the farms increased on an enormous scale, and the surplus,
exported to Europe, furnished the liquid capital that made
possible the financing of the war. Europe gazed in astonishment
at a new spectacle in history; that of a nation fighting the
greatest war which had been known up to that time, employing the
greater part of her young and vigorous men in the armies, and yet
growing infinitely richer in the process. The Civil War produced
many new implements of warfare, such as the machine gun and the
revolving turret for battleships, but, so far as determining the
result was concerned, perhaps the most important was the reaper.

Extensive as the use of agricultural machinery became in the
Civil War, that period only faintly foreshadowed the development
that has taken place since. The American farm is today like a
huge factory; the use of the hands has almost entirely
disappeared; there are only a few operations of husbandry that
are not performed automatically. In Civil War days the reaper
merely cut the grain; now machinery rakes it up and binds it into
sheaves and threshes it. Similar mechanisms bind corn and rice.
Machinery is now used to plant potatoes; grain, cotton, and other
farm products are sown automatically. The husking bees that
formed one of our social diversions in Civil War days have
disappeared, for particular machines now rip the husks off the
ears. Horse hay-forks and horse hayrakes have supplanted manual
labor. The mere names of scores of modern instruments of farming,
all unknown in Civil War days--hay carriers, hay loaders, hay
stackers, manure spreaders, horse corn planters, corn drills,
disk harrows, disk ploughs, steam ploughs, tractors, and the
like--give some suggestion of the extent to which America has
made mechanical the most ancient of occupations. In thus