HIS LIFE AND WORK 



not compelled to divide up every cord of wood 

 and bushel of wheat with a king or a landlord. 

 Whatever he earned was his own. He was an 

 American; and thus, in the endless chain of 

 cause and effect, we can trace the origin of the 

 Reaper back, if we wish, to George Washington 

 and Christopher Columbus. 



The whole spirit of the young republic pushed 

 towards the invention of labor-saving machinery, 

 towards replacing the hoe with the steel 

 plow, the needle with the sewing-machine, the 

 puddling-furnace with the Bessemer converter, 

 the sickle with the Reaper. And it is fair to 

 say that the social forces that represented the 

 American spirit were focused to a remarkable 

 degree in the home in which Cyrus H. McCor- 

 mick had his birth and his education. 



There was another contributing influence, too, 

 in the making of McCormick, the fact that 

 the blood of his father and mother came to him 

 in a pure strain of Scotch-Irish. It was this 

 inheritance that endowed him with the tenacity 

 and unconquerable resiliency that enabled him 

 not only to invent a new machine, but to create 



[17] 



