380 
Wisconsin State Agricultural Society. 
sources of wealth can be extinguished as effectually in the soil as 
elsewhere. The penalties for this crime against nature are not 
only visited upon the ungenerous and improvident robbers of 
earthly treasures, but they fall upon their children and their chil¬ 
dren’s children to a thousand generations. Poyerty, imprecations, 
and curses are their portion, instead of that blessed “ repose of 
soul ” and honored memory, which followed those who left the 
world in better condition than that in which they found it. 
A CHANGE OF PROGRAMME. 
Suppose the farmers of the west, after taking an account of stock, 
aud figuring up the results of past bad management, should send to 
the operatives in the work-shops and manufactories of Europe kind¬ 
ly greetings, setting forth the following 
FACTS. 
Dear Friends: —We have faithfully and diligently endeavored to 
carry out the programme or scheme devised by the common carriers 
and middlemen of America and Europe, who so kindly offered to 
effect exchanges of the products of our industry, and we find there 
is too much friction in their complicated arrangements. Our soil, 
which could once be relied upon for the production of forty, thirty, 
or twenty bushels of wheat per acre, complains of general debility; 
and the carriers have, with the warehousemen at Milwaukee or 
Chicago, and at Buffalo, Oswego, or Ogdensburg, and at New York 
or Boston, and at Liverpool, London, or Glasgow, and elsewhere, 
together with the commission agents and insurance companies, 
found it necessary to take one-third of our crop for transporting the 
remainder to your markets. They also charge us roundly for bring¬ 
ing your manufactures to us. 
The wheat crop, under favorable auspices as to weather, averages 
scarcely fourteen, and in some years and certain localities, does not 
reach ten bushels per acre; and the cost of production leaves us no 
margin for profits. We have imported guano and other fertilizing 
agents from the distant islands of the Southern Pacific Ocean, on 
the opposite side of the globe; but unless we raise cattle and sheep 
to enrich our soil,- and curtail our efforts to exhaust the land with 
grain crops, we shall not be able to keep the wolf from our doors. 
The bonds which we gave as subsidies in aid of railroads that we 
