done before. They shook their
heads and said--"Another American story!" when they were told that we were
supporting two vast armies and yet selling other nations enough grain to
feed thirty-five million people. Naturally, no country that clung to the
sickle and flail could be convinced of such a preposterous miracle.

After the war, the mighty river of wheat that flowed from the West became
so wide and so deep that it poured a yellow stream into every American
home. It began to turn the wheels of fourteen thousand flour-mills. Rich
cities sprang up, like Aladdin palaces, beside its banks--Chicago, St.
Louis, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Kansas City, St. Paul, Omaha,
Des Moines. All of these, and a hundred lesser ones, were nourished into
prosperity by the rising current of reaper-wheat, as it moved from the
Mississippi to the sea.

By 1876 we had become the champion food-producers of the world. A Kansas
farmer was raising six bushels of wheat with as little labour as an
Italian spent to produce one. And there was one doughty Scot--Dalrymple of
Dakota, who was guillotining more wheat with four hundred labourers and
three hundred harvesters, than five thousand peasants could garner by
hand.

Inevitably, the American Farmer became a financier. In 1876 he earned
twenty-four per cent. He had twenty-seven hundred millions to spend. By
1880 he had begun to buy so much store goods that the United States was
able to write a Declaration of Industrial Independence. Steadily he has
grown richer and wiser, until now he is the owner of a billion-acre farm,
worth thirty dollars an acre, operated with farm machinery that cost him
$900,000,000 and producing, in a single year, seven thousand times the
value of a millionaire.

Such, in one country, is the amazing result which the Reaper has helped to
create. And this is not all. It is now more necessary to the human race
than the railway. It is fighting back famine in fifty countries. Its click
has become the music of an International Anthem. The nations are feeding
each other, in spite of their tariffs and armies. The whole world takes
dinner at the one long table; and the fear of hunger is dying out of the
hearts of men; and the prayer of the Christian centuries is
answered--"Give us this day our daily bread."

CHAPTER II

THE STORY OF DEERING

Fifty years ago two young farmers named Marsh were cutting grain near
DeKalb, Illinois. They were too intelligent--too Am