CHAPTER V
The Harvester and the American Farmer
If the American Farmer went out of business this year he could clean up thirty thousand million dollars. And he would have to sell his farm on credit; for there is not enough money in the whole world to pay him half his price.
Talk of the money-mad Trusts! They might have reason to be mad if they owned the farms, instead of their watered stock. When we remember that the American Farmer earns enough in seventeen days to buy out Standard Oil, and enough in fifty days to wipe Carnegie and the Steel Trust off the industrial map, the story of the trusts seems like the “short and simple annals of the poor.”
One American harvest would buy the kingdom of Belgium, king and all. Two would buy Italy. Three would buy Austria-Hungary. And five, at a spot cash price, would take Russia from the Czar.
Talk of swollen fortunes! With the setting of every sun, the money-box of the American Farmer bulges with the weight of twenty-four new millions. Only the most athletic imagination can conceive of such a torrent of wealth.
Place your finger on the pulse of your wrist and count the heart-beats; one—two—three—four. With every four of those quick throbs, day and night, a thousand dollars clatters into the gold-bin of the American Farmer.
How incomprehensible it would seem to Pericles, who saw Greece in her Golden Age, if he could know that the yearly revenue of his country is now no more than one day’s pay for the men who till the soil of this infant Republic!
Or, how it would amaze a resurrected Christopher Columbus, if he were told that the revenues of Spain and Portugal are not nearly as much as the earnings of the American Farmer’s Hen!
Merely the crumbs that drop from the Farmer’s table (otherwise known as agricultural exports), have brought him in enough of foreign money since 1892, so that he could, if he wished, settle the railway problem once for all, by buying every foot of railroad in the United States.