28 LAND AND LABOR. 



about one eighth or tenth. Now the grain is sold and 

 converted into flour in mills that will count their runs 

 of stones or rolls by scores or hundreds, and their 

 daily yield by thousands of barrels, but requiring no 

 more men in the operations of flouring than did the 

 mill of our fathers when the yield was but thirty bar- 

 rels a day. Now the mills do their work without the 

 assistance of man, except as a watcher. At night the 

 mill may be, and usually is, locked up, dark, and 

 lonely, except for the watchman and his lantern, but 

 runs on and grinds out its flour by hundreds and 

 thousands of barrels a night. 



In our important hay crop the machine mower is 

 first put in, one man with team cutting as much grass 

 as could twelve men with scythes. Then follows the 

 tedder with a man and horse to scatter and turn it, 

 to facilitate its drying, doing the work of twenty men 

 with the hand fork, and so much better as to reduce 

 the time between the cutting and housing at least 

 twenty-four hours. Then comes the horse rake, rak- 

 ing twenty acres a day, while a man with the ordinary 

 hand rake can rake but two. Here the machine and 

 man do the work of twelve, twenty, and ten men re- 

 spectively, with the old appliances. 



And machinery digs the potatoes, milks the cows, 

 and makes the butter and the cheese. There is now 

 nothing in food production without its labor saving 

 process. 



In all these agricultural operations there is a dis- 

 placement of labor by invention of machines and their 

 improvement of from one doinjj the work of seven in 

 sowing grain, to twenty-four in plowing, and three 



