This elevation of the farmer is now seen to be our best guarantee of prosperity and national permanence. It was the incoming flood of wheat money that put the United States on its feet as a manufacturing nation. The total amount of this money, from the building of the first McCormick Reaper factory until to-day, is the unthinkable sum of $5,500,000,000, which may be taken as the net profit of the Reaper to the nation. Thus the Reaper was not, like the wind-mill, for instance, a mere convenience to the farmer himself. It was the link between the city and the country. It directly benefited all bread-eaters, and put the whole nation upon a higher plane. It built up cities, and made them safe, for the reason that they were not surrounded by hordes of sickle-and-flail serfs, who would sooner or later rise up in the throe of a hunger-revolution and pull down the cities and the palaces into oblivion. When the first Reaper was sold, in 1840, only eight per cent of Americans lived in towns and cities; and to-day the proportion is _forty_ per cent. Yet bread is cheaper and more plentiful now than it was then; and there is the most genial and good-natured co-operation between those who live among paved streets and those who live in the midst of the green and yellow wheat-fields. There are no Goths and Vandals on American farms. Instead of the tiny log workshop on the McCormick farm, in which the first crude Reaper was laboriously hammered and whittled into shape, there is now a McCormick City in the heart of Chicago--the oldest and largest harvester plant in the world. In sixty-two years of its life, this plant has produced five or six millions of harvesting machines, and it is still pouring them out at the rate of 7,000 a week. If it were to ship its yearly output at one time, it would require a railway caravan of 14,000 freight-cars to carry the machines from the factory to the farmers. [Illustration: McCORMICK REAPER IN USE IN RUSSIA] This McCormick City is one of the industrial wonders that America exhibits to visiting foreigners, and it is so vast that it can only be glanced at in a day. It covers 229 acres of land. In its buildings there is enough flooring to cover a 90-acre farm, and if they were all made over into one long building, twenty-five feet wide and one story high, it would be very nearly forty miles long, as far as from Chicago to Joliet. The population of McCormick City, counting workers only, is 7,000, whose average wages are $2.20 a day.