LEGISLATIVE AIDS TO AGRICULTURE. 19 



livelihood. Therefore the struggle is now going on, not only 

 in this country, but abroad, in both directions, for such equal 

 division. On the one side, workmen are insisting that they 

 shall have more pay ; on the other hand, other workmen are in- 

 sisting that they shall work less hours for the same pay, which 

 is another mode of arriving at the same result. 



At this hour, and upon this occasion, it may not be profitable 

 to discuss this question, which soon will tax, for its proper ad- 

 justment, the best statesmanship and highest humanity and jus- 

 tice of the country. It will not be ignored. If the laboring 

 man has improved in no great degree in anything else, he has 

 become fully aware of his situation, his powers and his capabil- 

 ities, and will not long suffer what he deems to be an injustice, 

 however it may be guarded by legal enactment. He has learned 

 and is still learning that with himself resides the power by the 

 ballot to repeal those laws, and substitute others in his own 

 favor in their stead ; and the danger is that he may not stop in 

 that change at the precise limit of justice on his side. Here he 

 is not limited to strikes and combinations, as in the old world, 

 in the pursuit of his rights. In this country he is the law-mak- 

 ing power itself. I have thus only adverted to the actual state 

 of things, to aid us in considering its relations and effects upon 

 agricultural labors. 



It must be first considered that there is a lack of increase in 

 the capacity for production of the land within the last half cen- 

 tury, as compared with the increase of production in everything 

 which goes to make the necessaries of life coming from manu- 

 factures and the arts. True, the machine-reaper, mower, 

 thresher and rake have aided, in some degree, the labor of the 

 farmer ; but it cannot fail to be observed that almost all the im- 

 provements of agricultural machinery only aid him to gather 

 the results of his toil, but do not make a spire of grass or blade 

 of corn grow where there was not one before. The plough is 

 the same with which your fathers broke the furrow ; the hoe, 

 the shovel, the spade, are the same. The cultivator and like 

 contrivances have lightened, in some degree, your labors, but 

 only in the thousandth part of a degree as compared with the 

 production of the power-loom over the loom of a half century 

 since. 



Therefore it is that there has been, and from the nature of 



