but now a corn husker is used. A machine drawn by two horses will do the work of eight men; it will take one row at a time and husk, gather, and elevate the corn into a wagon as fast as the team will walk through the field. It will gather all the ears, whether the stalks stand up or are bent down. It leaves all the husks on the stalk, and it does not pull up, or cut up, or break down the stalks.

After the corn was harvested our fathers would turn a shovel upside down over a box, sit on it, and drawing the ears with force and vigor across its edge, would shell at most twenty bushels in a long day; but far more commonly not more than five, and hard work it was. Now two men will take the ordinary improved corn sheller and shell 24 bushels in an hour, or 240 bushels in a short day. Leaving out of the account the difference in the length of the days worked, this shows that six times as much is now done with this machine as our fathers could do by the old methods. With the three classes of horse power machines four men will shell 1,500, 2,000, and 3,000 bushels respectively per day of ten hours; one man and machine now doing the work of 75, 100, and 150 men, respectively, when without machinery.

Our fathers, when they wanted their wheat converted into flour or their corn into meal, would take it to the neighboring mill, generally having one run of stones, rarely more than two, where everything was handled and moved by muscular force, requiring from one to three men in each mill, and turning out what might amount to from ten to thirty barrels of flour a day, paying for the service rendered in a toll of

about one eighth or tenth. Now the grain is sold and converted into flour in mills that will count their runs of stones or rolls by scores or hundreds, and their daily yield by thousands of barrels, but requiring no more men in the operations of flouring than did the mill of our fathers when the yield was but thirty barrels a day. Now the mills do their work without the assistance of man, except as a watcher. At night the mill may be, and usually is, locked up, dark, and lonely, except for the watchman and his lantern, but runs on and grinds out its flour by hundreds and thousands of barrels a night.

In our important hay crop the machine mower is first put in, one man with team cutting as much grass as could twelve men with scythes. Then follows the tedder with a man and horse to scatter and turn it, to facilitate its drying, doing the work of twenty men with the hand fork, and so much better as to reduce the time between the cutting and housing at least twenty-four hours. Then comes the horse rake, raking twenty acres a day, while a man with the ordinary hand rake can rake but two. Here the machine and man do the work of twelve, twenty, and ten men respectively, with the old appliances.

And machinery digs the potatoes, milks the cows, and makes the butter and the cheese. There is now nothing in food production without its labor saving process.

In all these agricultural operations there is a displacement of labor by invention of machines and their improvement of from one doing the work of seven in sowing grain, to twenty-four in plowing, and three

hundred and twenty in cutting the grain at harvest, according to the kind of work done and the class of machinery used for the particular operation.

Scarcely less effective, in the aggregate, are the numerous minor inventions whereby the labor of the farm and the household have been saved. Implements of this kind make a large portion of the stock in trade of the makers and venders of agricultural

wares.

Our fathers, with all their boys and men servants, had a full Winter's work in thrashing their wheat and other small grain, in shelling their corn, etc., and in getting their small products to mill or market. But now, after machinery has done its work in the field and barn the iron horse drags the product over its roads of steel, for hundreds and thousands of miles, at less cost and in less time than it took our fathers to transport the same to distances not greater than fifty miles. Upon those roads where formerly hundreds and thousands of men and teams were constantly employed in hauling products to market and goods to the country nowhere now is a man or team so employed. Men and animals are released from that labor; new forces have taken up the work, guided and controlled by comparatively few minds and hands. Even our cattle and hogs are no longer required to walk to the shambles; the iron horse takes them to the butcher; labor saving processes slaughter them, dress them, prepare their flesh for the market, for the table, and stop only at mastication, deglutition, and digestion.

To-day one man with the aid of machinery will

produce as much food as could be raised by the naked muscle and tools of a score of our fathers. There is now no known limit to the power of its production. In consumption there is no corresponding increase. Our fathers required, obtained, and used as many ounces of food per day as we do. It might have been different in kind and quality-nothing

more.

Not long ago the farm found constant employment for all its sons, and also for many of the children of the city. But now it furnishes work for but a very small portion of its own children, and that for a few weeks or months at most in the year, and for the remainder of the twelve months employment must be had in the cities and towns, or not at all. Here we find the true reason for stagnation in the population of the older agricultural sections, and abnormal growth and crowding of the cities.

The use of machinery in general manufactures, and especially of textiles, has had an equally potent effect upon the daughters of the farm, in compelling them, also, to seek employment in the manufacturing towns and cities, because there was no longer work to be found under the old rooftree, as will be here shown.

ery

The great revolution that has been effected in our industrial and social conditions, by the use of machinand labor saving processes in general production, to the exclusion, in great part, of manual labor, may, perhaps, be best seen by the changes that have been wrought within a few years in all that relates to our farming interests. For which see next chapter, on the "Bonanza Farms."

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CHAPTER II.

THE BONANZA FARMS.

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[The matter which forms this chapter was written by the author of this volume for the Atlantic Monthly of January, 1880. It is here reproduced, with some additions, for the reason that it gives a clear account of the methods pursued in a system of agriculture that is monopolizing the lands, developing a system of monster estates, swallowing up the small holdings of the people, and undermining and destroying the small farm interests of the country.]

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ITHIN the past year or two a new development in agriculture, in the great Northwest, has forced itself upon the public attention, that would seem destined to exercise a most potent influence on the production of all food products, and work a revolution in the great economies of the farm. But not enough is known of this new development to enable one to form any just estimate of either its force or extent. For the purpose of obtaining the data necessary to assist to a more correct understanding of the operations of what are known as the "Bonanza Farms," and their present and probable future effects, the writer went upon the ground to make them a study.

(On reaching St. Paul I visited the Land Office of the St. Paul and Sioux City Railroad, to gather some facts in regard to Southern Minnesota. The Land Commissioner, James H. Drake, Esq., learning of the purpose of my tour in the Northwest, expressed a