38 MICHIGAN STATE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 



little folk; the farm, which is the provider and maintenance of 

 luxury and comfort and the playground of the family and their 

 friends. And for the protection of the welfare and happiness 

 of these homes, which are very little different from the purest 

 type of homes anywhere, those problems affecting the rights 

 and interests of the people of the state at large are considered 

 freely, for just what they are worth and what they stand for in 

 the scale of equity and justice; though it must be admitted 

 that the farmers labor under the very great disadvantage of 

 not having at their ready command a prodigious mass of statis- 

 tics and compilations, from which convenient deductions may 

 be drawn, and are not favored with the enhghtenment of the 

 oratorical efforts of hired attorneys, so learned that they can 

 argue with equal powers of persuasion and equal display of 

 sincerity upon either side their clientage may desire. 



And so we hear from certain sources that the country people 

 are immeasurably crude in their logic as compared with others, 

 and that they are disposed to advance starthng fads and most 

 dangerous ideas of needed and corrective legislation. Well, 

 possibly ! These erratic fads are, however, as a rule, important 

 enough to call forth the attention and ridicule of a majority of 

 the politicians, for two or more years, then to engage them in 

 what appears very like a combination of the games of football 

 and leapfrog for about the same length of time, when they are 

 glad to indorse them as their very own; too valuable and too 

 necessary to public progress to be longer kept from the dear 

 constituents, over whose interests they preside. 



My friends, the decision of the common people upon meas- 

 ures for public good, arrived at under the sane and natural 

 conditions of the home, and far removed from the persuasion 

 and tumult of the caucus and convention, are much surer to lead 

 him who champions them in the public service toward the 

 United States Senate than over the much-trodden pathway 

 to the penitentiary. 



