CYRUS HALL McCORMICK 



women and producing commodities at the rate 

 of $5,000,000 worth in a week. It was then 

 what it is to-day the chief Reaper City and 

 principal granary of the world. The wheat 

 and flour that were sent out from its ports 

 and depots in the year that the inventor of the 

 Reaper died were enough to make ten thousand 

 million loaves of bread, which, if they were 

 fairly distributed, would have given about forty 

 loaves apiece to the families of the human race. 

 The United States, in 1884, had been for six 

 years the foremost of the wheat-producing 

 nations. It had also grown to be first in mining, 

 railroads, telegraphs, steel, and agriculture. It 

 was the land of the highest wages and 

 cheapest bread an anomaly that foreign 

 countries could not understand. In the bulk 

 of its manufacturing, it had forged ahead of all 

 other nations, even of Great Britain; and yet, 

 although a vast army of men had been drawn 

 from its farms to its factories, it had produced 

 in that year more than half a billion bushels of 

 wheat six times as much as its crop had been 

 in the best year of the sickle and the scythe. 



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