man who makes his labour-saving machines. Neither one can hurt the other
without doing injury to himself.

The inventor of the modern plough, Jethro Wood, was a wealthy Quaker
farmer of New York--a man of such masterful intelligence as to count Clay
and Webster among his friends. The late James Oliver, and David Bradley,
one of his greatest competitors, were born and bred near the furrowed
soil.

McCormick built his first reaper in a blacksmith shop on a farm. So did
John F. Sieberling, William N. Whiteley, Lewis Miller and C. W. Marsh. And
the man who owned the first of the reaper factories, Dayton S. Morgan,
grew up amid the stumps of a New York farm.

The American Farmer has always grown _ideas_, as well as corn and
potatoes. That is the secret of his prosperity. It was out in the
wheat-fields where the idea of a self-binder flashed upon the brain of
John F. Appleby; where Jacob Miller learned to improve the thresher and
George Esterley to build the header and Joseph F. Glidden to invent
barb-wire.

Before 1850 there was some progress among farmers, but it was as slow as
molasses in Alaska. They were free and independent, and little else. They
had poor homes, poor farms, poor implements.

Then came the gold-rush to California. What this event did for farmers and
the world can scarcely be exaggerated. It opened up the prairies, fed the
hungry banks with money, lured the farm labourers westward, and compelled
the farmers to use machinery.

Three years later the Crimean War sent the price of wheat soaring, and the
farmers had a jubilee of prosperity. Away went the log-cabin, the ox-cart,
the grain-cradle, and the flail. In came the frame house, the spring
buggy, the reaper, and the thresher. The farmers began to buy
labour-saving devices. Better still, they began to invent them.

There is one farm-bred man, named R. C. Haskins, in the Harvester Building
in Chicago, who, in his thirty years of salesmanship, has supervised the
selling of $275,000,000 worth of harvesters to American farmers. And as
for the amount of money represented by our farm machinery of all kinds,
now in use, it is very nearly a billion dollars--a total that no other
nation can touch.

To measure American Farmers by the census is now an outgrown method, for
the reason that each farmer works with the power of five men. The farm has
become a factory. Four-fifths of its work is done by machinery, which
explains how we can produce one-fifth of th