ure, to a French peasant. The peasant scratched his head. This was
a new idea.

"Because," he answered stodgily, "I haven't got twice as much to cut."

The quick, handy ways of American farmers are seldom found in other
countries. A Swiss will put a big stone upon a land-roller, to give it
weight, and then walk behind it. To ride on the roller himself does not
occur to him. A South German will usually take the reel off his reaper,
and handle the grain by hand. Operating five levers is too great a tax
upon his mind. An Argentinian wastes his pesos by hiring drivers--one on
the seat and another astride one of the horses.

"A Spanish farmer sent for me on one occasion," an expert told me, "and I
found him in great trouble. He had bought a new harvester, and put it
together _inside_ his barn, which had only one narrow door. He had to
choose between taking the machine to pieces and pulling his barn down."

Next to Russia, in the list of countries that this army of experts has won
to the harvester, comes Canada. Like the trek of the Boers into the
Transvaal, and of the Japanese into Korea, there has been a trek of three
hundred thousand American farmers into Western Canada--into the new
forty-bushel-to-the-acre wheat-land of Alberta. Most of these emigrants
were Minnesotans and Dakotans; therefore they are not poor. They carried
two hundred millions across the border. And they are now uprearing a
harvester-based civilisation in a vast region that will probably some day
have a population of twenty-five million people.

That billiard-table country--Argentina--stands third among the foreign
patrons of our Harvester Kings. As a wheat nation it is little older than
Alberta. It was only about eighteen years ago, after three centuries of
revolution, that Argentina settled down to raise wheat and be good.

To-day the Argentinians raise more wheat than Germany, and their country
has become a land of milk and honey. It is a South American Minnesota, but
eleven times larger, made fertile by the slow-moving Platte River--a
hundred miles wide when it reaches the sea--which moves through its plains
like an irrigating canal.

The fourth in rank of our harvester buyers is Australia, which is now
sending a yearly tribute of more than a million to the International
Company. This profitable reciprocity between Chicago and the island
continent was greatly furthered when the International bought the
sixty-five-acre Osborne plant, at Auburn,