So, this big business has evolved from simple to complex in accordance with the same laws that rule plants and empires. It has probably not yet reached its full maturity, for it is greater than any man or any form of organisation, and the tiny ephemeral atoms who control it to-day are no more than its most obedient retinue. They come and go--quarrel and make friends--live and die. What matter? The big business, once alive, grows on through the short centuries, from generation to generation. And what does it all mean--this federation of thirteen factory cities--this coordination of muscle and mind and millions--this arduous development of a new art, whereby a group of mechanics can take a wagon-load of iron ore and a tree, and fashion them into a shapely automaton that has the power of a dozen farmers? _It means bread. It means hunger-insurance for the whole human race. As we shall see in the next chapter, it means that the famine problem has been solved, not only for the United States, but for all the civilised nations of the world._ CHAPTER IV THE AMERICAN HARVESTER ABROAD The first American reapers that went to Europe were given a royal welcome. There were two of them--one made by McCormick and one made by Hussey, and they were exhibited before Albert Edward, the Prince Consort of England, at a World's Fair in London in 1851. There had been reapers invented in England before this date, but none of them would reap. All the inventors were mere theorists. They designed their reapers for ideal grain in ideal fields. One of them was a preacher, the Rev. Patrick Bell; another, Henry Ogle, was a school-teacher. James Dobbs, an actor, invented a machine that cut artificial grain on the stage. And a machinist named Gladstone made a reaper that also worked well until he tried it on real grain in a real field. But the exhibition of the American reaper in London did not result in its immediate adoption. There was little demand for harvesters in England fifty years ago; and in other European countries there was none at all. Farm labour was cheap--forty cents a day in England and five cents a day in Russia; and the rush of labourers into factory cities had not yet begun.