State Convention—The Farmer in Politics. 171 
on your sense of justice, and the demands of the occasion, the sin¬ 
cerity of my convictions, and trusting in God for that succor he 
alone can give, 1 shall proceed to give you my views in all kind¬ 
ness, but with such directness of language, and fearlessness of crit¬ 
icism, as the subject demands and a proper respect for you an d 
myself will permit. 
Masters of the soil, you fail to own yourselves. Your prejudices 
and idiosyncracies make you suspicious of your best friends; and 
fear, the offspring of those idiosyncracies, leads you into many 
errors, which an independent exercise of your better judgment 
wouln teach you to avoid. 
You exist only for two purposes, seemingly, in the estimation of 
the cunning political demagogues that duplicity has produced and 
your folly maintains; the one is to grow food for the people, the 
other to pay taxes for public officials to steal. You seem to be 
mere puppets in their hands and move as they pull the wires. You 
allow yourselves to cast votes prejudicial to your interests and ad¬ 
verse to the dictates of your intelligence. You allow men—who 
hold official position—through party machinery to control your 
footsteps and dictate the paths you shall walk in. You allow op¬ 
portunities to pass by unimproved by you, which are seized by 
your servants, and used to place toils around you; and instead of 
using your power to control, you yield yourselves a willing sacri¬ 
fice to your party's safety. 
The fathers of this, our common country, in defence of their 
liberties plucked from a king the brightest jewels in his crown; and 
'to secure to their descendants the full measure of those liberties, 
sought to place such guards around about the government as 
should shield them from the dangerous powers they had at such 
cost of blood, treasure, and personal sacrifices overcome; and in 
the prohibition in the constitution of the primogeniture, fondly 
hoped they had secured us at once, from the curse of hereditary 
rulers and the tyranny of concentrated capital. 
But good always has an attending evil, and in our day another 
power has taken possession of the government and is controlling it 
in its own interest; a power more cunning and grasping, richer in 
wealth, more unscrupulous and less responsible than the barons of 
the middle ages, and ten times more crafty than its merchant 
princes; holding us down with a grip of iron, none the less degrad- 
