Wisconsin State Agricultural Society. 
149 
production rests. We eat the food and build the houses whose 
material has come from the farm. Nor is it our lives only, hut our 
industries also that are fed by the farm. Thence comes our leather,, 
wood, wool, cotton,—outside the metals and minerals—the raw ma¬ 
terials of almost every product. 
Socially, the farmer has much the same interest that falls to him 
as an industrial element. There is no class of our citizens who 
have better conditions for a truly sober, honest, intelligent life, one, 
therefore, which shall better meet life’s great ends, than farmers. 
I say this, however, in the face of the past history of the world, and 
I must limit it largely to American farmers. Farmers, the rural 
population, have hitherto been, taking the world at large, the most 
uncouth, ignorant and I might say, dull and brutish of any portion 
of the nations to which they have respectively belonged. Farm 
labor has been, first slave labor, then surf labor, then peasant labor, 
and at length has become, in most countries, the labor of small, de¬ 
pendent and oppressed tenants and farm-hands. This fact is find¬ 
ing slow correction elsewhere, and is only a very limited fact in our 
happy land, the paradise of the farmer. Here, we repeat it, no 
class has better conditions for an honest, sober, useful, self-sufficing 
life than the average farmer. I cannot say that I think that he al¬ 
ways, or even very often, reaches such a life, but it is certainly open 
to him. 
While safe oportunities of production, and moderate motives be¬ 
long to the farmer, motives, perhaps too moderate to quicken the 
mass of them, there also fall to the ambitious among them, social dis¬ 
tinctions, positions of trust and proffers of knowledge. I cannot 
say that I altogether regret the ripple of political activity that is 
now running through and disturbing the farmers in the West. 1 
only fear that their leaders may be too strong for them, and we shall 
have the spectacle of a sleek, massive, kind-eyed bovine, meekly led 
by a sly, tricky boy for his own ends, 
My point is this, and it must bring me directly to my subject: 
our farmers, a numerous class, and fortunate in the conditions under 
which they are found, occupy a border ground of influence, from 
which they may easily and justly rise—but are in danger of not rising 
—to a central position in society and government. The one inclu¬ 
sive thing that everywhere interferes with progress, is the want of 
intelligence; but, in the case of the farmers, I must make a specifi- 
