226 Wisconsin state agricultural society. 
ADDRESS 
BY GOVERNOR C. C. WASHBURN. 
Delivered before the Northern Wisconsin Fair, at Oshkosh, October 3,1872. 
I have often wondered what might be the reason why those 
gentlemen who compose our agricultural and mechanical associa¬ 
tions, in selecting persons to address them on occasions of this 
kind, should so often make choice of those whose every day pur¬ 
suits and life labors have been devoted to entirely different chan¬ 
nels from their own, and whose knowledge of the subject upon 
which they are required to speak is, at the best, but of a theo¬ 
retical character. 
The only solution of this question that my mind has been able 
to discover, consists in that common infirmity of our natures 
which causes us to derive pleasure from the reflection that we are 
wiser than those who undertake to instruct us. If I have been 
selected upon any such principle, I beg to assure you that you 
have made no mistake, for candor compels me in the outset to de¬ 
clare unto you, that what I know about farming, is—if possible— 
even less than the knowledge of Uncle Horace; for, although 
born and brought up on a farm, amid the rough, bleak and sterile 
hills of New England, my labors at farming terminated almost as 
soon as they began, and before my acquaintance with the fertile 
and teeming acres of this glorious western country; and, consid¬ 
ering the difficult and unpromising lot of agriculturists of the 
last generation, could one be blamed, whose natural inclination 
toward hard labor was not excessive, for abandoning, while yet a 
boy, a pursuit which promised, at that time, only a bare subsist¬ 
ence as the scanty and dearly earned reward of never ending la¬ 
bor? 
In my earlier years, the-life of a farmer was one of patient, pro¬ 
longed, unremitting toil, with but a slight recompense awaiting 
him even at the end of long years of persistent industry. At that 
time, few of those multitudinous modern miracles, which now 
serve to lighten the labors of the husbandman, had an existence. 
