Scutari, near the Adriatic Sea, bars out foreign machinery by law; but
Roumania has been using our reapers and mowers for more than fifteen
years. Once in a while a reaper is sent over the Andes on muleback; or
into Central China via the wheelbarrow express. And now that there are
irrigation pumps at the base of the Sphinx, that ancient female, who has
been staring at sand-hills for three thousand years may soon look across
yellow fields in which American binders are clicking cheerfully. They are
for sale, too, in the holy cities of Rome, Jerusalem, Mecca, and
Benares--almost everywhere but Lhasa, the sacred capital of Tibet. So far
as I can learn, not one harvesting machine of any kind has entered that
land of mystery and superstition. In a few other countries harvesters are
not numerous. Very few have been sold or will be in Japan. Here are the
smallest farms in the world. A fork and a pair of scissors would seem much
more appropriate implements for such tiny plots. Take the whole arable
area of Japan, multiply it by three, and you will have only the state of
Illinois.
In India, where a family "lives" on fifty cents a week, where one acre
makes three farms and an entire farm outfit means no more than a
ten-dollar bill, a harvester is still almost as great a curiosity as an
Indian tiger is to us. One of the harvester agents told me of a rich
Hindoo who bought a complete set of American farm machines, and had them
set in a row near his house, apparently regarding them only as curios from
a foreign land. They have never been used, and a mob of starving labourers
reap his grain by hand within sight of his idle machines.
There are few harvesters in Asia Minor, where farmers live almost like
groundhogs--a whole family in one windowless hut of burnt clay. And there
are fewer still in Africa, where five million idle acres of fertile land
will some day be made to work for the human race.
But since the formation of the big Chicago company, every foreign nation
is being reached and taught to throw away its reaping-hooks and to cut its
grain in a civilised way. There is now practically no great city anywhere
in which a farmer cannot buy one of the handsome red harvesters that have
done so much to give a "full dinner-pail" to the civilized nations.
"The world is mine oyster," says the International Harvester Company. In
the first five years of its career, it has sent to foreign countries
920,000 harvesters of all sorts, for which it has been paid $70,000,000.
It has doubled its foreign sales and now makes two-third of the harvesters
of the world.
What with the profits, and the big orders, and the medals, and the
appreciation of monarchs, the Harvester men have found their foreign trade
from the first a business _de luxe_. In fact, one of the principal
reasons why they quit fighting was that they might handle this world
commerce in an organised way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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