Many of the old methods of the rough-and-tumble days have survived. It is not possible to say “Presto, change!” to 40,000 battling agents, so that they shall at once begin to play fair and coöperate. But the general opinion is that the Combine has raised the harvester business to a higher level. At one of its branch offices I came accidentally upon a letter written by Cyrus H. McCormick, in which he forbade the taking of rebates from railways.
“You must clearly understand,” he wrote, “that this company will maintain a policy of absolute obedience to the law.”
Among the farmers of Iowa and Kansas I found no definite charges against the harvester combine—nothing but that vague dread of bigness which seems natural to the average mind, and which even the great-brained Webster had when he opposed the annexation of Texas and California. Of four farm editors, one was against all “trusts” on general principles; and the other three believed that the evils of harvester competition were much greater than those of consolidation. The bare fact that this one corporation has $120,000,000 of capital alarms the old-timers. Others have become more accustomed to the Big Facts of American business.
“Why,” said one implement dealer, “after all, $120,000,000 is less than the American farmers earn in a week.”
He might also have said that it was less than the value of one corn crop in Iowa, or half as much as the Iowa farmers have now on deposit in their savings banks. It is very little more than Russell Sage raked in through the wickets of his little money-lending office, or than Marshall Field accumulated from a single store. In fact, if bread were raised one cent a loaf for one year in the United States alone, the extra pennies would buy out the whole “Harvester Trust,” bag and baggage.
The bulk of the farmers, so far as I could harmonise their opinions, are now too well accustomed to big enterprises among themselves to be scared by the Chicago merger. They have at the present time more than five thousand coöperative companies of their own. And some of these are of national importance; as, for instance, the powerful Cotton Growers’ Trust, and the Farmers’ Business Congress, which owns 800 elevators for the storage of grain.
“My only objection to the International Harvester Company,” said a business man in St. Paul, “is that it sells its machinery cheaper in Europe than it does in the United States.” I investigated this charge, and found it wholly incorrect. The greater expense and risk of foreign trade compels the manufacturers to ask almost as high prices as American farmers had to pay twenty years ago. But there is a quite credible reason for this rumour. It is simply this—that for some less progressive countries a crude, old-fashioned reaper is being made, to sell for $45. The modern, self-rake reaper is too complex for the simple mind of many a Russian farmer, so he is supplied with a clumsy machine which is $15 cheaper, but which looked, to my unskilled eye, more than $30 worse.
No one accuses the “Trust” of having unreasonably raised prices. On the contrary, it is generally given full credit for holding prices down, in spite of the fact that it is paying from twenty to eighty per cent. more for its labour and raw materials than was paid in 1902. Generally speaking, all farm implements except thrashing-machines are cheaper now than they were in 1880, when the competition was most strenuous. Binders have dropped from $325 to $125; hay-rakes from $25 to $16; and mowers from $80 to $45.
“I paid $200 for a self-binding harvester twenty-five years ago,” said a Kansas farmer. “Ten years later I bought another for $140 and in 1907 I bought one from the International for $125, which is in my judgment the best of the three machines.”
The International has competitors, too—very active and able ones. Binders are made by 4 large independent companies, mowers by 17, corn-shredders by 18, twine by 26, wagons by 116, and gasolene engines by 124. Of the thirty-seven different machines made by the International there are only three—hemp-reapers, corn-shockers, and rice-binders—that are made by no other company, and even these machines are not protected by any basic patents. Powerful as the International is, it is still far from the place where business is one long sweet dream of monopoly.