In 1884 McCormick died, at that time of the year when wheat is being sown in Spain and reaped in Mexico. The earth-life of "the strong personality before whom obstacles went down as swiftly and inevitably as grain before the knife of his machines," was ended. His last words, spoken in a moment's awakening from the death-stupor, were--"Work, work!" Not even the dissolution of his body could relax the fixity of his will. And when he lay in state, in his Chicago home, there was a Reaper, modelled in white flowers, at his feet; and upon his breast a sheaf of the ripe, yellow wheat, surmounted by a crown of lilies. These were the emblems of the work that had been given him to do, and the evidence of its completion. CHAPTER XI THE REAPER AND THE NATION When Cyrus H. McCormick died in 1884 he had provided hunger-insurance for the United States and the greater part of the civilized world. In that year his own factory made 50,000 harvesting machines, and there were in use, in all countries, more than 500,000 McCormick machines, doing the work of 5,000,000 men in the harvest fields. The United States was producing wheat at the rate of ten bushels per capita, instead of four, as it had been in 1847, when McCormick built his first factory in Chicago. And the total production of wheat in all lands was 2,240,000,000 bushels--enough to give an abundance of food to 325,000,000 people. Chicago, in 1884, was a powerful city of six hundred thousand population. It had grown sixty-fold since McCormick rode into it by stage in 1845. It had 3,519 manufacturing establishments, giving work to 80,000 men and 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.