The Romance of the Reaper Part 11

Roughly speaking, the American farmer pays Yucatan $12,000,000 a year for string--mere string, which is used once and then flung away. It is an extortion and a waste, besides being the only un-American factor in the whole harvester business.

How can we save these twelve millions and completely Americanise the trade? This is a problem that William Deering toiled at for twenty years.

The Harvester Company has a solution. I saw it at St. Paul--a new factory, which twists twine from flax. A farmer's son named George H. Ellis has found a quick and cheap way to clean the flax fibre; and at the time I visited the factory there were more than three hundred workers at the spindles. Two million pound of the twine were sold in 1906, so that the enterprise is no longer an experiment. This means, probably, that the farmer of the future will grow his own twine. Instead of yielding tribute to the forty Sisal Kings of Yucatan, he will pay no more than the charges of the railroad and the factory. The flax will be his own.

Yucatan is the only cheap-labour country that has been enriched by the harvester. Elsewhere it is the rule that the common people of the nation must reach a certain high level before the harvester trade can begin.

Where human labour has little value, it is plainly not worth saving.

[Ill.u.s.tration: IN THE ANCIENT FIELDS OF ALGIERS]

For this reason, the harvester is the best barometer of civilisation. It cannot go where slavery and barbarism exist. It will not enter a land where the luxury of the city is built on the plunder of the men and women who work in the fields. Whoever operates a harvester must not only be intelligent: he must be free.

To hundreds of millions of foreigners, the United States is known as "the country where the reapers come from." They realise, too, that farm machinery represents our type of genius, that it springs out of our national life, and comes from us as inevitably as song comes from Italy or silk from France.

Why? Read the history of the United States. This was the first country, so far as we can know, where men of high intelligence went to work _en ma.s.se_ upon the soil, and under such conditions as compelled them to develop a high degree of mechanical skill. The pioneer American farmer had to be his own carpenter and blacksmith. He had to build his own house and make his own harness. Consequently, before this Farmers' Republic was two generations old, the reaper was born in the little workshop behind the barn.

In the Old World every occupation stood alone and aloof. The mechanics knew nothing of the farm and the farmer knew nothing of the workshop.

"Every man to his trade," said Europe, Asia, and Africa. But in the New World, where trades and cla.s.ses and nationalities were flung together in a heterogenous jumble, there sprang up a race of handy, inventive farmers, set free from the habits and prejudices of their fathers. They were the first body of men who were competent to solve the problem of farm machinery.

And so, the American harvester is much more than a handy device for cutting grain. It is the machine that makes democracy possible. It reaches the average man, and more--it pushes the ladder of prosperity down so far that even the farm labourer can grasp the lowest rung and climb. _It has become one of our national emblems. It is as truly and as exclusively American as the Stars and Stripes or the Declaration of Independence._

CHAPTER V

THE HARVESTER AND THE AMERICAN FARMER

If the American Farmer went out of business this year he could clean up thirty thousand million dollars. And he would have to sell his farm on credit; for there is not enough money in the whole world to pay him half his price.

Talk of the money-mad Trusts! They might have reason to be mad if they owned the farms, instead of their watered stock. When we remember that the American Farmer earns enough in seventeen days to buy out Standard Oil, and enough in fifty days to wipe Carnegie and the Steel Trust off the industrial map, the story of the trusts seems like the "short and simple annals of the poor."

One American harvest would buy the kingdom of Belgium, king and all. Two would buy Italy. Three would buy Austria-Hungary. And five, at a spot cash price, would take Russia from the Czar.

Talk of swollen fortunes! With the setting of every sun, the money-box of the American Farmer bulges with the weight of twenty-four new millions.

Only the most athletic imagination can conceive of such a torrent of wealth.

Place your finger on the pulse of your wrist and count the heart-beats; one--two--three--four. With every four of those quick throbs, day and night, a thousand dollars clatters into the gold-bin of the American Farmer.

How incomprehensible it would seem to Pericles, who saw Greece in her Golden Age, if he could know that the yearly revenue of his country is now no more than one day's pay for the men who till the soil of this infant Republic!

Or, how it would amaze a resurrected Christopher Columbus, if he were told that the revenues of Spain and Portugal are not nearly as much as the earnings of the American Farmer's Hen!

Merely the crumbs that drop from the Farmer's table (otherwise known as agricultural exports), have brought him in enough of foreign money since 1892, so that he could, if he wished, settle the railway problem once for all, by buying every foot of railroad in the United States.

Such is our New Farmer--a man for whom there is no name in any language.

He is as far above the farmer of the story-books, as a 1908 touring-car is above a jinrikisha. Instead of being an ignorant hoe-man in a barn-yard world, he gets the news by daily paper, daily mail, and telephone; and incidentally publishes seven hundred trade journals of his own. Instead of being a moneyless peasant, he pays the interest on the mortgage with the earnings of four days, and his taxes with the earnings of a week. Even this is less of an expense than it seems, for he borrows the money from himself, out of his own banks, and spends the bulk of the tax money around his own properties.

Farming for a business, not for a living--this is the _motif_ of the New Farmer. He is a commercialist--a man of the twentieth century. He works as hard as the Old Farmer did, but in a higher way. He uses the four M's--Mind, Money, Machinery and Muscle; but as little of the latter as possible.

Neither is he a Robinson Crusoe of the soil, as the Old Farmer was. His hermit days are over; he is a man among men. The railway, the trolley, the automobile and the top buggy have transformed him into a suburbanite. In fact, his business has become so complex and many-sided, that he touches civilisation at more points and lives a larger life than if he were one of the atoms of a crowded city.

All American farmers, of course, are not of the New variety. The country, like the city, has its slums. But after having made allowance for exceptions, it is still true that the United States is the native land of the New Farmer. He is the most typical human product that this country has produced, and the most important; for, in spite of its egotistical cities, the United States is still a farm-based nation.

There could be no cloth-mills without the wool and cotton of the farm; no sugar factories without beets; no flour-mills without wheat; no beef-packing industry without cattle. The real business that is now swinging the whole nation ahead is not the ping-pong traffic of the Stock Exchanges, but the steady output of twenty millions a day from the fields and barn-yards. If this farm output were to be cut off, the towering skysc.r.a.pers would fall and the gay palace-hotels would be as desolate as the temple of Thebes.

The brain-working farmer is the man behind prosperity. That is the Big Fact of recent American history. It is he who pays the bills and holds up the national structure in the whirlwind hour of panic. Last year, for instance, while banks were tumbling, the non-hysterical farmer was quietly gathering in a crop that was worth three times all the bank capital in the United States; and since 1902 he and his soil have produced as much new wealth as would support Uncle Sam, at his present rate of living, for fifty years.

What was called "McKinley Prosperity" was really created by the agricultural boom of 1897. There had been a general crop failure in Europe, and the price of wheat had soared above a dollar a bushel. Other nations paid us twelve hundred millions for farm products; and this unparalleled inpouring of foreign money made us the richest and busiest nation in the world.

The supreme fact about the American Farmer is that he has always been just as intelligent and important as anyone else in the Republic. He put fourteen of his sons in the White House; and he did his full share of the working and fighting and thinking and inventing, all the way down from George Was.h.i.+ngton to James Wilson.

He climbed up by self-help. He got no rebates, nor franchises, nor subsidies. The free land that was given him was worthless until he took it; and he has all along been more hindered than helped by the meddling of public officials.

His best friend has been the maker of farm-machinery. But this is a family matter. Four-fifths of the Harvester Kings were farmers' sons; and the biggest harvester factory is only a development of the small workshop that always stood beside the barn. There are no two men who are more closely linked together by the ties of blood and business than the farmer and the man who makes his labour-saving machines. Neither one can hurt the other without doing injury to himself.

The inventor of the modern plough, Jethro Wood, was a wealthy Quaker farmer of New York--a man of such masterful intelligence as to count Clay and Webster among his friends. The late James Oliver, and David Bradley, one of his greatest compet.i.tors, were born and bred near the furrowed soil.

McCormick built his first reaper in a blacksmith shop on a farm. So did John F. Sieberling, William N. Whiteley, Lewis Miller and C. W. Marsh. And the man who owned the first of the reaper factories, Dayton S. Morgan, grew up amid the stumps of a New York farm.

The American Farmer has always grown _ideas_, as well as corn and potatoes. That is the secret of his prosperity. It was out in the wheat-fields where the idea of a self-binder flashed upon the brain of John F. Appleby; where Jacob Miller learned to improve the thresher and George Esterley to build the header and Joseph F. Glidden to invent barb-wire.

Before 1850 there was some progress among farmers, but it was as slow as mola.s.ses in Alaska. They were free and independent, and little else. They had poor homes, poor farms, poor implements.

Then came the gold-rush to California. What this event did for farmers and the world can scarcely be exaggerated. It opened up the prairies, fed the hungry banks with money, lured the farm labourers westward, and compelled the farmers to use machinery.

Three years later the Crimean War sent the price of wheat soaring, and the farmers had a jubilee of prosperity. Away went the log-cabin, the ox-cart, the grain-cradle, and the flail. In came the frame house, the spring buggy, the reaper, and the thresher. The farmers began to buy labour-saving devices. Better still, they began to invent them.

There is one farm-bred man, named R. C. Haskins, in the Harvester Building in Chicago, who, in his thirty years of salesmans.h.i.+p, has supervised the selling of $275,000,000 worth of harvesters to American farmers. And as for the amount of money represented by our farm machinery of all kinds, now in use, it is very nearly a billion dollars--a total that no other nation can touch.

To measure American Farmers by the census is now an outgrown method, for the reason that each farmer works with the power of five men. The farm has become a factory. Four-fifths of its work is done by machinery, which explains how we can produce one-fifth of the wheat of the world, half of the cotton, and three-fourths of the corn, although we are only six per cent. of the human race.

The genie who built Aladdin's palace in a night was the champion hustler of the fairy tale countries. But he was not so tremendously superior to the farm labourer who takes a can of gasolene and cuts fifty cords of wood in a day, or to the man who milks a herd of sixty cows in two hours, by machinery.

To-day farming is not a drudgery. Rather it is a race--an exciting rivalry between the different States. For years Illinois and Iowa have run neck and neck in the raising of corn and oats. Minnesota carries the blue ribbon for wheat, with Kansas breathless in second place. California has shot to the front in the barley race. Texas and Louisiana are tied in the production of rice. Kentucky is the tobacco champion; and New York holds the record for hay and potatoes.

To see the New Farmer at his best, I went to Iowa. No other State has invested so much money--sixty millions--in labour-saving machinery, so it can fairly claim to be the zenith of the farming world.

Here there are twenty thousand women and three hundred thousand men who have made farming a profession. They are producing wealth at the rate of five hundred millions a year, nearly sixteen hundred dollars apiece. How?

By throwing the burden of drudgery upon machines.

Iowa is not so old; she will be sixty-two, this year. She is not so large; little England is larger. Yet, with her hog-money she could pay the salaries of all the monarchs of Europe; and with one year's corn crop she could buy out the "Harvester Trust," or build three New York Subways.

When the Indians sold Iowa to Uncle Sam they got about eight cents an acre. To give the price exactly, to a cent, it was $2,877,547.87. When this money was paid, there were statesmen who protested that it was too much. Yet this amount was less than the Iowans got for last year's colts; it was less than one quarter of the value of the eggs in last years nests.

Every three months, the Iowa hen pays for Iowa.