No renown comes to these men. No medals are pinned upon their coats. They are only one regiment in the great pay-envelope army of American mechanics. But they are on the firing-line of the greatest battle against ignorance and famine that has ever been fought. They are the pioneers of the new farmer. To show the world’s peasantry how to work with brains and machinery, to bring them up to the American farmer’s level—that is their task. What could be more essentially American, or more profitable to the human race?
Many European farmers, of course, are easily up to the Kansas level; but the vast majority have been mistaught that the path of the farmer must forever be watered with sweat. Many of them are so cramped by the shackles of drudgery that they cannot even conceive of the value of leisure.
“Why don’t you use a scythe? Then you could cut twice as much,” said Horace Greeley, who was deeply interested in farm machinery and agriculture, to a French peasant. The peasant scratched his head. This was a new idea.
“Because,” he answered stodgily, “I haven’t got twice as much to cut.”
The quick, handy ways of American farmers are seldom found in other countries. A Swiss will put a big stone upon a land-roller, to give it weight, and then walk behind it. To ride on the roller himself does not occur to him. A South German will usually take the reel off his reaper, and handle the grain by hand. Operating five levers is too great a tax upon his mind. An Argentinian wastes his pesos by hiring drivers—one on the seat and another astride one of the horses.
“A Spanish farmer sent for me on one occasion,” an expert told me, “and I found him in great trouble. He had bought a new harvester, and put it together inside his barn, which had only one narrow door. He had to choose between taking the machine to pieces and pulling his barn down.”
Next to Russia, in the list of countries that this army of experts has won to the harvester, comes Canada. Like the trek of the Boers into the Transvaal, and of the Japanese into Korea, there has been a trek of three hundred thousand American farmers into Western Canada—into the new forty-bushel-to-the-acre wheat-land of Alberta. Most of these emigrants were Minnesotans and Dakotans; therefore they are not poor. They carried two hundred millions across the border. And they are now uprearing a harvester-based civilisation in a vast region that will probably some day have a population of twenty-five million people.
That billiard-table country—Argentina—stands third among the foreign patrons of our Harvester Kings. As a wheat nation it is little older than Alberta. It was only about eighteen years ago, after three centuries of revolution, that Argentina settled down to raise wheat and be good.
To-day the Argentinians raise more wheat than Germany, and their country has become a land of milk and honey. It is a South American Minnesota, but eleven times larger, made fertile by the slow-moving Platte River—a hundred miles wide when it reaches the sea—which moves through its plains like an irrigating canal.
The fourth in rank of our harvester buyers is Australia, which is now sending a yearly tribute of more than a million to the International Company. This profitable reciprocity between Chicago and the island continent was greatly furthered when the International bought the sixty-five-acre Osborne plant, at Auburn, New York, which had been remarkably successful in its Australian, as well as its French, trade.