394 Missouri Agricultural Report. 



issuance of a patent. The other through a growing disposition 

 toward race suicide. On the subject of inanimate machinery there 

 are indications that the world has gone mad, and while the opposite 

 seems to be true with reference to human machines, it is the excep- 

 tion they say that proves the rule, and I think I can endorse the 

 opinion of the preacher's boy, who was one of a family of nine 

 children. One morning he was taken into his mother's room to 

 welcome the advent of the tenth. After looking at it for awhile, 

 his father says, ''What do you think of it?" He immediately re- 

 plied, "I can think of a good many things we need worse." 



The laborer is a machine doing the bidding of the overseer. 

 The clerk is a machine doing the bidding of the proprietor. The 

 mechanic is a machine doing the bidding of the builder. The 

 machinist is a machine doing the bidding of the foreman. The 

 fireman is a machine doing the bidding of the chief. The politician 

 is a machine doing the bidding of his constituents. The lawyer 

 is a machine doing the bidding of his clients. The preacher, who 

 stands in the sacred pulpit as a messenger of the Most High, alas ! 

 is too often a machine doing the bidding of his most wealthy 

 parishioners. 



The machines that have been attracting the most attention 

 for the past few months have been political machines. These were 

 great massive and powerful national machines and each one of 

 them like the great engine that furnishes the power for a lot 

 of smaller machines, they furnished the power for state and county 

 and township and president machines. Two of these machines are 

 now laid up for repairs notwithstanding one of them was a brand- 

 new one. 



Some machines are retarded and lose a race on account of a 

 puncture, but the universal verdict was that it had no effect in the 

 case of one of these political machines. Some machines wear out 

 and break because of friction caused by lack of oil, and it has been 

 intimated that one of these machines lost in the race because of a 

 scarcity of oil caused by the dissolution of the Standard Oil Trust. 

 The accumulation of rust incident to being out of use for a long 

 time is always hard on a machine and generally unfits it for use, 

 but the machine that outdistanced all others in the great November 

 race gave every evidence of being in perfect condition, notwith- 

 standing the long years since it had been in anything like constant 

 use, and this only goes to show how the life of a machine can be 

 preserved and extended by protecting it from the storm when it. is 



