f or a tenant. He was
a stolid drudge--"brother to the ox." Even the masterful old Pilgrim
Fathers had no ploughs at all--nothing but hoes and sharp sticks, for the
first twelve years of their pioneering.

Fifty-five years of American Independence went by before the first reaper
clicked its way clumsily into fame, on a backwoods farm in Virginia. At
that time, 1831, the American people were free, but they held in their
hands the land-tools of slaves. They had to labour and sweat in the
fields, with the crude implements that had been produced by ages of
slavery. For two generations they tried to build up a prosperous Republic
with sickles, flails, and wooden ploughs, and they failed.

There are men and women now alive who can remember the hunger year of
1837, when there were wheat bounties in Maine and bread riots in New York
City. Flour mills were closed for lack of wheat. Starving men fell in the
streets of Boston and Philadelphia. Mobs of labourers, maddened by the
fear of famine, broke into warehouses and carried away sacks of food as
though they were human wolves. Even in the Middle West--the prairie
paradise of farmers--many a family fought against Death with the serf's
weapon of Black Bread.

Enterprise was not then an American virtue. The few men who dared to
suggest improvements were persecuted as enemies of society. The first iron
ploughs were said to poison the soil. The first railroad was torn up. The
first telegraph wires were cut. The first sewing-machine was smashed. And
the first man who sold coal in Philadelphia was chased from the State as a
swindler.

Even the railway was a dangerous toy. The telegraph was still a dream in
the brain of Morse. John Deere had not invented his steel plough, nor Howe
his sewing-machine, nor Hoe his printing-press. There were no stoves nor
matches nor oil-lamps. Petroleum was peddled as a medicine at a dollar a
bottle. Iron was $75 a ton. Money was about as reliable as mining stocks
are to-day; and all the savings in all the banks would not now buy the
chickens in Iowa.

Our total exports were not more than we paid last year for diamonds and
champagne. Chicago was a twelve-family village. There was no West nor
Middle West. Not one grain of wheat had been grown in Minnesota, the
Dakotas, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Washington, Nevada, Idaho, Montana,
New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, Oklahoma or Texas.

The whole structure of civilisation, as we know it, was