Wisconsin State Agricultural Society. 
ate returns for our labor ?” The answer came in the immense crops 
of wheat and corn, that yearly sought a market from these new 
farms. The quantity of these grains not only increased as rapidly 
as the population and amount of land brought into cultivation, but 
as already stated much bister, as there were raised in 1850, forty- 
eight bushels of corn and wheat to each inhabitant, and sixty-eight 
bushels in 1872, an increase greater by 40 per cent, than that of 
the population. This condition of things extended over so large a 
territory that for several years there has been, neither at home nor 
abroad, a market sufficient for the greatly increased production. 
The evil effect of glutting the market with these two cereals, 
began to show itself before the war. But the greatly increased 
consumption by our armies in the field, combined with the fact that 
a large number of men were taken from the farms for military ser¬ 
vice, so changed the relative amount of production and consump¬ 
tion, that there was again a demand for all the wheat and corn the 
whole country could produce. This new demand acted as a great 
stimulus upon production. The amount of wheat sown and 
corn planted, w r as only limited by the land and labor at the com¬ 
mand of the farmers, for a ready market at remunerative prices 
awaited the harvest. But this market was not a permanent one. 
The close of the war both destroyed the market and increased the 
production, by returning thousands of soldiers to their farms.— 
Gradually since then, farmers who were largely grain-growers have 
seen their means of support pass from them. Years have come and 
gone with these men, years of hard toil and rigid economy, with¬ 
out increasing their* wealth, and often they have found, at the close 
of the season, that the yield of the farm would not pay for the 
labor expended upon it and interest on the money invested. 
The resulting hard times then are largely the effect of a persist¬ 
ent violation, on an unusual scale, of a law of political economy as 
unchangeable as the laws of the Medes and Persians, that the de¬ 
mand for any commodity must regulate the supply. The present 
condition of western farmers was long ago predicted, if they con¬ 
tinued to depend upon the production of corn and wheat for their 
revenue. 
In 1864, the superintendent of the census said, (Agriculture of the 
U. S., census 1860, p. 42) u For some time before the war our Wes¬ 
tern farmers were beginning to complain that wheat-growing was 
