State Convention—Farmers of Wisconsin. 
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THE FARMERS OF WISCONSIN. 
BY GEO. W. LEE, BLOOMINGTON. 
The ancient and modem liistoiy of man’s civilization, ranks 
your calling as one of the most honorable and useful among man¬ 
kind. In proportion as agriculture is developed, we find society 
advanced in improvement and in civilization. Turn back the page 
of history to all the past, and at no period has agriculture a nobler 
and a brighter record than the present page of American history 
presents. Under our benign institutions and our republican form 
of government, agriculture has found ample room for its fullest de¬ 
velopment, A free education of the masses, with a wide domain 
of cheap lands, combined with an endless variety of productions of 
the soil, form the basis upon which rests the noble structure. 
Under our republican form, each voter is a spoke in the mighty 
wheel of government, and equally responsible for his devotion to 
the maintenance of those equal rights guaranteed to all. 
It is fit and becoming that all classes of industries and professions 
should meet in convention and discuss questions to them of vital 
importance in the race of life. A too common neglect of this duty 
upon the part of the farmer has opened the way, and a multitude 
of evils of an alarming character have crept in, endangering his 
rank, robbing agriculture of its reward, and threatening our national 
prosperity. What means those cries of want and starvation that 
come to us from the factories of New England and the hills of 
Pennsylvania? Why are the hundreds of thousands restrained from 
work, with none to give them bread? What means this great farm¬ 
ers’ movement now agitating the country from Maine to California? 
Such things do not come without cause. In human affairs effects 
follow causes; results are accomplished t by action. It is folly to 
shut our eyes and to profess not to see, and continue to sing praises 
over the glorious institutions of our happy land, until our institu¬ 
tions have disappeared, and we have rivited upon our necks the 
