Patent Office; I would have been better off at the end of the 14
years if I had filled exactly such station as my foreman holds,
and got his pay, and would not have had half the hard work, nor a
hundredth part of the heart-aching. I never experienced half the
fatigue in rowing after a whale in the Pacific Ocean (which I have
often done) as I experienced year after year for eighteen years in
the harvest field, I might say twenty years, for I worked as hard
in England as I do at home, for in the harvest, wherever I am
there is no rest for me. If I am guilty of no rascality why should
I not be compensated for toiling to introduce an invention which I
thought to be of so much advantage to the World. I know I was the
_first_ one who successfully accomplished the cutting of
grain and grass by machinery. If others _tried_ to do it
before me it was not _doing_ it; being the first who ever did
it, why should I be obliged to suffer and toil most, and get the
least by it? No man knows how much I have suffered in body and
mind since 1833, on account of this thing, the first year I
operated it in Balto. Three years after I cut the first crop, I
could not go to meeting for many weeks for want of a _decent
coat_, while for economy I made my own coffee and eat, slept in
my shop, until I had sold machines enough to be able to do better;
there was no rascality in all that. My machines then cost me
nearly all I got for them when counting moderate wages for my own
labour. The Quaker who lent me the ninety dollars ten years
afterward would not then (ten years before) trust me for iron, one
who was not a Quaker did. There is one thing not generally
understood; thou will remember the trial at Lloyd's, thou
remembers also that I received the purse of 100 dollars; now what
would the world suppose I would do? Why that I would do like the
flour holders, _keep the price up_! But it is a fact and can
be proved, that after it was announced to me that the verdict was
in my favor I said to a gentleman _now I will reduce my price 10
dollars_, on each machine, _and I did it_, from that hour
and did not breathe my intention until after that decision was
announced to me! Where is the man who has done the like under
similar circumstances? There is no 'rascality' in that. Now I do
not believe that there is a re