“‘No, your Excellency,’ I said. ‘They can be made only in America.’
“‘Well,’ said Bismarck, speaking very good English, ‘you Yankees are ingenious fellows. This is a wonderful machine.’”
When Loubet was President of France, he and Seth Low, of New York, were walking together over the President’s estate. Loubet pointed to a reaper which was being driven through a yellow wheat-field.
“Do you see that machine?” he remarked. “I bought it from an American company in 1870, and I have used it in every harvest since that time. I have four of those machines now, and I want to say to you that they are the most useful articles that come to us from the United States. I am stating no more than the simple truth when I tell you that without American harvesters, France would starve.”
In still other countries the American reaper has been popular with kings and potentates. The Sultan of Turkey and the Shah of Persia each bought one during the Chicago World’s Fair. And the young King of Spain, who ordered a mower in 1903, narrowly escaped being minced up by its knives. Being an impulsive youth, he gave a cry of joy at sight of the handsome machine, sprang upon the seat, and lashed the horses without first laying hold of the reins. The horses leaped, and the seventeen-year-old Alphonso went sprawling. Twenty workmen ran to his help, and one level-headed American mechanic caught the reins; so the worst penalty that the boy king had to pay for his recklessness was a tumble and a bad scare.
In Russia, the Czar and the grand dukes at first bought reapers partly as toys and partly as strike-breakers. If the labourers on their estates demanded more pay than fifty cents a week, the manager would drive them in a body to his barn, then throw open the doors and show them five or six red harvesters.
“Do you see these American machines?” he would say. “Unless you go back to work at the same wages, I will reap the grain with these machines, and you will have no work at all, and no money.” A look at these machine-devils has usually sent the cowed serfs back to their sickles. But here and there it has set them to wondering whether or not a fifty-cent-a-week job was worth having, and so has given them an A B C lesson in American doctrines.
KING ALPHONSO OF SPAIN DRIVING AN AMERICAN SEEDER
Many of the Russian nobility, too, have begun to learn a trifle about democracy from the American harvester agents. There is a certain young baron, for example, whose estate is not far from Riga. Last year, to be in fashion, he bought a Chicago self-binder. When it arrived, there came with it, as usual, an expert mechanic to set it up and start it in the field. In this case, the mechanic was a big German-American named Lutfring, born in Wisconsin, of “Forty Eighter” stock.