54 
WISCONSIN STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
state should be encouraged, rather than that bare cutting of logs 
and rafting them down the Mississippi, for sawing elsewhere, 
which, by some of our lumbermen, is practiced to so great an 
extent. 
MANUFACTURES. 
We have treated of this great state interest at such length 
in our last two volumes, that this discussion may be chiefly 
confined to the bare statement of what progress the state is 
making therein. 
Exclusive of lumbering, which, as before remarked, it prop¬ 
erly embraces, it ranks next to agriculture in the amount of 
its annual product, and the importance of its relation to the 
social welfare of the state. 
Manufacturing not onty affords employment and support to 
a great number of people, thereby fulfilling an important office 
in political economy, but it furnishes them with a kind of em¬ 
ployment admirably suited to encourage intellectual activity; 
to establish all who engage in it in habits of promptness and 
regularity ; to permanently fix in them a conviction of the 
value of system and of the wise and provident adaptation of 
means to ends; and finally, through the constant use of con¬ 
structive rather than e/es-tructive methods, the better to qual¬ 
ify them for the duties of both private and public life. Hence 
it is that we find our manufacturing communities characterized 
by an intelligence, a faithfulness, and a morality not so com¬ 
monly found among the working population of the commer¬ 
cial port, the mines, or the lumber camp. 
These considerations, added to the advantages of furnishing 
a home market for the raw materials used, as well as for large 
supplies of such products of agriculture as are needed for 
food, and of saving to our people the cost of transporting the 
manufactured articles of every kind consumed by them from 
the remote places of their manufacture elsewhere,—these con¬ 
stitute a powerful argument in favor of such encouragement 
to this branch of our industry as may be afforded without in¬ 
justice to the others! 
