They
bring forth also not merely foodstuffs, but vast quantities of
raw material for manufacture, such as cotton, wool, and hides.
This immense productivity is due to the use of farm machinery on
a scale seen nowhere else in the world. There is still, and
always will be, a good deal of hard labor on the farm. But
invention has reduced the labor and has made possible the
carrying on of this vast industry by a relatively small number of
hands.
The farmers of Washington's day had no better tools than had the
farmers of Julius Caesar's day; in fact, the Roman ploughs were
probably superior to those in general use in America eighteen
centuries later. "The machinery of production," says Henry Adams,
"showed no radical difference from that familiar in ages long
past. The Saxon farmer of the eighth century enjoyed most of the
comforts known to Saxon farmers of the eighteenth."* One type of
plough in the United States was little more than a crooked stick
with an iron point attached, sometimes with rawhide, which simply
scratched the ground. Ploughs of this sort were in use in
Illinois as late as 1812. There were a few ploughs designed to
turn a furrow, often simply heavy chunks of tough wood, rudely
hewn into shape, with a wrought-iron point clumsily attached. The
moldboard was rough and the curves of no two were alike.
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