Seven
bushels of wheat for every man, woman, and child of the ninety or more
millions in America and a thousand million dollars' worth of food to other
nations! That is the sum of the product--of what has been led forth in a
single year.
But the leader forth, the producer, the man who set his heart upon
"turning his furrows," whose "wakefulness was to give heifers their
fodder," he has himself risen. He has, as I said of the farmers of Aramoni
(the sons of the first settlers who are still turning up occasionally a
flint arrow-head in the fields)--he has his daily paper, his daily mail,
his telephone. He "pays his taxes with a week's earnings." He ploughs,
plants, sows, cultivates, reaps by machinery. The poet Gray could find
only with difficulty in that valley a footsore ploughman homeward wending
his weary way, and Millet would in vain look for a sower, a man with a
hoe, a woman reaper with a sickle, a man with a scythe or cradle. The new-
world peasant is not only maintaining more than his per-capita share of
the "fabric of the world" but he is taking his place in the councils of
men.
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