uillotine to cut off
the heads of the privileged people who ate too much, it produced a reaper
that gave everybody enough. This was not a complete answer, nor will
there ever be one, to the riddle of liberty, equality and fraternity. But
it was so much better than theories and riots that it helped to persuade
twenty-five million immigrants to cross the ocean and become shareholders
in the American Republic.

If it were possible to trace back a strand in the twisted thread of cause
and effect, we would find that many a factory and steel-mill owes its
origin to the flood of wheat-money that came to us from Europe in 1880 and
1881--every dollar of it made by the humble harvester.

Without this obedient slave of wood and steel, all our railroads and
skyscrapers and automobiles could not save us from famine. If we had to
reap our grain in the same way as the Romans did, it would take half the
men in the United States to feed us on bread alone, to say nothing of the
rest of the menu.

Like most great things, the reaper was born among humble people and in a
humble way. It was crude at first and dogged by failure. No one man made
it. It was the product of a hundred brains.

The exact truth about its origin is not known and never will be. What few
facts there were have been torn and twisted by the bitter feuds of the
Patent Office. Every letter and document that exists is controversial. So
I cannot say that the story, as I give it, is entirely true, but only that
it is as near as I can get to the truth after six months of investigation.

There is evidence to show that Cyrus Hall McCormick completed a practical
reaper in 1831, although the first reaper patent was taken out in 1833 by
an inventive seaman named Obed Hussey, of Baltimore. The young McCormick
did not secure his patent until 1834; but he had given a public exhibition
in Virginia three years before.

There were nearly a hundred people who saw this exhibition. Not one of
them is now alive; and the story as told by their children has many little
touches of imagination. But in the main, it is very likely to be true.

It was in the fall of 1831 when Cyrus McCormick hitched four horses to his
unwieldy machine and clattered out of the barnyard into a field of wheat
nearby. Horses shied and pranced at the absurd object, which was unlike
anything else on the face of the earth. Dogs barked. Small boys yelled.
Farmers, whose backs were bent and whose fingers were scarred f