The plough, the self-binder, the thresher were all invented
on the farm.
The son of Sirach said: "They shall not be sought for in the council of
the people, and in the assembly they shall not mount on high"; but
fourteen of the first twenty-six Presidents were farmers' sons, and that
statistic gives but merest suggestion of the farmer's part in all the
councils of the people.
Here are a few significant, graphic facts which would furnish interesting
material for a new edition of Virgil's "Georgics" and "Bucolics" or lead
Horace to revise his verses on rural life.
There are practically five times as many farmers (under the early man-
power definition of the farmer) as the census shows, for the farmer now
works with the old-time power of five men.
Six per cent of the human race (and the larger part of that six per cent
is in the Mississippi Valley) produces, one-fifth of the wheat of the
world, two-thirds of the cotton, and three fourths of the corn (and this
takes no account of its reapers and mowers that gather the crops in other
valleys).
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