the great majority, with crooked
backs and bended knees, cut the grain with little hand sickles precisely
like those which are now dug up in Etruscan and Egyptian tombs.

Though McCormick had invented his reaper in 1831, and though many rival
machines had appeared in the twenty years preceding the Civil War, only
the farmers on the great western plains had used the new machinery to
any considerable extent. The agricultural papers and agricultural fairs
had not succeeded in popularizing these great laborsaving devices. Labor
was so abundant and so cheap that the farmer had no need of them. But
the Civil War took one man in three for the armies, and it was under
this pressure that the farmers really discovered the value of machinery.
A small boy or girl could mount a McCormick reaper and cut a dozen acres
of grain in a day. This circumstance made it possible to place millions
of soldiers in the field and to feed the armies from farms on which
mature men did very little work. But the reaper promoted the Northern
cause in other ways. Its use extended so in the early years of the war
that the products of the farms increased on an enormous scale, and the
surplus, exported to Europe, furnished the liquid capital that made
possible the financing of the war. Europe gazed in astonishment at a new
spectacle in history; that of a nation fighting the greatest war which
had been known up to that time, employing the greater part of her young
and vigorous men in the armies, and yet growing infinitely richer in the
process. The Civil War produced many new implements of warfare, such as
the machine gun and the revolving turret for battleships, but, so far as
determining the result was concerned, perhaps the most important was the
reaper.

Extensive as the use of agricultural machinery became in the Civil War,
that period only faintly foreshadowed the development that has taken
place since. The American farm is today like a huge factory; the use
of the hands has almost entirely disappeared; there are only a few
operations of husbandry that are not performed automatically. In Civil
War days the reaper merely cut the grain; now machinery rakes it up and
binds it into sheaves and threshes it. Similar mechanisms bind corn and
rice. Machinery is now used to plant potatoes; grain, cotton, and other
farm products are sown automatically. The husking bees that formed
one of our social diversions in Civil War days have disappeared, for
particular