3S4 * WISCONSIN STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
farm products are low, and many of you have had only poor crops ; 
charges for transportation are high; you do have to pay too much, 
for agricultural implements ; raxes are high; money is scarce; it 
is hard to know that while your hard toil has brought you but 
little recompense, there are men rioting in ill-gotten wealth. 
But worse than low prices is that leeling which makes a farmer 
blindly shut his eyes to all other causes, and attribute them only 
to excessive freight rates; worse than poor returns for his work is 
the feeling that makes a farmer hate men of other callings, and 
makes him willing to repay real or imaginary wrongs by attempted 
wrongs and defraudings; worse than high taxes for the farmer is 
the attempt to gain prosperity by legislation for his special bene¬ 
fit, however unjust to others; worse than all material evils of the 
farmer’s position is the feeling that prompts him, in the face of his 
children, in the face of the world, to give up in sullen despair: to 
settle down into a gloomy misanthropy ; to look on his class as 
especially oppressed by all the world; to distrust his brother 
man—his brother often by ties of blood—because he happens to 
be engaged in other business. 
Think of an intelligent farmer deliberately saying, “ we have 
wasted our lives in learning to farm, but our children need not fol¬ 
low our example.” Think of an Iowa farmer deliberately writing 
that he wished there were no improved agricultural implements ! 
Think of farmers wishing they could banish the comforts, the con¬ 
veniences gained, the wonderful advancement of the past half cen¬ 
tury, and go back to the old times ! And all this has been said 
and written within the past few weeks. 
So long as the world stands, farming must'pay. In the nature 
of things, as God has made us, it is inevitable that, as a broad, gen¬ 
eral rule, fair returns will follow intelligent labor on the farm. Great 
profits, a life of ease, exemption from physical labor, many of the 
luxuries of life are not to be expected; but taking all things into 
consideration, farmers will ever continue to have as much real 
prosperity, as men of equal intelligence, equal education, equal en- 
ergy, equal capital in other callings. 
Farmers to-day are not the only men who feel the “hard times.” 
It is a mistake of fact, and a terrible mistake in its effects to believe 
that they, of all men, are the only ones who meet with troubles and 
