ies, in the
year that the victorious old Reaper King was carried to his grave, with a
sheaf of wheat on his breast.

What if there had been no reapers, and no hunger-insurance, and no cheap
bread! What sort of an American nation would we have, if we were still
using such food-implements as the sickle and the flail?

Could we have swung through four years of Civil War, as we did, without
famine or national insolvency?

Could the West have risen toward its present greatness if its billion
acres had to be harvested by hand?

Could the railways alone, which produce nothing, have given us more food
for less work--the first necessity of a civilised democracy?

Would our manufacturers be creating new wealth at the rate of sixteen
billions a year, if the reaper had not enriched the farmers and sent half
the farm-hands into the factories?

And our towering cities--two of them more populous than the thirteen
colonies were, how large would they be and how prosperous if bread were
twenty cents a pound?

As Seward once said, it was the reaper that "pushed the American frontier
westward at the rate of thirty miles a year." Most of the western
railways were built to the wheat; and it was wheat money that paid for
them. The reaper clicked ahead of the railroad, and civilisation followed
the wheat, from Chicago to Puget Sound, just as the self-binder is leading
the railroad to-day--three hundred miles in front in Western Canada, and
eight hundred miles in Siberia. Even so unyielding a partisan of the
railroads as Marvin Hughitt admitted to me that "the reaper has not yet
received proper recognition for its development of the West."

During the Civil War the reaper was doing the work of a million men in the
grain-fields of the North. It enabled a widow, with five sons, to send
them all to the front, and yet gather every sheaf into the barn. It kept
the wolf from the door, and more--it paid our European debts in wheat. It
wiped out all necessity for Negro labour in the wheat States, just as a
cotton-picker will, some day, in the South.

"The reaper is to the North what the slave is to the South," said Edwin M.
Stanton in 1861. "It releases our young men to do battle for the Union,
and at the same time keeps up the supply of the nation's bread."

Lincoln called out every third man, yet the crops increased. Europeans
could not believe it. They heard in 1861 that we were sending three times
as much wheat to England as we had ever