ou will see, not only a mower to cut the grass, but a tedder (a kind
of steel mule, with an incurably bad temper) to kick and scatter the
new-mown hay, so that it will dry in the sun; a rake to gather it
together; a loader to swing it on the wagon; and a baler to compress it
into bundles.

Here are the self-binders, not for the grain only, but for corn and rice
as well. For the especial benefit of King Corn, whose tribute to this
Republic has lately swollen to twelve hundred millions a year, the company
is making machines that pluck the corn from the stalk with iron hands,
and others that wrench off the husks, shell the corn, and grind it into
several varieties of breakfast food for the four-footed boarders of the
farm.

Here is a new machine, much less elegant than useful, for flinging manure
over a field. Barefooted women did this work in the old brutal days of
hand labour. But now, thanks to the brain of a canny Canadian farmer,
Joseph S. Kemp, one worker can feed the hungry fields without so much as
soiling the tips of the fingers.

The farmer's wife--and there are 10,000,000 of her in the United States,
has been the last one to be considered, in this outpouring of machinery.
But I found at Milwaukee a rebuilt factory belonging to the International,
where 2,500 men are making fifty cream separators and 100 gasolene engines
a day, both designed to make life easier for Mrs. Farmer, as well as for
her husband. Also, it will please her to know that she may soon be honking
her way to town in an automobile buggy, which the big corporation is
making for farmers in a new factory in Akron.

A harvester company must follow the whims of its customers, almost as much
as though it had newspapers for sale. It must give 10,000,000 farmers what
they want. At the Plano factory I saw 470 different varieties of wheels;
and sixty-one kinds of wooden tongues at McCormick's.

"Nothing could be simpler than a tongue," said Maurice Kane, the chief
mechanical expert of the International. "It is a mere pole. If we suited
ourselves, we should only make two kinds--one for horses and one for oxen.
But the farmers of the world have sixty-one different ideas as to how a
tongue ought to be made, and we must give them what they ask for."

The last Minnesota Legislature, in the simplicity of its heart, proposed
to establish a complete harvester plant for $200,000. It may surprise the
members of that Legislature to know that the International ha