Cyrus Hall McCormick: His Life and Work

-preservation, the year 1809, which was marked by famine and tragedy in almost e

e beautifier of Paris; Proudhon, the prophet of communism; Lord Houghton, who did much in science, and Darwin, who did most; FitzGerald, who made known the literature of Persia; Bonar, who wrote hymns; Kinglake, who wrote

n strip of fairly fertile land that lay crumpled between the Blue Ridge on the east and the Alleghanies on the west. It was eighteen miles south of the nearest town of Staunton, and a hundred miles from th

of telling how the farmers of the valley, when they heard that the Revolution had begun in Massachusetts, carted 137 barrels of flour to Frederick, one hundred miles north, and ordered it

d, for instance, there was a parlor which had the dignity of mahogany furniture, and the luxury of books and a carpet. The next-door county of Augusta boasted of thirteen car

ad displaced them in the factories. In the Tyrol, sixty thousand peasants, who had revolted from the intolerable tyranny of the Bavarians, were being beaten into submission. In Servia, the Turks were striking down a rebellion by building a pyramid of thirty thousand Servian skulls,-a t

-day, was being terrorized in the West by the Indian Confederacy of Tecumseh; and its flag had been flouted by England, France, and the Barbary pirates. Its total revenue was much less than the value of last

hases of the moon; kept his cows outside in winter; and was unaware that glanders was contagious. Joseph Jenks, of Lynn, had invented the scythe in 1655, "for the more speedy cutting of grasse"; and a Scotchman had improved it into

it was generally believed that the task was hopeless; and any effort to encourage inventors had hitherto been a failure. An English society, for instance, had offered a prize of one hundred and fifty dollars for a better method of reaping grain, and the only answer it rece

clearing that is now known as Herald Square. There was no street railway, nor cooking range, nor petroleum, nor savings bank, nor friction match, nor steel plow, neither in New York no

considered, as smoking is at the present time; there was no organized opposition to it of any kind, except one little temperance society at Saratoga. There were no sewers, and much of the water was drawn from putrid wells. Many faces were pitted with small-pox. Cholera

riminal there was no feeling except the utmost repulsion and abhorrence. It was found, for instance, in 1809, that in the jail in New York there were seventy-two women, white and black, in one chairless, bedless room, all kept in

e swept from the sea, with a loss to capital of twelve millions a year, and a loss to labor of thirty thousand places of employment. According to this amazing act of po

work or bread. The jails were jammed with debtors,-1,300 in New York alone. The newspapers were overrun by bankruptcy notices. The coffee-houses were empty. The ships lay mouldering at the docks. In those hand

ugh it were a mere province of a European empire. So, by degrees, there came a change in the American point of view,-a swing from politicalism to industrialism. The mass of the people were now surfeited with oratory and politics and war. They began to settle down to hard facts and hard work. Instead

r the chief topics of interest came to be of a wholly different sort. They were such as the tariff, the currency, the building of factories and canals, the opening of public lands, the problem of slavery, and the development of the West. The hardy, v

n laborers, too, whose wages had been fifty cents a day, tramped westward along the Indian trails and seized upon scraps of land that lay ownerless. Nine out of ten Americans began to farm with the utmost energy and pers

feed itself. Not even nine-tenths of its people could produce enough grain to satisfy its hunger. Again and again, until 1858, wheat had to be imported by this nation of farmers. So, a