HIS LIFE AND WORK 



he was when Cyrus McCormick learned to 

 till the soil. 



This elevation of the farmer is now seen to be 

 our best guarantee of prosperity and national 

 permanence. It was the incoming flood of 

 wheat money that put the United States on its 

 feet as a manufacturing nation. The total 

 amount of this money, from the building of the 

 first McCormick Reaper factory until to-day, is 

 the unthinkable sum of $5,500,000,000, which 

 may be taken as the net profit of the Reaper to 

 the nation. 



Thus the Reaper was not, like the wind-mill, 

 for instance, a mere convenience to the farmer 

 himself. It was the link between the city and 

 the country. It directly benefited all bread- 

 eaters, and put the whole nation upon a higher 

 plane. It built up cities, and made them safe, 

 for the reason that they were not surrounded by 

 hordes of sickle-and-flail serfs, who would sooner 

 or later rise up in the throe of a hunger-revolu- 

 tion and pull down the cities and the palaces into 

 oblivion. When the first Reaper was sold, in 

 1840, only eight per cent of Americans lived in 



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