TO THE FARMERS OF THE UNITED STATES
WHOSE ENERGY AND PROGRESSIVENESS HAVE
MADE THIS WONDER-STORY COME TRUE

PREFACE

This is the story of our most useful business. It is a medley of
mechanics, millionaires, kings, inventors and farmers; and it is intended
for the average man and woman, boy and girl. Although I have taken great
pains to make this book accurate, I have written it in the fashion of
romance, because it tells a story that every American ought to know.

The fact is that the United States owes much more to the Reaper than it
owes to the factory or the railroad or the Wall Street Stock Exchange.
Without the magical grain machinery that gives us cheap bread, the whole
new structure of our civilisation, with all its dazzling luxuries and
refinements, would be withered by the blight of Famine. This may sound
strange and sensational to those who have been bred in the cities, but it
is true.

The reaper has done more to chase the wolf from the door--to abolish
poverty and drudgery and hand-labour, than any other invention of our day.
It has done good without any backwash of evil. It has not developed any
new species of social parasite, as so many modern improvements have done.
It has not added one dollar to the unclean hoard of a stock-gambler, nor
turned loose upon the public a single idle millionaire.

The reaper is our best guarantee of prosperity. In spite of our periodical
panics, which prove, by the way, that the men who provide us with banks
are not as efficient as the men who provide us with bread, we are certain
to rebound into prosperity and social progress as long as we continue to
make three hundred harvesting machines every working day--one every two
minutes. The rising flood of wheat is bound to submerge the schemers and
the pessimists alike.

And it is the reaper, too, which has done most to make possible a nobler
human race, by lessening the power of that ancient motive--the Search for
Food. Every harvester that clicks its way through the yellow grain means
more than bread. It means more comfort, more travel, more art and music,
more books and education. In this large fact lies the real Romance of the
Reaper.

In gathering the material for this book I have been greatly assisted by
Messrs. E. J. Baker, of the _Farm Implement News_; B. B. Clarke, of the
_American Thresherman_; Ralph Emerson, of Rockford, Ill; C. W. Marsh, of
De Kalb, Ill.; Edwin D. Metcalf and T. M. Osbo