362 Wisconsin state agricultural society . 
his great learning, he gave us a few foundation facts upon which 
he himself failed to build. In one of his interviews with the 
New York Tribune reporter, he told us that no farmer in Illinois 
could raise a bushel of corn for less than twenty-five cents. Then 
he gave us a case of a neighbor of his who spent a whole day 
with two teams in marketing sixty bushels of corn, and as the 
neighbor was returning home he asked him how much he got for 
his sixty bushels of corn, and in reply the man held up two pairs 
of boys 7 boots and said, “ I got these for my corn and two dollars 
in money.” Corn was worth twenty cents at the station and the 
company charged eleven cents to freight it to Chicago, where it 
sold for thirty-one ceats, so you see that if the railroad had 
hauled the corn for nothing, the poor farmer would have still 
been in debt, for it is certinly worth three dollars a day 
for a man and team. Now, what Farmer Smith’s neighbor 
needed, was not cheaper transportation, but the knowledge how 
to convert his corn into more highly concentrated articles, so that 
it would not take him two days to market twenty dollars worth. 
Had he converted this corn into beef or pork, the cost to 
market the same would have been seventy cents; into cheese, 
twenty-eight cents; into butter, twenty cents; and if converted 
into wool, seven cents; and when we take into account the 
increased fertility of the soil by returning the corn in the shape of 
manure, we have the real profits of farming. 
But there is another phase to this question of transportation 
that seems to be entirely lost sight of in the clamor for more rail¬ 
road facilities, and it is this ; no community can ever be perman¬ 
ently prosperous so long as it depends upon the caprice of any 
class of middle men, or so long as it depends absolutely on a 
foreign market or foreign made supplies. We, to-day, in the 
northwest are as actually dependent on New England as our 
country once was on old England for the comforts and necessaries 
of life. I never could see the propriety of sending our wool to 
Boston to be manufactured into clothing and at the same time 
paying freight on it both ways, also sending our wheat and pork 
there to feed the operatives while they were engaged in the man¬ 
ufacture of the same, and at the same time beat the tender mercies 
of the transportation companies and the hoard of middlemen that 
