orth of sisal a year, and the
United States buys it all. _Three-fourths of this money is clear profit;
and it is an almost incredible fact that the forty Sisal Kings of Yucatan
have a larger net income than the owners of the immense International
Harvester Company._

Roughly speaking, the American farmer pays Yucatan $12,000,000 a year for
string--mere string, which is used once and then flung away. It is an
extortion and a waste, besides being the only un-American factor in the
whole harvester business.

How can we save these twelve millions and completely Americanise the
trade? This is a problem that William Deering toiled at for twenty years.
The Harvester Company has a solution. I saw it at St. Paul--a new factory,
which twists twine from flax. A farmer's son named George H. Ellis has
found a quick and cheap way to clean the flax fibre; and at the time I
visited the factory there were more than three hundred workers at the
spindles. Two million pound of the twine were sold in 1906, so that the
enterprise is no longer an experiment. This means, probably, that the
farmer of the future will grow his own twine. Instead of yielding tribute
to the forty Sisal Kings of Yucatan, he will pay no more than the charges
of the railroad and the factory. The flax will be his own.

Yucatan is the only cheap-labour country that has been enriched by the
harvester. Elsewhere it is the rule that the common people of the nation
must reach a certain high level before the harvester trade can begin.
Where human labour has little value, it is plainly not worth saving.

[Illustration: IN THE ANCIENT FIELDS OF ALGIERS]

For this reason, the harvester is the best barometer of civilisation. It
cannot go where slavery and barbarism exist. It will not enter a land
where the luxury of the city is built on the plunder of the men and women
who work in the fields. Whoever operates a harvester must not only be
intelligent: he must be free.

To hundreds of millions of foreigners, the United States is known as "the
country where the reapers come from." They realise, too, that farm
machinery represents our type of genius, that it springs out of our
national life, and comes from us as inevitably as song comes from Italy or
silk from France.

Why? Read the history of the United States. This was the first country, so
far as we can know, where men of high intelligence went to work _en masse_
upon the soil, and under such conditions as compelled th