New York, which had been
remarkably successful in its Australian, as well as its French, trade.

[Illustration: AN AMERICAN HARVESTER AT WORK IN ARGENTINA]

Ride along any of the historic roadways of the world and you will see the
painted automata from Chicago. "On the road to Mandalay," and along the
Appian Way, and the trail of death that marks the flight of Napoleon from
Moscow, you will find these indispensable machines. They are cutting grass
and wheat on the battle-fields of Austerlitz and Sedan and Waterloo.

Scutari, near the Adriatic Sea, bars out foreign machinery by law; but
Roumania has been using our reapers and mowers for more than fifteen
years. Once in a while a reaper is sent over the Andes on muleback; or
into Central China via the wheelbarrow express. And now that there are
irrigation pumps at the base of the Sphinx, that ancient female, who has
been staring at sand-hills for three thousand years may soon look across
yellow fields in which American binders are clicking cheerfully. They are
for sale, too, in the holy cities of Rome, Jerusalem, Mecca, and
Benares--almost everywhere but Lhasa, the sacred capital of Tibet. So far
as I can learn, not one harvesting machine of any kind has entered that
land of mystery and superstition. In a few other countries harvesters are
not numerous. Very few have been sold or will be in Japan. Here are the
smallest farms in the world. A fork and a pair of scissors would seem much
more appropriate implements for such tiny plots. Take the whole arable
area of Japan, multiply it by three, and you will have only the state of
Illinois.

In India, where a family "lives" on fifty cents a week, where one acre
makes three farms and an entire farm outfit means no more than a
ten-dollar bill, a harvester is still almost as great a curiosity as an
Indian tiger is to us. One of the harvester agents told me of a rich
Hindoo who bought a complete set of American farm machines, and had them
set in a row near his house, apparently regarding them only as curios from
a foreign land. They have never been used, and a mob of starving labourers
reap his grain by hand within sight of his idle machines.

There are few harvesters in Asia Minor, where farmers live almost like
groundhogs--a whole family in one windowless hut of burnt clay. And there
are fewer still in Africa, where five million idle acres of fertile land
will some day be made to work for the human race.

But since the