FARMERS' INSTITUTES. 211 



Now to pass on. I was in Chicago once, when it was the most doleful 

 sight the eye of man ever beheld. It was just after the fire, and it was a 

 mass of ruins. No man has ever described it. No human being 

 could, no imagination could realize, no pen recall the awful sight 

 that met the eye. It looked as if, and people felt as if, it were 

 time to write: ''History is closed. It came, it flourished, and it 

 went up in smoke." In two years Chicago had arisen, phoenix-like, 

 from its ashes, higher, broader, grander, richer, stronger than before, 

 and how? It went up there on the profits made from pigs and 

 corn. Those rich, fertile vallej^s back of Chicago, in Illinois, Iowa, 

 Kansas and Nebraska — all that country contributed to its growth, and 

 rebuilt that magnificent, unparalleled city. It was the farmers' contri- 

 bution ; they might have waited there until doomsday, praying for com- 

 merce to come, for manufacturers to come and build them up, if agricul- 

 ture had kept in the background, and had not turned its wonderful con- 

 tributions in their direction. 



When we get the balance of trade in our favor, it is the farmers' contri- 

 bution that does it. In 1892, we exported from America to foreign lands, 

 one billion, thirty million dollars worth of property. Now what was the 

 farmers' contribution out of that? Mind you, I have claimed 60 per cent 

 of this stock, but we have 78 per cent of the stock in the exports that 

 went from this land, to force a balance of trade of 202 millions, back in 

 our favor. We contributed, from the farms, almost eight hundred of 

 that thousand millions, by our faith in the soil, our faith in God and the 

 march of the seasons in the farming of the land. By your industry, you 

 wrung from the ground enough to feed this nation, and to send abroad 

 eight hundred millions of property. 



I am with you tonight to leave with you, perhaps, the last speech T 

 shall ever make, to impress upon your minds the importance of the call- 

 ing in which we are engaged. I have talked to you about what we are 

 doing — our share in the exports. And not only in this direction, are we 

 contributing, but all the while, in every department. Let no man sneer 

 at your calling or make you think one particle less of it. 



But what is the grandest of all the crops? The boys and the girls that 

 are raised on the farms. They grow up and go into the cities, and form 

 the best business men we have, and there are some things that we on the 

 farm have reason to be thankful for. Before me tonight are some 

 farmers' wives, and mothers, with their children; let me say a word of 

 encouragement to you. We do not contribute to some things, in propor- 

 tion to our numbers. For four years I visited the Industrial School at 

 Lansing, as often as once a fortnight. I have taken those boys where 

 there were a hundred or fifty of them, and talked to them. I would say, 

 "Boys, I want every one of you who came from a farm to raise the right 

 hand." I never yet found over three in a hundred or two in fifty there 

 that came from the farms. The usual average is two in a hundred; out 

 of 500 boys, ten came from the country and 490 from the cities and 

 villages. But I am here to say to the mothers of the farmer boys, that 

 your boys do not suffer the temptations that boys in the town do. They 

 have the mother's affection and guiding hand to buoy them up. and 

 because the city boys are ranging at large, and the gilded saloons are 

 open, and crime is so broadcast, and the many temptations, because of 



