184 Wisconsin state agricultural society . 
tracts, means that we are handed over to a corporate power with¬ 
in the state to do with as they list, they are as false teachers as the 
men who pronounced the Dred Scott decision. The freedom of 
the citizen, whatever be the fate of African slavery or railway 
despotism, must and shall be preserved. 
Our national, as well as our state legislation, has been tampered 
with, and is too much in the interest of capitalists, and too little 
in favor of the people. Tariffs, so far as they are protective of 
industries that employ but a small portion of the population, 
schemes of finance that depreciate currency and leave it without 
any certain value, are profitable to men of capital and to shrewd 
speculators, or rather gamblers in stocks; but they are a heavy 
tax upon that portion of the population that is not speculative 
and must earn its living painfully by manual labor. The farmers, 
the mechanics and the laborers of this country should have spe¬ 
cie payments, a fixed and unwavering currency, and low taxes on 
articles of necessity. 
Still more discreditable, if not more injurious, is the influence 
that has sought and gained enormous grants of land for railroad 
corporations, and has interested itself in the election of senators 
of the United States who were known to favor its iniquitous 
schemes. The leading railways of the country are the real con¬ 
stituency of more than one of our congressmen. You or I may 
do the voting, but we are too often the machines; back of us are 
the powers that elect. It is not a republican or a democratic 
crime. When Jay Gould was asked bow he manipulated the 
elections to the New York legislature, he answered: “In a re¬ 
publican county I was a republican; in a democratic county I 
was a democrat; in a doubtful county I was doubtful.” There is 
not a shadow of doubt but that both of the great parties in the 
country—that is the representatives of the whole people—have 
thus been, wittingly or unwittingly, made the tools of corpora¬ 
tions. 
“ Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” We have neglected 
the duties of freemen, and we are getting a fit reward. But with 
political institutions that express the Divine purpose and formu^ 
late the result of our latest civilization ; with political theories 
that have not only revolutionized the past, but stretch forth into 
