ails on the North American Continent.

Perhaps McCormick's greatest achievement is that his machine has
banished famine wherever it is extensively used, at least in peace
times. Before the reaper appeared existence, even in the United States,
was primarily a primitive struggle for bread. The greatest service of
the harvester has been that it has freed the world--unless it is a world
distracted by disintegrating war--from a constant anxiety concerning its
food supply. The hundreds of thousands of binders, active in the fields
of every country, have made it certain that humankind shall not want for
its daily bread. When McCormick exhibited his harvester at the London
Exposition of 1851, the London Times ridiculed it as "a cross between
an Astley chariot, a wheel barrow, and a flying machine." Yet this same
grotesque object, widely used in Canada, Argentina, Australia, South
Africa, and India, becomes an engine that really holds the British
Empire together.

For the forty years succeeding the Civil War the manufacture of
harvesting machinery was a business in which many engaged, but in which
few survived. The wildest competition ruthlessly destroyed all but
half a dozen powerful firms. Cyrus McCormick died in 1884, but his sons
proved worthy successors; the McCormick factory still headed the list,
manufacturing, in 1900, one-third of all the self-binders used in the
world. The William Deering Company came next and then D. M. Osborne, J.
J. Glessner, and W. H. Jones, established factories that made existence
exceedingly uncomfortable for the pioneers. Whatever one may think of
the motives which caused so many combinations in the early years of
the twentieth century, there is no question that irresistible economic
forces compelled these great harvester companies to get together.
Quick profits in the shape of watered stock had nothing to do with
the formation of the International Harvester Company. All the men
who controlled these enterprises were individualists, with a natural
loathing for trusts, combinations, and pools. They wished for nothing
better than to continue fighting the Spartan battle that had made
existence such an exciting pastime for more than half a century. But the
simple fact was that these several concerns were destroying one another;
it was a question of joining hands, ending the competition that was
eating so deeply into their financial resources, or reducing the whole
business to chaos. When Mr. George