In 1898 Europe had become so dependent upon America for its reaping machinery that 22,000 machines were shipped from the McCormick plant alone--so many that a fleet of twelve vessels had to be chartered to carry them. There are now as many American Reapers and Harvesters in Europe as can do the work of 12,000,000 men. Of all American machines exported, the Reaper is at the head of the list. It has been the chief pathfinder for our foreign trade. Four-fifths of all the harvesting machinery in the world is made in the United States; and one-third, perhaps more, in the immense factory-city that Cyrus H. McCormick founded in Chicago in 1847. It was McCormick's most solid satisfaction, in his later life, to see foreign nations, one by one, adopt his invention and move up out of the Famine Zone. No news was at any time more welcome to him than the tidings that a new territory had been entered. And although the foreign trade has been vastly multiplied in the past five or six years, he lived long enough to see his catalogue printed in twenty languages, and to know that as long as the human race continued to eat bread, the sun would never set upon the empire of the Reaper. CHAPTER IX McCORMICK AS A MANUFACTURER "If I had given up business, I would have been dead long ago," said Cyrus H. McCormick in 1884, only a few weeks before his death; and this statement was by no means an exaggeration. His business was his life. It was not a definite, walled-off fraction of his life, as with most men. It was the whole of it. His business was his work, his play, his religion, his grand opera, his education. There was business even in his love-letters and his dreams. McCormick believed in business. He had the sturdy pride of a "John Halifax, Gentleman." He never wanted to be anything else but a worker. He never wasted a breath in wishing for an easier life. He worked hard for twenty-five years after he had made his fortune, because he believed in work and commerce and the reciprocities of trade. He was never dazzled nor deflected for a moment by the pomps and pageantries of the world, and for the glory that springs from war he had very little respect. In 1847, when offering a place in his factory to his brother Leander, he writes, "This will be as honorable an enterprise as to go to Mexico to be shot at." And in later life, in a conversation with General Lilley, of Virginia, he said, "I expect to die in the harness, because this is not the world for rest. This is the world for work. In the next world we will have the rest."