Because of this harvesting machinery, the wheat crop of the world is now nearly twice what it was in 1879. The American crop has multiplied six and a half times in fifty years. Western Canada, Australia, Siberia, and Argentina have become wheat producers. The cost of growing one bushel in America, with machinery and high wages, is now about half a dollar, which is less than the cost in Europe and as low as the cost in India, where laborers can be hired for a few pennies a day. With a sickle, the time-cost of a bushel of wheat was three hours; with a self-binder, it is now ten minutes. And so, because of these amazing results, the rattle of the harvester has become an indispensable part of the music of our industrial orchestra, harmonious with the click of the telegraph key, the ring of the telephone bell, the hum of the sewing-machine, the roar of the Bessemer converter, the gong of the trolley, the whistle of the steamboat, and the puff of the locomotive. Next to the Reaper, the most important factors in this world-mechanism of the bread, are the Railroad and the Steamboat. These arrived on the scene just at the right time to distribute the surplus that the Reaper produced. The Steamboat, and its humble relative, the barge, came first. The Erie Canal of 1825, the Suez Canal of 1869, and the Sault Ste. Marie Canal of 1881, were built largely for the carrying of the wheat. By 1856 wheat was on its way from Chicago to Europe; and four years later the first wheat-ship curved around Cape Horn from California. Ten years ago an entirely new kind of ship, a sort of immense steel bag called a "whaleback," was built to carry 250,000 bushels of wheat in a single load. By this means a ton of wheat is actually carried thirteen miles for one cent. There are to-day small barges on the canals of Holland, large ones on the river Volga, and several thousand steamships on the world's main water-ways, all carrying burdens of wheat. Enough is now being transported from port to port to give steady work to fully three hundred steamships and summer work to very nearly as many more. There was an exciting contest between the ship and the car in the earlier days of transportation, to see which should carry the largest share of the wheat. About 1869 the car won. In this year, too, the United States was belted with a railway, east to west, which meant the opening up of the first great wheat-empire. Other railways pushed out into the vast prairies of the West, lured by the call of the wheat. They were the pioneers of the world's wheat-railways. Wheat was their chief freight and wheat farmers were their chief passengers. At the outset the grain was shipped in bags. Then some railway genius invented the grain-car, which holds as much as twenty or twenty-five wagons. And to-day one of the ordinary moving pictures of an American railroad is a sixty-car train travelling eastward with enough wheat in its rolling bins to give bread to a city of ten thousand people for a year.