So, in the span of his business life--from 1831 to 1884,--McCormick had seen his country rise from insignificance to greatness, and he had the supreme satisfaction of knowing that his Reaper had done much, if not most, to accelerate this marvellous progress. As we shall see, the invention of the Reaper was the right starting-point for the up-building of a republic. It made all other progress possible, by removing the fear of famine and the drudgery of farm labor. It enabled even the laborer of the harvest-field to be free and intelligent, because it gave him the power of ten men. [Illustration: THE WORKS OF THE McCORMICK HARVESTING MACHINE CO.] The United States as a whole, had paid no attention to the Reaper until the opening of the California gold mines in 1849. Then the sudden scarcity of laborers created a panic among the farmers, and boomed the sale of all manner of farm machinery. Two years later the triumph of the McCormick Reaper at the London Exposition was a topic of the day and a source of national pride. And in 1852 the Crimean War sent the price of wheat skywards, providing an English market for as much wheat as American farmers could sell. But it was not until the outbreak of the Civil War that the United States learned to really appreciate the Reaper. By the time that President Lincoln had made his ninth call for soldiers, by the time that he had taken every third man for the Northern armies, the value of the Reaper was beyond dispute. By a strange coincidence, in this duel between wheat States on the one side, and cotton States on the other, it was a Northerner, Eli Whitney, who had invented the cotton-gin, which made slavery profitable; and it was a Southerner, Cyrus H. McCormick, who had invented the Reaper, which made the Northern States wealthy and powerful. It was the Reaper-power of the North that off set the slave-power of the South. There were as many Reapers in the wheat-fields of 1861 as could do the work of a million slaves. As the war went on, the crops in the Northern States increased. Europe refused to believe such a miracle; but it was true. Fifty million bushels of American grain went to Europe in 1861, and fifty-six million bushels in the following year. More than two hundred million bushels were exported during the four years of the war. Thus the Reaper not only released men to fight for the preservation of the Union. It not only fed them while they were in the field. It did more. It saved us from bankruptcy as well as famine, and kept our credit good among foreign nations at the most critical period in our history.