LECTURES AND ESSAYS READ AT INSTITUTES. 179 



advantages of club and grange libraries, together with the literary, scientific, 

 and political periodicals of the day, easily accessible to him, tell us who will, 

 why the farmer should not be one of the most learned, astnte, and sensible 

 persons in the world ; and yet while we see men of every other conceivable 

 labor, trade, avocation, and profession harmoniously at work, each in his own 

 direction, seemingly willing to live and let live, each battling for the common 

 good, striking with the keen ax of unanimity and intelligence at the root of 

 all obnoxious legislation, we find the farmer climbing up a rickety ladder, 

 with a dull hatchet of questionable policy, trying to see how small a twig of 

 our industrial ''Upas" he can bruise off in the longest conceivable time, 

 seemingly studiously avoiding all great and momentous questions that should 

 require prompt and emphatic legislation, and busying himself with insignifi- 

 cant and unimportant matters, unmindful of a ponderous national debt, and 

 its constantly accumulating interest; forgetful of extravagant appropriations 

 for rapidly increasing and profligate public expenses; taking no thought of 

 the enormous grants of land to pretended corporations who seek to gain title to 

 the same without an apology for a consideration ; ready for the pittance of a 

 few cents tariff on a single industry, to grant the right to moneyed monopo- 

 lists, to reach their fingers to the bottoms of the pockets of our poor industrial 

 people, and to make a free grab bag of their meagre purses to fill the coffers 

 of the rich. In not one of these great issues have we, as farmers, ever sug- 

 gested a candid, practical solution, or made a united and pronounced attempt 

 at reformatory legislation. It is true that while wolves have been devastating 

 our flocks we may have been strenuously searching for skippers in our cheese. 

 Now to illustrate exactly what I mean, I will take the important question of 

 railroad transportation; for on that question all of us farmers pretend to be 

 posted. Now what have we done toward solving that question? Absolutely 

 nothing but petition and whine. We have never made it an issue upon which 

 we have either attempted to nominate or elect a representative to our legisla- 

 ture. All we look for in that direction is did my party nominate the man, 

 and if so, that is sufficient. Questions of monopolies, transportation tariffs, 

 land grants, government expenditure and what our babies are to have for sup- 

 per all sink into insignificance before the fact that he is the nominee of my 

 party. For this reason we have d(5ue absolutely nothing. We do not even 

 meet the railroad companies half way in our endeavors to secure more favor- 

 able rates of transportation by massing our products in such quantities as will 

 make it to their interest to give us rates, but instead we send, as it were, a 

 peck of potatoes in a paper sack for shipment and whine if these ''great 

 monopolies" do not give us rates. I said before that we had done absolutely 

 nothing in regard to the transportation question. But there is one phase of it 

 which we have pushed with an energy worthy of the cause. But whether our 

 action has been in favor of ourselves or the railroad companies is, to my mind, 

 still an open question. I refer to our united and glorious action in reference 

 to legislative passes. On that issue of passes, we elected in this county two 

 editors and defeated two farmers. In that issue we made it our special duty 

 to see that no railroad company squandered its money on representative farm- 

 ers, or in other words, to see that our representative farmers pay full fare to 

 all railroad companies over whose lines he is to be transported. One represen- 

 tative paper of us farmers grows eloquent over the abolition of representative 

 passes, and at the same time begs transportation for himself over the same 

 roads. Our State Grange passes resolutions against the free pass system, while 

 the same members will crawl in the dirt to get half fare to and from its scg. 



