“Yes,” replied Deering, blushing as red as one of his own mowers.
“Well,” said the Westerner, shaking him by the hand, “I want to say that you’re a mighty smart man.”
Deering looked thoroughly uncomfortable, and when the stranger had gone, he leaned over to Webster and said:
“Think of him saying that I made the binders when I pay you fellows for making them. I never felt so foolish in my life.”
He is now eighty-one—older than our oldest railroad. In his lifetime he has seen his country grow seven times in population and twenty-four times in wealth.
He and his fellows have undeniably doubled the food supply of the world. More—they said, “Presto, change!” and the drudges of the harvest-fields stood up and became men. They have made life easier and nobler for untold myriads of people, and have led the way to the brightest era of peace and plenty that the hunger-bitten human race has ever known.
Yet less than thirty of the reaper kings became millionaires. Not one can stand beside the great financiers of steel and real estate and railroads. And not one, in his whole lifetime, piled up as much profit as a Carnegie or a Rockefeller has made in a single year.
The get-rich-quick brigands of Wall Street meddled with the harvester business once—and never again. That was twenty-one years ago, when the famous “Binder-Twine Trust” set out with the black flag flying. It was a skyrocket enterprise. James R. Keene bulled the stock up to 136. This was the first and only “easy money” that was ever made in the harvester world. Then the farmers and the reaper kings rose up together and smote the Trust in twenty legislatures. Its stock became waste paper; and in the financial hurricane of 1893, it was the first victim.
No other business shows so tragic a death roll. For fifty years its trail was marked by wreckage and disaster. Most of the few who succeeded at first, failed later. Out of every ten who plunged into the scrimmage, nine crawled out whipped or terrified.
And so the Romance of the Reaper was for fifty years a tragedy of competition. Out of more than two hundred harvester companies, only fourteen survived in 1902; and these realised that if such waste and warfare continued, their business would be destroyed.