w
tract of land, in order to avoid the trouble of fertilising the soil.

"I have seen farmers ploughing in Russia with a piece of board," said one
agent. "And I have seen their thrashing done by the feet of oxen." But the
new idea has been planted and is growing. "Russia is the land of
to-morrow," said another expert. "We have been educating the farmers there
for seventeen years, yet we have only scratched the surface. We who have
lived among the Russian peasants expect great things from them."

They have succeeded, then, in their campaign for the supremacy of the
American reaper--the Reaper Kings who enlisted the crowned heads and the
nobility of Europe in their service. By 1899 Europe was a customer at our
farm machinery factories to the extent of twelve millions a year. This
figure was doubled in 1906, and is now increasing by leaps and bounds. All
told, this one industry has brought us $150,000,000 of foreign money in
less than fifty years.

Europe has sent us emigrants--twenty-five million in the past
seventy-five years. But we have more than replaced them with labour-saving
farm machinery. There were in 1907 as many American harvesters in Europe
as would do the work of eleven million men.

If our foreign trade goes ahead at its present rate of speed, we shall
soon have Europe hopelessly in our debt, in this exchange of men for
machinery. In the past four years, for instance, Europe has sent us less
than four million emigrants, but we have sent to Europe, in that time,
enough agricultural automata to equal the labour of five million men.

And this means much to Europe. What with her 4,500,000 soldiers and her
4,000,000 public officials, she has to serve more than twenty-five million
meals a day to men who are non-producers. She has to clothe and house
these governmental millions and their families. How could she do this if
it were not for the eleven million man-power of her American harvesters,
and the half billion bushels of reaper-wheat that she can buy from other
countries?

France must have our harvesters because she has been short of men since
the wars of Napoleon. She has half a million soldiers and nine-tenths of a
million officials. Even now, with harvesters clicking merrily in all their
largest grain-fields, she and Germany cannot feed themselves. Spain at one
time exported wheat, but at present is buying 10,000,000 bushels a year.
England grows less than a quarter as much as will feed her people. And