side. He was one of those Cromwellian men who can only be appreciated at a
distance. He was too absorbed in his work to be congenial and too
aggressive to be popular. He shouldered his way roughly against the
slow-moving crowd; and the people whom he thrust out of his way naturally
did not consider the importance of his life-task.

Most of the really great men of his day were his friends--Horace Greeley,
for instance, and Peter Cooper, Junius Morgan, Abram S. Hewitt, Cyrus W.
Field, and Ferdinand De Lesseps. But among the men of his own trade he
stood hostile and alone.

"McCormick wants to keep the whole reaper business to himself. He will not
live and let live," said his competitors. And they had reason to say so.
He did want to dominate. He wanted to make all the harvesting machines
that were made--not one less. He was not at all a modern
"community-of-interest" financier. He was a man of an outgrown school--a
consistent individualist, not only in business, but in politics and
religion as well. There was no compartment in his brain for mergers and
combines--for theories of government ownership--for Higher Criticism and
the new theology. He was a Benjamin Franklin commercialist, a Thomas
Jefferson Democrat, and a John Knox Presbyterian.

He had worked harder to establish the reaper business than any other man.
He was making reapers when William Deering was five years old, and before
Ralph Emerson and "Bill" Whiteley were born. He had graduated into
success through a fifteen-year course in failure. The world into which he
was born was as hostile to him as the Kentucky wilderness was to Daniel
Boone or the Atlantic Ocean to Columbus. He was hard-fibred, because he
had to be. He was the thin end of the wedge that split into fragments the
agricultural obstacle to social progress.

One careless writer of biographies has said that McCormick began at the
foot of the ladder. This is not correct. When he began, there was no
ladder. _He had to build it as he climbed._

The first man who gave battle to McCormick was an erratic genius named
Obed Hussey, who, as we have seen, secured a reaper patent in 1833. No two
men were ever more unlike than Hussey and McCormick. Hussey was born in
Nantucket; and he had roamed the frozen North as a whaling seaman. He was
inventive, poetic, and as whimsical as the weather. His delight was in
working out some mechanical problem. His first invention was a machine to
make pins. Soon afterward