446 WISCONSIN STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
States of Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota should take the “ West¬ 
ern Farmer,” not because it is published at our State Capital, but 
because it is filled with valuable information that comes within 
the needs and wants of every farmer living in the northwest, and 
because it is conducted with great energy and ability. 
It may be asked, where is the money to come from to do all 
these things? In answer, let me say there is time enough spent 
in waiting for the signs of the moon to get right, and loss enough 
sustained by doing things out of their proper season, to pay for all 
these things; and further, money in the pocket is of small ac¬ 
count compared with knowledge in the head. 
If farmers would become intelligent after the manner above in¬ 
dicated, they would become a power in the land. We should hear 
no more complaint of the middle men affixing the value to the 
farmers’ products, and at the same time making the price of the 
articles the farmer has to purchase. The Hon. Levi Woodbury, in 
the year 1844, while discussing the tariff question in the U. S. 
Senate, estimated that the cultivators of the soil were, at that time, 
nine out of every eleven of the population of the United States. 
The estimate was doubtless far too large, but they are largely in 
the majority in the United States, and they are so distributed that 
they could, if they had the intelligence to back up their numbers, 
control the legislation, the commerce and manufactures of the 
country ; and yet with all their numerical strength, they were 
found to be utterly powerless to retain the pitiful duty of ten per 
cent, on wool when twenty intelligent manufacturers asked for its 
reduction. 
In the remarks that I am now about to make, I take the pre¬ 
caution to except the twenty or thirty honorable members that 
represent the farming interest in this capital at this time, as well 
as the gentlemen that have added brilliancy to the history of the 
past from my own county. The general rule of electing farmers 
to office, especially legislative offices, is after this manner. The 
politicians of a given locality, having a large number of axes to 
grind, put their heads together and select one of the most obscure 
individuals they can find living on a farm, and put him in nomi¬ 
nation ; then the editor and the men of brains in the county go 
to work and make him believe that he is the greatest statesman in 
