376 Wisconsin State Agricultural Society. 
practical man as to place more reliance in the accuracy and efficiency 
of the sire of his favorite “short-horns” than in the predictions of 
the learned and scientific savant whose science did not tally with 
the farm register, would be justified in appointing a day of thanks¬ 
giving to a kind Providence, and the dairymen’s associations of this 
country, in view of the agricultural statistics presented in the recent 
report of Hon. Peter Doyle, Secretary of State, showing that 
Wisconsin, according to the assessor’s lists of crops, had 256,000 
less acres of land under wheat in 1875 than in 1874; which is 
equivalent to the withdrawal of 6,650 fields of forty acres each from 
that disastrous crop; and the legislature of this State could not en¬ 
act a more just and beneficent law than one which would, if prop¬ 
erly enforced, compel every man, who has impaired the soil, and 
impoverished the land, and weakened its productiveness, to bring 
back an equal or greater quantity of the mineral constituents of 
the produce sold, and restore them to the fields from which they 
have been taken. The railroads should assist, by dead-heading these 
restoratives, as they do in returning delegates from a political con¬ 
vention on the certificate of the secretary. 
Nature teaches mankind that we are all more or less mutually 
dependent, and that like cog-wheels we are pushing each other 
along, by filling up mutual voids in the great wheel that is pro¬ 
pelled by the two-fold powers of divine economy and human ne¬ 
cessity. There is, really and actually, harmony of interests. 
While in Great Britain and other European countries wars and 
density of population have compelled both owners and tillers of 
the soil to develop its capacity to support both the landed aristoc¬ 
racy, with its standing armies, and the laboring masses, there has 
prevailed in this comparatively new and undeveloped country a 
system or practice of prodigality and profligacy, if not crimnal 
wastefulness or wanton vandalism, in regard to the treatment of 
the richest heritage on God’s foot-stool, as seen in the general ten¬ 
dency of American agriculture to weaken the soil, by raising grain 
for consumption in foreign countries that require more food, oc¬ 
casionally, than they can produce. 
We are apt to fly to the physician for remedies to correct 
physicial evils that might have been averted by due regard to the 
laws of nature for the preservation of health. We often appeal to 
the State and national legislatures for the correction of cramps, 
