It is in the very nature of the wheat trade to benefit the masses and not the few. The more wheat that grows, the less danger there is of an aristocracy of wheat. More wheat means more luxury in the farm-house, more traffic on the railway, and more food in the slums. It means busier factories and steel-mills, because the farmer, when he receives his wheat-money, becomes the customer of the manufacturer. Thus it was not at all accidental that the wealth of Buenos Ayres came with the exportation of wheat, or that the commercial awakening of Canada followed the opening up of her western prairies, or that the industrial supremacy of the United States dates from the immense wheat harvests that began in 1880 to push the whole country forward with the power of $500,000,000 a year. As one of McCormick's competitors, J. D. Easter of Evanston, once declared, "It seems as though the McCormick Reaper started the ball of prosperity rolling, and it has been rolling ever since." [Illustration: HARVESTING HEAVY GRAIN, SOUTH AMERICA] If we wish to know what the Reaper will eventually do for these new wheat countries, we have but to glance back over the short history of our ten prairie States. Here, by the use of both science and machinery, the New Farmer has reached his highest level of success. By 1884 these ten States had twenty million thriving settlers, riding on forty-two thousand miles of railway, raising as much wheat in a day as New England could in a year, and storing their profits in twenty-five hundred banks. Incredible as it may seem to Europe and Asia, it is true that even the poorhouses in Iowa and Kansas were used last year as storehouses for wheat. And it is true that in the co-operative commonwealth called Kansas, at the last assessment, there were found to be forty-four thousand pianos and six million dollars' worth of carriages and automobiles. This in a State where there are no Grand Dukes and where every man works for a living! If the lords of Siberia wish to know what may be done with that famine-swept vastitude they may come and see that bed of an ancient sea, which in thirty years has been transformed into the world's greatest bread-land--the Red River Valley. Here the banks are not only packed with millions, but hundreds of millions, belonging to the shirt-sleeved proprietors of the soil. Here, in the yellow days of August, a man may travel for days and see no limit to the ocean of waving, shimmering wheat, that ripples around him in a vast sky-bounded circle. Wheat--wheat--wheat! Nothing but wheat! It is a Field of the Cloth of Gold, that adds nothing to the glory of kings, but much to the glory of the common people. Drop the German Empire down upon this valley and its expanse of dizzying, swirling wheat, and the wheat would not be wholly eclipsed. There would still be enough grain around the edges to make a golden fringe.