W. Perkins, of J. P. Morgan
and Company, first attempted to combine these great companies, the
antagonisms which had been accumulated in many years of warfare
constantly threatened to defeat his end. He early discovered that the
only way to bring these men together was to keep them apart. The usual
way of creating such combinations is to collect the representative
leaders, place them around a table, and persuade them to talk the thing
over. Such an amicable situation, however, was impossible in the present
instance. Even when the four big men--McCormick, Deering, Glessner,
and Jones--were finally brought for the final treaty of peace to J. P.
Morgan's office, Mr. Perkins had to station them in four separate rooms
and flit from one to another arranging terms. Had these four men been
brought face to face, the Harvester Company would probably never have
been formed.

Having once signed their names, however, these once antagonistic
interests had little difficulty in forming a strong combination. The
company thus brought together manufactured 85 per cent of all the farm
machinery used in this country. It owned its own coal-fields and iron
mines and its own forests, and it produces most of the implements used
by 10,000,000 farmers. In 1847 Cyrus McCormick made 100 reapers and
sold them for $10,000; by 1902 the annual production of the corporation
amounted to hundreds of thousands of harvesters--besides an almost
endless assortment of other agricultural tools, ploughs, drills,
rakes, gasoline engines, tractors, threshers, cream separators, and the
like--and the sales had grown to about $75,000,000. This is merely the
financial measure of progress; the genuine achievements of McCormick's
invention are millions of acres of productive land and a farming
population which is without parallel elsewhere for its prosperity,
intelligence, manfulness, and general contentment.

CHAPTER VII. THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF THE AUTOMOBILE

In many manufacturing lines, American genius for organization and large
scale production has developed mammoth industries. In nearly all the
tendency to combination and concentration has exercised a predominating
influence. In the early years of the twentieth century the public
realized, for the first time, that one corporation, the American Sugar
Refining Company, controlled ninety-eight per cent of the business of
refining sugar. Six large interests--Armour, Swift, Morris, the National
Packing Company,