The get-rich-quick brigands of Wall Street meddled with the harvester business once--and never again. That was twenty-one years ago, when the famous "Binder-Twine Trust" set out with the black flag flying. It was a skyrocket enterprise. James R. Keene bulled the stock up to 136. This was the first and only "easy money" that was ever made in the harvester world. Then the farmers and the reaper kings rose up together and smote the Trust in twenty legislatures. Its stock became waste paper; and in the financial hurricane of 1893, it was the first victim. No other business shows so tragic a death roll. For fifty years its trail was marked by wreckage and disaster. Most of the few who succeeded at first, failed later. Out of every ten who plunged into the scrimmage, nine crawled out whipped or terrified. And so the Romance of the Reaper was for fifty years a tragedy of competition. _Out of more than two hundred harvester companies, only fourteen survived in 1902; and these realised that if such waste and warfare continued, their business would be destroyed._ CHAPTER III THE INTERNATIONAL HARVESTER COMPANY For fifty years the Harvester Kings fought one another in the open field of competition. Their armies of agents, drilled in the arts of rivalry, waged a war in which quarter was neither given nor sought. It was a fight almost of extermination. Out of two hundred companies that went to battle with flags waving and drums beating, less than a dozen came home. David M. Osborne backed a new self-binder, lost a million, and died of heartbreak. J. S. Morgan, who had a small factory at Brockport, saw the immense McCormick and Deering plants and quit. Even the great Whiteley fell, and Lewis Miller, the father-in-law of Edison and the founder of Chautauqua, went down "like a great tree upon the hills." Walter A. Wood, after forty years of success, took Governor Merriam and James J. Hill as partners, and set out to win the West for the Wood Company. Their factory was the pride of St. Paul. Their credit was the best, and their fame was over all the prairies. Yet after five years of battling they surrendered; and not one harvester is made to-day west of Illinois. It is a common opinion among harvester men that from first to last there has been more money put into the business than has ever been taken out--so enormously wasteful were these years of competition. By 1902 the harvester business was merely a terrific and destructive war. The agents were tearing the whole industry to shreds and tatters. So far as the Harvester Men could see, they must choose between combination and ruin. Not one of them was personally in favour of combination. They were individualists through and through. The spirit of competition had been bred in the bone. So, when several of them came together to check this warfare, it was not of their own free will. It was because they could do nothing else. They were hurled together by social forces over which they had no control.