you have made progress, and are able to ask and answer questions that were dark to you before. I believe the farmers' lives will be very much improved by a little thought. Farmers come here and are encouraged to give more care to their live stock. That is all right, but the care that our families, our households and our neighbors require in the way of culture and thought is beyond all comparison, beyond the value of stock growing. I simply ask farmers to adopt some new modes of action, and of recording your thoughts and putting down your questions, so that when you come here to the next annual meeting you may feel that you have come with a new interest.

Mr. Babbitt I believe that the whole crowd who attend these conventions take, on an average, five agricultural papers. I do not think we need that part of the advice.

Mr. Plumb Then see that your neighbors have them. To-day I met, casually, the editor of the only purely agricultural paper published in the state of Wisconsin. I refer to the editor of the Wisconsin Farmer, published at Fond du Lac; a very modest little paper, but one that has the making of something in it if it has the proper amount of aid. I asked Mr. Lockin why he did not come up here and tell his story to the farmers and ask them for help. He was too modest for that. Not a single agricultural editor has lifted his voice here in his own behalf. I hope you will not forget that we have in the state a paper entirely devoted to the interests of farmers. It is not in the interest of any corporation whatever. It is to be removed to Milwaukee in order to have a wider field. The editor says that so long as he can. receive a cordial support from the farmers of the state it shall remain a purely agricultural paper, and if he cannot get it he shall have to succumb and become the property of some corporation.

Professor Henry - I wish to say that so far as I could I have made the Wisconsin Farmer the organ of the agricultural depart. ment of the university. I felt that I must have a Wisconsin agricultural paper if I wished to reach the farmers of Wisconsin. The results of the experiments on the university farm, and all sorts of references to my work and the work of those who are

helping in the sorghum experiments, I shall publish in that paper. I did not know anything about the editor of the paper, but I wrote to him and told him I was going to help him. So if you take two papers make one of those the Wisconsin Farmer, until we help the editor of that paper to make it what it ought to be. You drove out of the state of Wisconsin one of the best editors that was ever in it, by bringing him to a state of poverty. Now we have another who may go the same way unless we give him a good support.

Judge Bryant I beg to correct the gentleman a little. I do not think we ever drove any editor out of the state. I think he went off on his own responsibility. If he had thought a little further and a little longer and had not been quite so old fogyish about some things he would have been here now. I say this without any disrespect to him, for if there was ever any gentleman I admired it was he; but he set himself up against the farmers to a considerable extent, and the result of it was he lost his patronage.

Mr. Babbitt I believe if we take that paper we shall do ourselves good and him too. He is a splendid looking man, and if he is not the right kind of a man I am mistaken. I waited around and hinted around and wanted to have him ask me to take his paper, but he never said a word. I think he is the right material, and so I think is Prof. Henry.

A

G. H. Durrie, Madison - I have lived here more or less for twenty-five years, and if Mr. Morrow is the gentleman referred to I know he was literally starved out from the lack of support. better man and an abler man in his department there never was in the state of Wisconsin.

Mr. Plumb Mr. Morrow was placed in a very peculiar position which few understand. I think he needs no apology. It was his modesty and his personal feelings that prompted him to, retire from the state. Mr. Morrow bas done well. We all congratulate him. Let him go, and now if we can get another man that we can tie to, that will do for us the work Mr. Morrow might have done if he had stayed with us, let us hold on to him, whether it be Professor Henry or Mr. Lockin, of the Farmer, or both.

On motion of Hon. M. Anderson the convention tendered a

vote of thanks to President Fratt for the courtesy with which he

had presided over the convention.

The convention then adjourned.

ADDRESS

Delivered by CHAS. R. BEACH, Esq., of Whitewater, at the Walworth County Fair, at Elkhorn, on Wednesday, September 22, 1880.

I am here, to day, at the earnest request of your president. I did not want to come, for I am neither a public speaker nor a model farmer. There are weeds in my garden and in my corn field, and there is nothing about my place quite as it should be.

But the Judge says that it is just so about his place, and that it is always so about the place of any one who attempts to make agricultural speeches. And more than that, nobody cares anything for the address at a county fair, or the speaker either, and that it will save the society twenty-five and perhaps fifty dollars, rather than to get a noted military man or a high-toned politician. With these considerations before me, I have consented to address you.

The wise man has told us that in all labor there is profit, but that the talk of the lip tendeth only to penury. I will not make you poor with many words. Words when arranged in their most attractive form, when spoken with all the grace that eloquence can command, are but the dim and shadowy representations of things tangible and real, or of the ideas and principles those living and material things embody.

To-day I see on every hand things living and real, things tangible and composed of material substance, things of utility and of beauty, not one of them but is here as the representative, the embodiment of some principle, some plan or purpose, more clearly set forth, more forcibly expressed than could be by the lips of any living speaker.

These glossy trotters, these ponderous draft horses, these broadbacked Durhams and Holsteins, these delicate Jerseys, these beautiful Merino sheep, the fiber of whose wool rivals the silk in

softness, these square and compactly built porkers so gracefully rounded that we in our admiration almost forget that they are hogs, these threshers and reapers and mowers, these countless appliances which genius has designed to lighten labor, this butter and cheese, these vegetables and grains, these fruits and flowers so artistically arranged, these matchless productions of the needle and the pencil, these, each and all of them, are the speakers here to-day. Not one of them but is the worked out result of the wisdom and knowledge and skill of their exhibitors. Many of us farmers make the coming to these fairs merely a holiday, but if we do not gather some of the wisdom here set forth, if we do not learn some of the lessons here taught, we are but dull and inapt scholars.

The people of Walworth county are justly proud of their fairs, and we point exultingly to then in proof of our improvement and progress in farming; and judging from what we see on every hand about us, we may without arrogance and without the fear of contradiction, claim that we, as a county, rank second to none in the state.

I had therefore thought it not inappropriate to dwell for a few moments upon our progress and improvements in farming as indicated by this exhibition, and then to consider how we shall farther improve and elevate our business.

In looking over this exhibition, the most casual observer cannot fail to be impressed with the great number of mechanical contrivances designed to lessen labor, and at the same time to increase production. But to those of us whose memory goes back to the farm as it was fifty years ago, the improvement in this direction is still more apparent. Then the chief motive power relied upon was human muscle, and the tools by which that power was ap plied were of the rudest kind. To be sure, horses and oxen were used in plowing and harrowing, but the best plows of that day would hardly compare with the poorest of ours, and the harrows were but a letter A with from nine to twelve teeth. A hoe, sometimes (though not often) a small corn plow, a scythe, a pitchfork, a grain cradle and a hand rake (all of them so clumsy and heavy that no laborers of to-day could be induced to use them), a thresh

ing flail and fanning mill, comprised the invoice. This outfit had one thing to recommend it- it cost but little.

To-day I see here on exhibition the sulky plow, the wheel harrow, the sulky corn cultivator, the sulky horse rake, the mowing machine, the reaper and the self binder. Upon any one or all of them we may ride and work with as little expense of muscle as he of fifty years ago in taking a pleasure trip in the best vehicle he could afford, yet at the same time doing four-fold more work than he could accomplish with all his muscles strained to their utmost capacity.

I cannot better illustrate this increase of production resulting from the use of improved machinery than by a few statistics:

Within the last twenty years our whole population has increased about sixty per cent., while the farming population has not increased over thirty per cent., yet within that time we have increased our exports of wheat from four millions in 1860 to one hundred and seventy-five millions in 1879, and corn from three and one-half millions to one hundred millions. We pack five times as many hogs, export six times as much butter, and eight times as much cheese.

We as farmers often point exultingly to this increased production in proportion to population as proof of our progress.

But does not the presence of this machinery here to day go to prove how much we are indebted for the prosperity to the mechanic, the inventor and the man of science, whose labors are purely intellectual?

The self-binder which reaps our fields with automatic precision, and with more than human skill, which seems alive with human intelligence, devoid of human passion, for it never gets mad and threatens to quit unless we raise its wages, from whence does it derive its power but from the principles of science, as taught by the scholar and applied by the inventor and the mechanic? It is thought combined with the iron and the wood that compose it.

To how many days' work of harvest labor is that invention. equal? How many men with flails are equal to a single steam thresher? The very commonness of these wonderful proofs of intellectual power and mechanical skill make us forget their value