Yucatan. Yet this is the land on which the United States depends for binder twine. Manila fibre we can now get from our new co-Americans--the Filipinos; but there is never enough of it to supply the millions of self-binders. Only sisal-hemp yields abundantly enough. And Yucatan is the only spot in the world where sisal can be grown in commercial quant.i.ties.

Yucatan is smaller than South Carolina, with not quite the population of Milwaukee. It was once the poorest of the Central American states; but since the arrival of the twine-binder it has become the richest. It sells from fifteen to eighteen million dollars' worth of sisal a year, and the United States buys it all. _Three-fourths of this money is clear profit; and it is an almost incredible fact that the forty Sisal Kings of Yucatan have a larger net income than the owners of the immense International Harvester Company._