2 
Wisconsin state agricultural society. 
remunerative returns, can no more be separated from the interests 
and duty of the state, than the law of gravitation can be divorced 
from the specific gravity of substantive things. 
This is no new theory, invented for the occasion, but is an ac- 
knowledged truth in the science of political philosophy. This 
great law that establishes a kind of governmental protectorate 
(contradistinguished from paternalism) over the people under any 
form of government, has been acknowledged from the earliest 
stages of historic man, even under the crudest forms of civiliza¬ 
tion. Even the chiefs of the barbarian clans that roamed through 
Egypt, Persia, and along the Illyrian coast, had an eye to the 
lives and fortunes of their adherents, thus acknowledging the 
highest order of statesmanship, that individual and collective 
good should be the test of authoritative duty. The Phoenicians- 
were earliest in the field, plying the arts of navigation, for the 
diffusion of articles of production and consumption, and it is said 
that Solomon employed their- shipping in the transportation of 
timber from various places and gold from Ophir, which he used 
in the construction of the temple. 
It is said that all events are hinged upon their own philosophy, 
and since the law that encourages and even permits massive 
population, is sustained by the “higher law” of production and 
diffusion , I will cite one of the most remarkable cases in point,, 
either in ancient or modern history. Between the epochs of 1245 
and 332 B. C., the liliputian kingdom of Phoenicia became, and 
continued to be the artful master of the commercial world. The 
little strip of land lying on the east coast of the Mediterranean 
and at the base of the Lebanon mountains, only 100 by 20 
miles in geographical extent, was peopled by an energetic branch 
of the family of Canaan, who opened roads into Egypt, Arabia, 
Judea, Illyria, and even to the East Indies, through Persia— 
into Greece, and as far as the Black and Caspian seas. Their 
ships were numbered by the thousands, and visited the Black, the 
Caspian and the Baltic seas, the Persian Gulf—opened an exten¬ 
sive traffic with India, and the island of Ceylon, with Spain, 
France, the British Isles, and even according to Goodrich, doubled 
Cape Good Hope, arousing the incredulity of Herodotus, because, 
without the knowledge of the compass, they had passed from 
