effective. When we
consider that one-half of our population is farmers, and that sixty per
cent of the annual wealth of the world is the production of men who
follow the fresh furrow, we see how mighty and far-reaching is an
invention that lightens labor, as this most efficient tool certainly
does.

Accidentally, I found an interesting item on page two hundred
seventy-six of the Senate Report of the Forty-fifth Congress. Mr.
Coffin, statistician, was testifying as an expert on the value of
patents to the people. Mr. Coffin says, "My estimate is that for a
single year, if all of the farmers in the United States had used the
Oliver Chilled Plows, instead of the regular steel or iron plow, the
saving in labor would have totaled the sum of forty-five million
dollars."

When the papers announced the passing of James Oliver some of them
stated that he was "probably the richest man in Indiana." This fact, of
itself, would not make him worthy of the world's special attention.
There are two things we want to know about a very rich man: First, how
did he get his wealth? Second, what is he doing with it? But the fact
that wealth was not the end or aim of this man, that riches came to him
merely as an incident of human service, and that his wealth was used in
giving employment to a vast army of workmen, makes the name of Oliver
one that merits our remembrance.

James Oliver worked for one thing and got another. We lose that for
which we clutch. The hot attempt to secure a thing sets in motion an
opposition which defeats us. All the beautiful rewards of life come by
indirection, and are the incidental results of simply doing our work up
to our highest and best. The striker, with a lust for more money and
shorter hours, the party who wears the face off the clock, and the man
with a continual eye on the pay-envelope, all have their reward--and it
is mighty small. Nemesis with her barrel-stave lies in wait for them
around the corner. They get what is coming to them.

* * * * *

The Oliver fortune is founded on reciprocity. James Oliver was a
farmer--in fact, it was the joke of his friends to say that he took as
much pride in his farming as in his manufacturing. Mr. Oliver considered
himself a farmer, and regarded every farmer as a brother or partner to
himself. "I am a partner of the farmer, and the farmer is a partner of
Nature," he used to say. He always looked forward to the time when he
would g