LEGISLATIVE AIDS TO AGRICULTURE. 29 



any individual of society to get his living without labor, is a 

 tax direct, inevitable and oppressive, upon the laboring interest 

 of the community, and is an injustice to every laborer and every 

 farmer. This system of special legislation, which has grown up 

 until it takes the legislature six months in the year to pass laws 

 to guide the State for the other six months, has come to be an 

 evil, to alleviate, aye, to eradicate which, I call upon the only 

 disinterested body of men — the farmers of Massachusetts — to 

 interpose. 



In reply to these suggestions, I may be answered — as it is the 

 stock reply of those asking special legislation, that incorporating 

 railroads and aiding means of transportation of persons and 

 products are of equal advantage to the agricultural interest 

 with tliat of any other — that the special legislation of which I 

 have complained has built up a system of railroads over the 

 State which has largely conduced to its prosperity. A large 

 part of this may be admitted to be true, and yet it is no answer 

 to our argument. The legislation which has built railroads, 

 from which capital and capitalists may realize large dividends 

 and immense fortunes, may and does indeed benefit the State, 

 but at a very enormous expense to the tax-payer and producer. 

 Dividends of ten or fifteen per cent., railroad stocks increasing 

 from par to one hundred and fifty per cent., are only to be sus- 

 tained by rates of fare which are burdensome and oppressive to 

 those needing the means of cheap transportation to get their 

 produce to market. And is it not a fact, that the railroads find 

 it for their interest so to manage their affairs and to adjust their 

 tariff of charges as to favor the long lines of transportation, — 

 thus to entice the wheat and flour and corn of the West to come 

 to Boston for shipment, and not to New York, — rather than in 

 favor of the local agricultural interests of Massachusetts ? 



Again, the undertaking of one of the most gigantic engineer- 

 ing enterprises of the age — the boring of a tunnel five miles 

 through a mountain — is not, if I understand it, although the 

 millions requisite for the accomplishment of the object are to 

 come from taxation, intended to build up the local interests of 

 Massachusetts farmers, but is to make a through line to the 

 great West in the interests of capital invested in the banking, 

 mercantile and manufacturing pursuits of the State. Railroads 

 have now become the actual common highways of the country, 



