rmick built his first hundred reapers in 1845, he paid four and a
half cents for bolts. That was in the mythical age of hand labour. To-day
fifty bolts are made for a cent. So with guard-fingers. McCormick paid
twenty-four cents each when James K. Polk was in the White House. Now
there is a ferocious machine, which, with the least possible assistance
from one man, cuts out 1,300 guard-fingers in ten hours, at a labour-cost
of six for a cent.

Also, while exploring one of the Chicago factories, I came upon a herd of
cud-chewing machines that were crunching out chain-links at the rate of
56,000,000 a year. Nearby were four smaller and more irritable automata,
which were biting off pieces of wire and chewing them into linchpins at a
speed of 400,000 bites a day.

"Take out your watch and time this man," said Superintendent Brooks of the
McCormick plant. "See how long he is in boring five holes in that great
casting."

"Exactly six minutes," I answered.

"Well, that's progress," observed Brooks. "Before we bought that machine,
it was a matter of four hours to bore those holes."

In the immense carpenter shop he pointed to another machine. "There is one
of the reasons," he said, "why the small factories have been wiped out.
That machine cost us $2,500. Its work is to shape poles, and it saves us a
penny a pole; that is profitable to us because we use 300,000 poles a
year."

In one of its five twine mills--a monstrous Bedlam of noise and fuzz,
which is by far the largest of its sort in the world--there is enough
twine twisted in a single day to make a girdle around the earth.

In the paint shop the man with the brush has been superseded--a case of
downright trade suicide. In his place is an unskilled Hungarian with a big
tank of paint. Souse! Into the tank goes the whole frame of a binder, and
the swarthy descendant of Attilla thinks himself slow if he dips less than
four hundred of these in a day. The labour-cost of painting wheels is now
one-fifth of a cent each. Ten at once, on a wooden axle, are swung into
the paint bath without the touch of a finger. And the few belated
brush-men who are left work with frantic haste, knowing that they, too,
are being pursued by a machine that will overtake them some day.

In the central bookkeeping office of the Harvester Company I found some
almost incredible statistics. Here, for instance, are a few of the items
in last year's bill of expenses:

Two hundred and thirty-five mi