ancial hurricane of 1893, it was the first victim.

No other business shows so tragic a death roll. For fifty years its trail
was marked by wreckage and disaster. Most of the few who succeeded at
first, failed later. Out of every ten who plunged into the scrimmage, nine
crawled out whipped or terrified.

And so the Romance of the Reaper was for fifty years a tragedy of
competition. _Out of more than two hundred harvester companies, only
fourteen survived in 1902; and these realised that if such waste and
warfare continued, their business would be destroyed._

CHAPTER III

THE INTERNATIONAL HARVESTER COMPANY

For fifty years the Harvester Kings fought one another in the open field
of competition. Their armies of agents, drilled in the arts of rivalry,
waged a war in which quarter was neither given nor sought. It was a fight
almost of extermination. Out of two hundred companies that went to battle
with flags waving and drums beating, less than a dozen came home.

David M. Osborne backed a new self-binder, lost a million, and died of
heartbreak. J. S. Morgan, who had a small factory at Brockport, saw the
immense McCormick and Deering plants and quit. Even the great Whiteley
fell, and Lewis Miller, the father-in-law of Edison and the founder of
Chautauqua, went down "like a great tree upon the hills."

Walter A. Wood, after forty years of success, took Governor Merriam and
James J. Hill as partners, and set out to win the West for the Wood
Company. Their factory was the pride of St. Paul. Their credit was the
best, and their fame was over all the prairies. Yet after five years of
battling they surrendered; and not one harvester is made to-day west of
Illinois.

It is a common opinion among harvester men that from first to last there
has been more money put into the business than has ever been taken out--so
enormously wasteful were these years of competition. By 1902 the harvester
business was merely a terrific and destructive war. The agents were
tearing the whole industry to shreds and tatters. So far as the Harvester
Men could see, they must choose between combination and ruin.

Not one of them was personally in favour of combination. They were
individualists through and through. The spirit of competition had been
bred in the bone. So, when several of them came together to check this
warfare, it was not of their own free will. It was because they could do
nothing else. They were hurled together by social