424 
WISCONSIN STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
son, no one, I think, will dispute the assertion that a given amount 
of time and labor will produce more wheat, barley, oats, corn, hay, 
roots, clover and grass seed; more cotton, rice, hemp, flax and to¬ 
bacco; and more beef, mutton, wool, pork, milk, butter and cheese 
to-day than it would twenty-five, fifty or one hundred years ago. 
And the same is true, as a rule, of the articles for which a farmer 
wishes to exchange his surplus products. A given amount of time 
and labor will produce more and better implements and machines; 
more woolen, linen and cotton cloth; more boots, shoes, stockings 
and gloves; more pins, needles, buttons and thread. 
The same amount of labor will dig more coal, iron and silver, and 
will saw and plane more boards, and give us more nails, hammers, 
glass, putty and paint; will give us more furniture for our houses, 
and more and better light, and more, if not better, books, papers 
and pictures. Tn short, owing to the discoveries of science, to in¬ 
creased skill, and to mechanical and chemical inventions, a given 
amount of labor will produce more of the necessaries and luxuries 
of life which a farmer needs to procure in exchange for his farm 
products than it would twenty-five, fifty or one hundred years ago. 
So far as material prosperity is concerned, therefore, we are, as a 
nation, or a community of nations, better olF than we were twenty- 
five, fifty or one hundred years ago. We need not work so hard, or 
if we work as hard, we can have more of the necessaries and luxu¬ 
ries of life. I am speaking now of all classes. 
But, of course, it does not necessarily follow that one class in ex¬ 
changing its products for the products of another class gets, at all 
times, a fair and just equivalent. And no acts of legislation will 
make a man just and liberal. If a barber in Kansas refuses to shave 
a farmer for less than two bushels of corn, the farmer can let his 
beard grow. And if a shoemaker wants fifty bushels of potatoes 
for a pair of boots, the farmer may have to submit to the exchange. 
But such a state of things in a free and intelligent community will 
not last long. The farmer or his son will turn shoemaker, and by 
and by the shoemaker will want to turn farmer. This matter of the 
exchange of labor or its products must be left to regulate itself. 
Monopoly, extortion, and all forms of injustice, seldom prosper in 
the end. 
To me, the prospects of American agriculture were never so 
bright as at the present time. There is plenty of work to he done. 
