EXHIBITION OF 1868. 
455 
Wisconsin has a special interest in this matter. You raise wheat largely, 
but ,the great corn crops and cattle herds of Illinois you hardly rival. The 
exportation of a single leading staple is exhausting and hazardous, and should 
lead to the development of other resources. 
Your wool crop is large, it is true, but what folly to send away a pound of 
it. The lumber from your pine forests will be exhausted, the large export of 
wheat, with small home consumption will impoverish your soil, your farming 
will not improve if you keep up the old habits; but turn to the exhaustless 
stores of iron and coal and peat, so easily accessible in and near your bor¬ 
ders; bind the swift streams to your service to turn your water-wheels; build 
factories and shops and iron mills; weave your own clothes ; shape your own 
tools; make your own iron and steel; feed the workmen from your farms, and thus 
diversify tlieir products, and the day of your redemption is at hand. In the 
great exposition of wool and woolens in Chicago, in August, I shared the 
pleasure and surprise of all there, at the quantity and quality of the products 
of Western skill exhibited. I saw woolens from your State, not only service¬ 
able but beautiful—good enough for any man to wear anywhere. You have 
already some eighty woolen mills, making excellent and honest cloths, with 
no shoddy in them. But you sell wool to go eastward, pay freights, commis¬ 
sions and profits, both ways, and get back imported woolens nicely finished, 
but shoddy-mixed—and shoddy and shabby are the same after a little wear. 
You have iron ores of the finest quality, and send to England to buy rails, so 
poor that no other market in the world will take them, and lay them down 
over the very mines where lies your own iron waiting to be wrought by the 
hands of decently paid and hopeful American workmen. 
Capital likes good investments and quick returns, yet it can live, and wait, 
and take advantuge of poverty. Labor wants constantly and decently paid 
occupation. Diversified industry is desirable to the capitalist, but far more 
so, and more necessary to the workman. If I had a million dollars it would 
need no great wit to go into a region where cash was scarce, because the 
people were far from market, loan money to farmers, and swallow up their 
farms, accoriing to law, if not according to gospel, by relentless foreclosure 
of mortgages. But suppose I invested the money in woolen, or cotton, or 
iron mills, bought the products of those farms for the workmen, and employed 
the surplus laborers; there need be no mortgages, but the lands will rise five 
or ten fold in value. 
I should not be acting as a philanthropist, but simply as a business man^ 
helping others to prosper that I might share in that prosperity. A factory 
with a capital of $500,000 will spend about that sum yearly for materials and 
labor, and the larger part circulates among the people.' 
Let the blood stagnate or move too slow in the veins and a man is sick—the 
strong and ready pulsation is health. So with business ; it is rapid and easy 
circulation of money, quick returns, nearness of producer and consumer, 
demand for labor of all kinds, and sale and interchange of its products, that 
make health and bring wealth. 
