Cyrus Hall McCormick Part 11

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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 pa.s.sed 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 steams.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p-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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 s.h.i.+fting 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 j.a.pan 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 mult.i.tudes should be fed. He picked up the task of feeding the hungry ma.s.ses--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 n.o.bler nature for its full development. The gentle need not be eliminated by the strong. Instead of contending with one another in an unbrotherly compet.i.tion, 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 friends.h.i.+p 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