458 
STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
ing, that your manufacturers want, should take care that their home-market 
is fully supplied, even if it takes millions of sheep to do it. 
Let me put it fairly to you, farmers of Wisconsin. Do you want to banish 
these woolen manufacturers? Would you think it a benefit to be compelled 
to sell all your wool in the distance and buy a half million dollars worth of 
shoddy-clothes from over the ocean in place of the honest goods they make 
for you ? Would you not be glad to have scores of woolen mills to each one 
now running ? 
Iron ore is valueless in the ground, and labor gives it value. It costs 
about eighty dollars, paid to workmen, to make a ton of iron. 
Which is best for you—to send your wheat to Liverpool and take it back 
in poor English iron, with heavy freight and commissions deducted, and your 
rich land made poor by the export of its crops; or to feed the iron-makers 
at your doors, save expenses, get better iron,, quick returns, better prices, 
and keep your land in good heart ? 
The West produced, in ISG*?, 600,000 tons of pig iron, and 200,000 fons of 
bars, and plates, and rails, and our total product of iron and steel was worth 
over $46,000,000. 
Would you send that sum to England to swell her yearly iron and steel ex¬ 
ports of $76,000,000, and increase \our debt? or would you increase this 
business, which is labor creating value from coarse raw material, and reach 
to the point of exporting the products of your mines, the richest in the 
world ? Iron ships, built on the Clyde, navigate the ocean. You may re¬ 
member iron blockade runners—armed to scourge our commerce also—com¬ 
ing from the same locality, and built to order for certain Britons of the baser 
sort. (Thank Heaven, the Brights, and Thompsons, and the cotton spinners 
in English mills, poor in purse, but rich in soul and in loyalty to free labor 
the world over, had no fellowship in such greedy meanness.) Iron ships 
built at our own yards, by our own workmen, from our own iron, should nav- 
gate our lakes, and rivers, and the ocean. 
Shall the hum of the spindle, the roar of the waterfall, the puff of the en¬ 
gine, and the clang of the trip-hammer cease in your borders, that England 
may find market for her wares, while you keep on being “ the world’s grana¬ 
ry ” until your land is too poor to raise wheat ? 
You will answer these questions for yourselves and your children. Fail to 
diversify your industry and your path leads down to decay of purse, and soil, 
and soul; give your labor and skill many ways to act, and that path leads up 
to wealth of soil and of soul. 
Agriculture and manufactures are the creators of useful materials and fin¬ 
ished products, Commerce only transports and exchanges what they bring 
into being. Neither can thrive without the other, and neither can gain by 
overreaching the other. 
Lessen our manufactures, and, for a time, a few importing traders might 
gain, but the power of the country to buy from abroad would soon decrease, 
and the home trade would languish. Let our manufactures thrive, and our 
