AN AMERICAN HARVESTER AT WORK IN ARGENTINA
Ride along any of the historic roadways of the world and you will see the painted automata from Chicago. “On the road to Mandalay,” and along the Appian Way, and the trail of death that marks the flight of Napoleon from Moscow, you will find these indispensable machines. They are cutting grass and wheat on the battle-fields of Austerlitz and Sedan and Waterloo.
Scutari, near the Adriatic Sea, bars out foreign machinery by law; but Roumania has been using our reapers and mowers for more than fifteen years. Once in a while a reaper is sent over the Andes on muleback; or into Central China via the wheelbarrow express. And now that there are irrigation pumps at the base of the Sphinx, that ancient female, who has been staring at sand-hills for three thousand years may soon look across yellow fields in which American binders are clicking cheerfully. They are for sale, too, in the holy cities of Rome, Jerusalem, Mecca, and Benares—almost everywhere but Lhasa, the sacred capital of Tibet. So far as I can learn, not one harvesting machine of any kind has entered that land of mystery and superstition. In a few other countries harvesters are not numerous. Very few have been sold or will be in Japan. Here are the smallest farms in the world. A fork and a pair of scissors would seem much more appropriate implements for such tiny plots. Take the whole arable area of Japan, multiply it by three, and you will have only the state of Illinois.
In India, where a family “lives” on fifty cents a week, where one acre makes three farms and an entire farm outfit means no more than a ten-dollar bill, a harvester is still almost as great a curiosity as an Indian tiger is to us. One of the harvester agents told me of a rich Hindoo who bought a complete set of American farm machines, and had them set in a row near his house, apparently regarding them only as curios from a foreign land. They have never been used, and a mob of starving labourers reap his grain by hand within sight of his idle machines.
There are few harvesters in Asia Minor, where farmers live almost like groundhogs—a whole family in one windowless hut of burnt clay. And there are fewer still in Africa, where five million idle acres of fertile land will some day be made to work for the human race.
But since the formation of the big Chicago company, every foreign nation is being reached and taught to throw away its reaping-hooks and to cut its grain in a civilised way. There is now practically no great city anywhere in which a farmer cannot buy one of the handsome red harvesters that have done so much to give a “full dinner-pail” to the civilized nations.
“The world is mine oyster,” says the International Harvester Company. In the first five years of its career, it has sent to foreign countries 920,000 harvesters of all sorts, for which it has been paid $70,000,000. It has doubled its foreign sales and now makes two-third of the harvesters of the world.
What with the profits, and the big orders, and the medals, and the appreciation of monarchs, the Harvester men have found their foreign trade from the first a business de luxe. In fact, one of the principal reasons why they quit fighting was that they might handle this world commerce in an organised way.
To-day they are not battling with one another on the royal farms of Europe, like gladiators who make sport for emperors. There is more business and less adventure. They have a geography of their own, and have divided the whole world into eight provinces. The “Domestic” Department of the International comprises the United States and Canada and is managed from Chicago. Central Europe, with Russia and Siberia, has its headquarters at Hamburg; Western Europe and Northern Africa are handled from Paris; Great Britain is directed from London; South America from Buenos Ayres; Australia from Melbourne; New Zealand from Christchurch; and Mexico from Mexico City. Such is the commercial empire that has its seat at the foot of Lake Michigan.