148 
Annual Report of the 
by chinch-bugs, and if Mr. Wood had been there he would have 
been in the same fix with the rest of them. 
Adjourned till 7:30 P. M., to meet in the Assembly Chamber. 
ECONOMY IN FARMING. 
BY JOHN BASCOM, LL. D., 
President of the University of Wisconsin. 
Farmers, to a patriotic or philanthropic mind, constitute a most 
interesting class. The prosperity of our nation, and the prosperity 
of Christian society, must depend very much upon them. 
They are a midway class between the rich and the poor, between 
capitalists and laborers, between the educated and the uneducated. 
Farmers, a farmer, can easily move upward; there is no social 
ban upon him. He can easily sink downward, there is nothing in 
his calling to sustain him. As midway men, they furnish the nat¬ 
ural cement of society, they keep labor in countenance, and check 
the hauteur of capital. They are the peers of everybody and above 
nobody. They bring us constantly, in our estimates of our fellows, 
to what a man is, rather than to the calling which he pursues. 
Farmers thus furnish the core, the democratic—I am not speaking 
of politics—center of our republican society. 
Farmers are broadly diffused over our entire country, and their 
interests are much the same in every portion of it. This assertion 
would be almost absolutely true, was it not for the cotton and sugar 
interests of the south. Scattered everywhere, yet one in pursuit 
and in character, the elevation of the farmer, his thrift and intelli¬ 
gence are points of national import, and give its national features 
to society. This interest, attaching to the position of farmers, is 
sustained by their numbers. They are not only more numerous 
than any other one class, they about equal them all combined; they 
compose not far from one-half the nation. They are thus by nu¬ 
merical strength properly the body, of which other classes are the 
members; nor this alone by numbers, but also by the farther fact, 
that they are the source of nutrition, the quality and the quantity 
of cur nourishment depend on them. We who are scattered through 
a hundred other employments, are but outlying limbs fed and sus¬ 
tained by this bulky body of farm labor, with whom most primitive 
