No. 4 ] NEW ENGLAND ACiRICULTURE. 127 



sell in c'Oinpotition with the ni.'irkets of the nvoiUI without 

 any i)rotection. 



The first agricultural meeting that I cvei* attended was in 

 the town of Hinghaui. My friend Hersey invited me to 

 make my first appearance with fear and trembling before 

 that intelligent l)ody of ]\Ia.ssachusetts farmers. There was 

 present there, with several other of the best speakers of this 

 Commonwealth, a clergyman from Boston, the Rev. B. A. 

 Carpenter, and he opened his speech with something that 1 

 have never forgotten. He spoke of a sign in the southern 

 part of England, beginning with the king, " I govern all ; " 

 next the soldier, " I fight for all ; " next the clergyman, " I 

 pray for all ; " next the lawyer, ' ' I plead for all ; " next the 

 farmer, " I pay for all." I never forgot that. I do not 

 think I have ever repeated it, but it has often been in my 

 mind. That was, I think, the whole question of political 

 economy put into small compass. 



The business of this country, gentlemen, for the last four 

 or five years, or five or six years, has been afflicted in all the 

 paltry operations and all the great alfairs of mankind. If 

 you tell a western farmer that the reason why he did not get 

 his price for wdieat was because somebody was president or 

 somebody was governor in place of somebody else, you 

 would be only making a fool of him. You cannot make a 

 fool of a western man that way. The fact is, that the })rice 

 of the agriculture of our western country is fixed in the 

 foreign markets. AVhy we have to-day a rise in the price 

 of cereals, especially of wheat, is because they have had one 

 of those great famines in India that they have every ten or 

 twelve years, probably from time immemorial. The price 

 of wheat has gone up from 58 cents a bushel, earlj' in Sep- 

 tember, to 82 cents. 



I am trying to induce these farmers to get their living by 

 intelligence and hard work, not by taxing somebody else to 

 get something for themselves ; not call to Hercules when 

 your wagon gets stuck in the mud, but put your shoulder 

 to the wheel and boost it out. The price of corn is now 

 low. Why? Because this country has raised this year 

 more than 8,000,000,000 l)ushels of corn. Figure up what 

 that is worth when it gets into the market of the world. 



