has now become impossible to reap the world's wheat by hand. As well
might we try to carry coal from mines to factories in baskets. Merely to
have gathered in our own cereal and hay of last year's growing, would have
been a ten days' job for every man and woman in the United States, between
the ages of twenty and twenty-six. But even if it had been possible to
return to hand-labour, in the production of the world's wheat, the extra
cost would have swollen, last year, to a total of $330,000,000--so I am
told by a Wisconsin professor who has made a careful study of the costs
of harvesting. This amount is more than equal to the entire revenue of the
International Harvester Company, in the five years of its existence.

Roughly speaking, the time needed to handle an acre of wheat has been
reduced from sixty-one hours to three, by the use of machinery. Hay now
requires four hours, instead of twenty-one; oats seven hours, instead of
sixty-six; and potatoes thirty-eight hours, instead of one hundred and
nine.

It is machinery that has so vastly increased the size of the average
American farm. In India, where a farmer's whole outfit can be bought for
ten dollars, the average farm is half an acre or less. In France and
Germany it is five acres. In England it is nine. But in the United
States--the home of farm machinery, it is one hundred and fifty acres.

Very little has been written about this stupendous prosperity of American
farmers. Why? Because it is so recent. The Era of Big Profits began barely
ten years ago. There was a time when the blue-ribbon New Farmer was the
man who grew wheat in the Red River Valley. He was the aristocrat of the
West. His year's work was no more than a few weeks of ploughing and
sowing, and a few days of harvesting. Even this was done easily, sitting
on the seat of a machine and driving a team of splendid horses. After
harvest, he cashed in, carried a big cheque to the bank, and settled down
for a long loaf or a trip to the old homestead in the East.

But it was the bad year of 1893 that first put the farmers, the country
over, on the road to affluence. Up to that time it was their usual policy
to depend upon a single crop. One farmer planted nothing but wheat;
another planted nothing but corn; a third nothing but cotton; and so on.
But in 1893 the prices of wheat, corn, and cotton fell so low that the
farmers' profits were wiped out. This disaster set the farmers thinking;
and in four years they