les of leather belting, 940 miles of cotton
duck, 2,000 grindstones, 3,000 shovels, 10,000 brooms, 1,670,000 buckles,
1,185,000 pounds paint, 4,000,000 pounds wire, 15,000,000 pounds nails.

Merely to maintain its experimental department costs this imperial company
$7,000 a week. Here are more than two hundred inventors and designers,
well housed and well salaried, and not tramping from shop to shop, as
inventors did in the good old days. They are paid to think; and the
company is mightily proud of them. But the truth is that all large
corporations which employ an army of unskilled workmen are being compelled
to offset so much mere muscle by a special department of brains.

There is, besides, a most elaborate system of inspection. In the Deering
factory I saw a squad of ten men who were testing the newly made binders
with straw. "About three out of a hundred need fixing," said the foreman.

The chains are tested by a violent pneumatic machine. Every link, even, is
branded with a private mark--[triangle]. And in the Hamilton plant a new
scheme is being tried--the whole packing gang has become a staff of
inspection. Whenever a man finds a hundred defective pieces, he gets an
extra dollar. One sharp-eyed Scot in the packing-room confided to me that
he had made "as high as two shillin's a week."

Such is the scope of the International Harvester Company, created in 1902.
As to the men who control it, I have had the greatest difficulty in
penetrating back of the business to their personal characteristics. For
they dislike the fierce light that beats upon a rich American.

Of its president, Cyrus H. McCormick the Second, the first word to be said
is that he is not built on the same lines as his belligerent father. He
would fare badly, very likely, if he were in charge of a
catch-as-catch-can business, such as the reaper trade was thirty years
ago. The making of harvesters is, to him, half a duty--to his father, his
workmen, and the machine itself--and half a profession--not a battle nor a
game, as it was with the first Reaper Kings. He has no desire to play a
lone hand in the business world. And his painstaking purpose, as a man of
affairs, is to secure less speculation and more stability, less waste and
more organisation, less friction and more community of interest.

In all things he is a simple and serious man. I have seen him work from
noon until midnight; but in my opinion, if he really had his choice, he
would prefer