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."
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.