harge of the raw materials--the coal and iron and lumber and sisal and
flax.

These are a few of the men who manage this international empire of
bread-machinery. They are all practical men, hard workers, close to the
farm and the farmer. They are not fashionable idlers, nor promoters, nor
Wall Street speculators. And they have no more use for tickers than for
telescopes--a fact which is vitally important, now that they are making
more than half the harvesters of the world.

Such is the International Harvester Company from the inside. But an
outside view is equally necessary. It is of tremendous interest to
10,000,000 American farmers to know the habits and the disposition of
this powerful organisation. As Theodore Roosevelt has said, there are
good combinations and bad ones. Which is the International Harvester
Company?

In order to get the facts about it at first hand, I interviewed the four
chief competitors of the Harvester Company, three Attorneys-General, seven
editors of farm papers, four professors of agricultural colleges, seven or
eight implement agents, thirty farmers in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin,
two state governors, and the Federal Bureau of Corporations. Before I had
gone far, I learned that the big Harvester Company has been beset by a
host of new troubles.

It is an evidence of the eternal futility of human ambition, that when a
group of warring Harvester Kings had made peace with one another, when
they had healed their wounded and buried their dead, and sat down to enjoy
a future of prosperous tranquillity, up sprang a host of new enemies,
armed and double-armed with weapons from which there seemed to be no sort
of defence. Their outposts were shattered by legislative dynamite. Tariff
walls were built across their paths. And half a dozen giant ogres,
otherwise known as Attorneys-General, crashed into their peaceful business
with destructive clubs of law.

The bigger the organisation the more trouble to protect and preserve it.
This is what Abraham Lincoln learned--what the whole United States
learned, half a century ago; and it is the lesson that the
harvester-makers are studying to-day. It is a new phase of an old fact; it
is the Tragedy of the Trust.

Some foreign nations, too, have taken their cue from American
Legislatures, and have become almost as hostile to the Chicago company as
though it were exporting roulette wheels and burglars' jimmies. France
taxed half a million from it last ye