The French in the Heart of America Part 19

I do not mean to intimate that all the sickles, that is, harvesters, are made on that portage strip, for if all the factories and coal lands (twenty thousand acres) and timber lands (one hundred thousand acres) and ore lands (with their forty million tons of ore) and railway tracks that unite to make these harvesters were brought together around that portage strip there would be no place for the city itself; but through one building on that strip the myriad paths do run, connecting all the tillable, grain-growing valleys of this planet; and yet a recent, most observing English critic, Mr. Wells, saw as he left that city only a "great industrial desolation" netted by railroads. He smelled an unwholesome reek from the stock-yards, and saw a bituminous reek that outdoes London, with vast chimneys right and left, "huge blackened grain- elevators, flame-crowned furnaces, and gauntly ugly and filthy factory buildings, monstrous mounds of refuse, desolate, empty lots, littered with rusty cans, old iron, and indescribable rubbish. Interspersed with these are groups of dirty, disreputable, insanitary-looking wooden houses."

[Footnote: H. G. Wells, "Future in America," p. 59.] Nothing but these in a place whose very smoke was a sign of what had made it possible for the nations of the earth even to subsist at all in any such numbers, or if at all, on anything better than black bread.

And, after all, this precursor, this runner before, was but one of hundreds of later Champlains, Nicolets, and La Salles, in the wake of whose visions came the producers, those who led forth the corn and wheat from the furrows, the trees from the forests, the coal from the ground, the iron from the hills, the steel from the retorts, the fire from the wells, the water from the mountains, electricity from the clouds and the cataract--dukes, field-marshals, generals, demiG.o.ds whom no myth has enhaloed or poetry immortalized.

Prometheus, bringing fire to mortals, did in a more primitive way what they have done who have led forth the oil of the rocks (petroleum) to light the lamps of the earth. Orpheus, who sang so entrancingly that mortals forgot their punishments and followed him, and Amphion, who drew the stones into their places in the walls by his music, performed no more of a miracle than a lad who tips a Bessemer converter. Hercules is remembered as a hero of the garden of the Hesperides for all time, whereas he probably but imported oranges from Spain to the eastern Mediterranean, and is hardly to be mentioned by the side of such a Mississippi Valley transporter and importer as Mr. Hill.

But let us follow more particularly the producers of the fields, whom we call the farmers there, the men whom the son of Sirach had in mind when he said in the ancient days: "How shall he become wise that holdeth the plough, that glorieth in the shaft of the goad, ... and whose discourse is of the stock of bulls?" It was a farmer's son who invented the harvester, and four-fifths of the men (whom the writer, to whom I am indebted for many of these facts about the farmer, calls "harvester kings")--along with the plough kings and wagon kings of whom democracy has been dreaming-were farmers' sons. The plough, the self-binder, the thresher were all invented on the farm.

The son of Sirach said: "They shall not be sought for in the council of the people, and in the a.s.sembly they shall not mount on high"; but fourteen of the first twenty-six Presidents were farmers' sons, and that statistic gives but merest suggestion of the farmer's part in all the councils of the people.

Here are a few significant, graphic facts which would furnish interesting material for a new edition of Virgil's "Georgics" and "Bucolics" or lead Horace to revise his verses on rural life.

There are practically five times as many farmers (under the early man- power definition of the farmer) as the census shows, for the farmer now works with the old-time power of five men.

Six per cent of the human race (and the larger part of that six per cent is in the Mississippi Valley) produces, one-fifth of the wheat of the world, two-thirds of the cotton, and three fourths of the corn (and this takes no account of its reapers and mowers that gather the crops in other valleys).

It would cost three hundred million dollars more to harvest the world's wheat by hand, if it were possible, than it costs now by the aid of the harvester and reaper. [Footnote: H. N. Ca.s.son, "Romance of the Reaper," p.

178.]

Some years ago in a trial made in Germany in the presence of the Emperor and his ministers, it was shown that a Mississippi Valley harvester driven by one man could do more in one day than forty Polish women with old- fashioned sickles. [Footnote: H. N. Ca.s.son, "Romance of the Reaper," pp.

134, 135.]

The precursor of the harvester saw grandmothers and mothers in the fields working day and night to cut and gather the harvest, but he could not now (except among the new immigrant farmers) see that spectacle. I cannot recall that, until I met that old-world population coming over the mountains as I made my first journey east out of that valley, over twenty years ago, I ever saw a woman at work in the fields.

The gallantry of that primitive pioneer life kept her in the cabin, which was the castle, and, while her labor was doubtless not less than her husband's, it had the sanct.i.ty of its seclusion and its maternal ministries to life. In the new industrialism that has invited the daughters of the Polish women harvesters into the factories yonder there is this constant and increasing concern which is insisting upon a living wage, wholesome sanitary environment, and on shorter hours of labor for women and children--this purpose that will ultimately bring skies and sunsets without exposure or back-breaking labor.

On my way to a provincial university in the north of France not long ago, I saw a peasant mother standing in the misty morning at the mouth of a small thresher, feeding into it the sheaves handed her by her husband, the horse in a treadmill furnishing the power. When I pa.s.sed in the misty morning of the next day she was still feeding the yellow sheaves into the thresher; and I thought how much better that was than the flail.

On a farm in the northwest, a hundred miles square, as long ago as 1893, three hundred self-binders were reaping the wheat at the cost of less than a cent a bushel--with practically no human labor beyond driving, [Footnote: H. N. Ca.s.son, "Romance of the Reaper," p. 178.] and there are seven thousand harvesting machines made each week [Footnote: H. N. Ca.s.son, "Cyrus Hall McCormick," p. 196.] by the one great harvester company alone.

The time needed to handle an acre of wheat has been reduced by the use of machinery from sixty-one hours to three; of an acre of hay from twenty-one to four; of oats from sixty-six to seven; of potatoes from one hundred and nine to thirty-eight--which is significant in its promise of the wisdoms of leisure. [Footnote: H. N. Ca.s.son, "Romance of the Reaper," p. 179.]

But machinery has also increased the size of the farm. In France and Germany, I am told, the average farm is but five acres in size, and in England nine; while in the United States it is one hundred and thirty- eight acres, and in the States west of the Mississippi two hundred and eleven acres.

And the product? One harvest, in the picturesque words of Mr. Ca.s.son, would buy Belgium, two would buy Italy, three would buy Austria-Hungary, and five, at a spot-cash price, would take Russia from the Czar. Seven bushels of wheat for every man, woman, and child of the ninety or more millions in America and a thousand million dollars' worth of food to other nations! That is the sum of the product--of what has been led forth in a single year.

But the leader forth, the producer, the man who set his heart upon "turning his furrows," whose "wakefulness was to give heifers their fodder," he has himself risen. He has, as I said of the farmers of Aramoni (the sons of the first settlers who are still turning up occasionally a flint arrow-head in the fields)--he has his daily paper, his daily mail, his telephone. He "pays his taxes with a week's earnings." He ploughs, plants, sows, cultivates, reaps by machinery. The poet Gray could find only with difficulty in that valley a footsore ploughman homeward wending his weary way, and Millet would in vain look for a sower, a man with a hoe, a woman reaper with a sickle, a man with a scythe or cradle. The new- world peasant is not only maintaining more than his per-capita share of the "fabric of the world" but he is taking his place in the councils of men.

What is most promising now is that these followers of the old pioneers of France in that valley are beginning to add to their acres new dominions, discovered by the new pioneers of France, such as the chemists Lavoisier and Berthelot, forerunners of the modern schools of agricultural chemistry and physical chemistry. One hundred years after La Salle completed the waterway journey to the gulf through that valley, Lavoisier made a discovery of the composition of water itself that has been of immense benefit, I am told, to the farmer of that valley and of other valleys. And then came Berthelot with his teaching of how to put together again, to synthetize, what man has waste-fully dissipated. France's men of the lens and the retort have become precursors where France's men of the boat and the sword went first, and have opened paths to even richer fields than those in which the harvesters have reaped.

There are as many agricultural colleges in the United States as there are States; there are at least fifty agricultural experiment stations, and there is ever new provision for scientific agricultural research.

Here is a partial catalogue of the enactments and appropriations of the legislature in the valley States for two years only:

LAWS AND APPROPRIATIONS SHOWING WORK DONE IN AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT AND EXTENSION WORK BY CERTAIN OF THE STATES, 1911-14.

ALABAMA

1912.--$27,000, experiments with fertilizers, combating boll-weevil, plant breeding, horticultural investigations, agricultural extension, etc.

1913.--Same as for 1912.

COLORADO

1911-12.--$5,500, experiments with potatoes.

5,000, experiments with alfalfa, grain, etc.

3,500, dry farming.

1913.--$47,500, experimental work in dry farming, dairying, etc.

1913-l4.--County commissioners, on pet.i.tion of one hundred taxpayers, to appoint county agriculturist; salary paid by county and expenses by county, State, and United States.

ILLINOIS

1913.--Authorized counties to appropriate $5,000 annually for soil and crop improvement.

See "American Year Book, 1913," p. 466.

IOWA

1913.--$500, cross-breeding of fruits and edible nuts. Authorizing establishment of county corporations for improvement of agriculture.

40,000, experiment station.

10,000, veterinary investigation.

17,000, experimental farm.

40,000, agricultural extension.

See "American Year Book, 1913," p. 465.

KANSAS

1913-14.--$55,000, experiment station.

15,000, production and dissemination of improved seeds.

102,500, for six branch stations, two of which are new.

125,000, pumping-plants at experiment station.

LOUISIANA

1912.--Police juries of several parishes authorized to appropriate not to exceed $1,000 annually in aid of farmers' co-operative demonstration work; also to acquire and establish experimental farms.

MICHIGAN

1912.--Authorizing and regulating county agricultural departments for advice and a.s.sistance to farmers.

MINNESOTA

1913.--$60,000, maintenance of county agricultural agents; counties each to pay $1,000.

MISSOURI

1913-14.--$25,000, county farm advisers.

20,000, soil experiments.

30,000, agricultural investigations.

5,000, promotion of corn growing.