44 STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



greatest industry in the world, and the one which must prosper or all 

 other industries fail — the farming industry, — so that it may receive 

 a generating impetus, and by so doing you will reduce the first cost 

 of transportation to the benefit of the farmers and also make it easier 

 to get to school, to church, to grange and club halls, and neighbors' 

 sitting rooms and dinner tables and in this way generate better girls 

 and boys, and so a better United States of America. 



Now as regards State aid — is there any equity in it? Let me call 

 your attention to something in which there is no equity'; however, let 

 me again say, that I am not here to discuss religious or moral questions. 

 I am not like the hen that was given forty-eight eggs to hatch, and 

 she being an energetic hen spread out over the whole forty-eight and 

 that made her so thin that she didn't hatch a single egg; now I am 

 trying to hatch but one and that is the good roads egg; but I can 

 see without much trying that there are four thousand saloons where 

 intoxicating liquors are sold in this State ; also see that the license 

 money is divided between the city, or village, and the county; I read 

 the other day in that religious journal called the ''New York World," 

 that one-half the insanity in men was caused by the excessive use 

 of intoxicating liquors and that half of the insanity in females was 

 traceable to the same cause; so I think I have a right to use just a 

 bit of common horse sense and come to this concl\ision, that one-half 

 of the criminals, one-half of the insane and one-half of the feeble- 

 minded are created by the excessive use of intoxicants. Well ! Your 

 farmers are not in the saloon business, neither are your farms situated 

 in the village or city; but these unfortunates are created in the village 

 or city and after they are created they are sent to the prisons, reform- 

 atories, asylums, or home for feeble-minded, which you taxed your farms 

 to build, and tax your farms to run, and I would ask, that the license 

 money be divided into three equal parts, one-third to the village or 

 city, to pay the policemen to watch me when I am drunk, one-third to 

 the county to pay for my keep if I go to the county house after squan- 

 dering my money, and one-third to the State treasury to pay my ex- 

 penses if my drinking makes a criminal out of me, or to pay the ex- 

 penses of my wife if my debauchery drives her to the insane asylum, 

 or to pay the expenses of taking care of my foolish children if foolish 

 they may be, or I would ask if my farm has got to be taxed to take 

 care of unfortunates created in village and city in which I have no hand 

 and do not participate in the profits; I insist that it is but the golden 

 rule doctrine or reciprocity that all property in the State pay something 

 toward the improvement of the common wagon roads. 



Never in my life did I have a better illustration of my duty than 

 a few days ago regarding paying something on my property in the city 

 of Detroit, toward a State aid fund for improving roads; I was at 

 Brown City — spoke there to a large audience at a Farmers' Institute-; 

 it was on Saturday and I wanted to get home that night, but there 

 was no railroad train that I could get that would take me there, so 

 I engaged a livery rig which took me to North Branch where I could 

 get a train. Now if there had been a train and I had gone to the station 

 in Brown City and purchased a ticket, what would have happened? 

 The ticket agent would have charged me a suflflcient amount of money 

 to have paid a fair dividend on the money invested in the railroad 



