McCormick did not for a moment regard this case as trivial. It involved a principle. Once when a friend bantered him for fighting so hard over a small matter, he replied, "My conscience, sir! I don't know what would become of the American people if there were not some one to stand up for fair dealing." His victory did much to teach the railroads better manners and a finer consideration of the travelling public. Soon after the conclusion of the case, a trunk belonging to a relative of the McCormicks was destroyed on the New York Central. It value was $1,300, and one of the railroad's lawyers promptly sent a check, saying, "We don't want to have a lawsuit with the McCormicks." For these numerous lawsuits McCormick paid a terrible price, both in money and friendship. He acquired a reputation as "a man who would law you to death." He brought down upon himself to a remarkable degree the hostility of his competitors, and prevented himself from receiving the full credit and prestige that he deserved. Instead of being revered as the father of the Reaper business, he was feared as an industrial Bismarck--a man of unyielding will and indomitable purpose, who regarded his competitors as a pack of trespassers in an empire that belonged by right to him. The truth is that this situation did not arise because of the natural perversity of either McCormick or his competitors. In his later life, McCormick proved that he could co-operate with his equals in the most harmonious way, in a new business enterprise. His competitors, too, were for the most part men of ability and uprightness. Neither in their public nor private lives, was there any stain upon the honor of such men as Wood, Osborne, Adriance, Manny, Emerson, Huntley, Warder. Bushnell, Glessner, Jones, and Lewis Miller. But these men were all newcomers. They were beardless striplings compared to McCormick. He had made and exhibited a successful Reaper twenty years before the first of them began. His father had grappled with the problem of the Reaper before most of them were born. It was inevitable, therefore, that there should have been an unspanable gap between the two points of view. McCormick stood alone because he _was_ alone. He and the Reaper had grown up together in long hazardous years of pioneering, through ridicule and poverty and failure. It was his dream come true. And in the same spirit with which he had fought to create it, he also fought to hold it, and to protect it from men to whom it was not a dream and a life-mission, but a mere machine. CHAPTER VII THE EVOLUTION OF THE REAPER