Seventeen years later, on his imperial
farm, Napoleon III (whose royal ancestors had given the very site for the
factory) fastened the cross of the Legion of Honor upon the breast of this
prophet.
There were others who went with him or followed him into that richer
valley, adding the self-rake to the sickle, then putting a platform on the
harvester so that the men who bound the sheaves had no longer to walk and
bend over the grain on the ground, as they had done since before the days
of Ruth and Naomi, then devising an iron arm to take the place of one of
flesh, and finally putting a piece of twine in the hand of that iron arm
and making it do the work of the binder. I cannot help wondering what
Tonty of the iron hand would have said could he have seen that half-human
machine cutting the wheat, and with its iron hand tying it in bundles,
there in the fields of Aramoni, just back of the Rock St. Louis.
But I do not need to idealize or emphasize to men of France the service of
this particular precursor, who was for years considering the unwrought
iron, making experiment after experiment before he came down into that
golden valley, literally to multiply its acres a hundredfold; for the
French Academy of Science declared that he had "done more for the cause of
agriculture than any other living man," and a late President of the French
Republic is quoted as saying that without this harvester "France would
starve.
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