furnish no parallel for utter and abject poverty. I believe on the first day of January, 1858, there was not, upon an average, two dollars and fifty cents in cash to each inhabitant of the Territory. Hard times were the theme of each and every class of society, and all departments of industry. Merchants, mechanics, speculators and bankers were continually lamenting their departed fortunes, and their many failures and losses.

There was one class of individuals who, although they may have been sadly pinched by the pressure of times, noted no failures in their ranks, and who, when winter set in, were comparatively well off, in fact, relatively opulent and luxurious in their circumstances. They were the very few farmers who had passed through the era of speculation untempted by the allurements thereof, they who had followed the plow steadily, and planted their crops carefully. They, and they alone, of all the people of Nebraska could board themselves. There is no doubt but that poverty induces thought. It may paralyze the physical energies for a time, but it will induce reason and reflection in the thoughtless and judgment and discretion in the reckless, after all other arguments have failed. I believe that owing to our extreme poverty, we were led to more thinking and reasoning during the winter of 1857 and 1858, than up to that time had ever been accomplished in the Territory. As you have seen your grandfathers, during the long winter evenings, sit down by the large fire place when the huge back log and big blaze burned so brightly, away back east, somewhere, at your old homesteads, as when the old man, after reading his newspaper, would wipe his spectacles, put them up by the clock on the mantle piece, and seating himself there in the genial fire light, place his head between his hands, and his elbows on his knees, and have a good "long think"; just so with us all in Nebraska that winter. We had a "think," a long, solemn, gloomy think, and among us all, we thought out these facts: that the new way of making money by chartering wild cat banks, had proved a most unprofitable delusion and an unmitigated humbug. We thought that building large cities without any inhabitants therefor, was a singularly crack-brained specimen of enterprise; and furthermore, that everybody could not live in town who lived in the Territory unless the towns were laid off in 80 acre or quarter section lots. We thought, to sum up all hurriedly, that it was useless to attempt to legislate prosperity into that country; that it was impossible to decoy wealth into our laps by legal enactment; that we had, in fact, been a very fast, very reckless, very hopeful,

enthusiastic, and self-deceived people; that while we had assumed to play the part of Dives, we were really better fitted for the performance of the character of Lazarus. The scheme for obtaining wealth without labor, prosperity without industry, and growing into a community of opulence and ease without effort had been a complete failure.

The spring of 1858 dawned upon us, and the icy hand of winter relaxed its hold upon the earth, and the prairies were once more clothed in sunshine and emerald. The result of our thinking during the long dreary winter, was now about to be embodied in active efforts to enhance our real prosperity and substantial wealth. It had been fully and justly determined that the true grandeur and prosperity of the people was concealed in their capacity for industry, honesty and patient endurance. If there were fortunes to be made in Nebraska, they were to be acquired by frugality and persevering exertion alone. The soil was to be tilled and taxed for the support of the dwellers thereon; and out of it and it alone was all true and substantial independence to be derived. For the first time during our political existence, we realized our true condition, and comprehended the proper method of ameliorating and improving it. The numerous signs marked "banker, broker, real estate dealer," etc., began one by one to disappear, and the shrewd and hopeful gentlemen who had adopted them were seen either departing for their old homes in the east, or buckling on the panoply of industry, and following quietly the more honorable and certainly paying pursuit of prairie-breaking and corn-planting. The gloom of the long night of poverty was about passing away forThe clouds were breaking, the effulgence of a better and brighter day sent its first glad beams to reanimate and rejoice the dispirited and encourage the strong and hopeful. Labor at once began and its hundred voices made the air resonant with its homely music. All about us, on every side, the prairie plow was at work, turning over, as it were, the first page in the great volumes of our prosperity. Everywhere were brawny arms lifted up to strike the earth, that a stream of plenty and contentment might flow forth and bless the country, even as the rock itself sent up sweet waters to quench the thirst of Israel's children when smote by the strength of Aaron. Everywhere these rich and rolling prairies which had lain for unnumbered centuries as blank leaves in the history of the world's progress were being written upon by the hand of toil, snatched from the obscurity of uselessness, and forever dedicated to the support of the Anglo-Saxon race. The sunshine seemed

ever.

.brighter, and the rain and the dews more plentiful and refreshing, because they descended upon the earth and found it not all a wild and desolate waste. Seed had been sown, farms opened and every energy had been taxed to make the Territory of Nebraska self sustaining. It was the first genuine effort in the right direction. The people were aroused to the fact, that agriculture, and that alone, was to be for many years the sole support, the sheet anchor and the salvation of the Territory. Emulation was excited; each endeavored to outwork the other in the good cause. In many of the counties, fairs were held last fall, and agriculture had at last, after three years of neglect, assumed its true position in Nebraska. As you well remember the season was favorable, the crops were heavy. We had enough, aye, more than enough, and the last spring witnessed the first shipment of our surplus production of grain to the foreign market. The first steamers that came up the Missouri in 1857, brought us corn to keep us and our stock from perishing by hunger and starvation. We paid for it at the rate of two dollars a bushel. But now by the energy of our farmers, Nebraska in less than two years had been transformed from a consumer to a producer. And the steamboats of the old Missouri bore away from our shores in the spring of 1859, hundreds of thousands of bushels of corn to the southern and eastern markets, which we did not need for our home use, and for which, at the rate of 40 cents per bushel, we have taken more money than for town lots in the last eighteen months, or will in the next twentyfour. Thus imperfectly and hurriedly I have narrated the history of agriculture in Nebraska, down to the planting of last spring's crop; what that was and how much greater the breadth of land cultivated than ever before, the new farms that met the eye on every side, and the vast fields of ripening grain that magically unsurpassed the place of the rank prairie grass, eloquently proclaimed.

If our brief and only half-improved past has been thus encouraging and thus indicative of prosperity; if notwithstanding the mercilessness of the panic and scarcity of money, the present time, today, finds Nebraska richer in the true elements of prosperity, stronger in the golden capital of skillful industry and contented labor than she ever was before, who shall predict her future? Who shall attempt to portray the fulness and glory of her destiny?

The Anglo-Saxon race are being driven by the hand of God across the continent of America, and are to inhabit and have dominion over it all. These prairies which have been cleared and made ready for the plow by the hand of God

himself, are intended for the abiding place of the pioneers in the progress of the world. The American Indian, in whom there are none of the elements of thrift, held a tenancy upon these fertile plains for centuries; but there was neither labor in his arm nor progression in his spirit. He was an unworthy occupant of so goodly a land and he has been supplanted. He has gone, and his race is fast becoming extinct; the world is too old for its aborigines. Their destiny is completed; they are journeying to their fate; they must die, and a few years hence only be known through their history, as it was recorded by the AngloSaxon, while he pushed them before him in his onward tread.

We stand today upon the very verge of civilization, riding upon the head wave of American enterprise, but our descendants, living here a century hence, will be in the center of American commerce-the mid-ocean of our national greatness and prosperity. Upon this very soil, the depth and richness of which is unsurpassed in the whole world, in a country whose mineral resources-as yet wholly undeveloped-are certainly magnificent and exhaustless; whose coal beds are as extensive as its prairies; whose rivers and springs are as healthful as they are numerous, in such a country agriculture must and will carve out, for an industrious people, a wealth and happiness, the like of which the world has never dreamed of before. Manufacture and skill in the various arts may, and will undoubtedly aid us in our pursuit of a glorious and independent opulence, but our great trust and strong hope is still hidden in the fertility of our soil and its adaptation to general cultivation. The agriculturist may be proud of his calling for in it he is independent; in it there is no possibility of guile or fraud, and for his partners in labor God has sent him the genial sunshine, gentle rains and the softly descending dews. The very elements are made his assistants and co-workers; the thunderbolt that purifies the atmosphere and furnishes electric life to the growing crops, is his friend and his helper. It may be urged, and often is, that the calling of the farmer is an arduous and homely one, that it is arduous no one can deny, but it is honorable. The idea that a man cannot be a true gentleman and labor with his hands, is an obsolete, a dead and dishonored dogma. All labor is honorable. The scholar in his study, the chemist in his laboratory, the artist in his studio, the lawyer at his brief, and the preacher at his sermon, are all of them nothing more, nothing less, than day laborers in the world's workshop-workers with the

head. And the smith at his forge, the carpenter at his bench, mechanics and artisans of every grade and kind, and the farmer, are the same laborers-workers with the hand. The two classes represent the two divisions of labor, and they are mutually dependent upon each other. But if among them all there is one art more health-giving, one art more filled with quiet and honest contentment, than another it is that of agriculture. And yet agriculture, although it is the art supportive of all arts, although it is the basis and foundation upon which the superstructure of all the commerce of the world is reared, is less studied, less thought of, and more remote from its perfection than all others.

During the last ten years it has, however, begun to attract a greater degree of attention and has taken a few steps towards that high place in the world's business which awaits it. The county, state, and national fairs, which are now proven so useful, are the protracted meetings of husbandmen, where agricultural revivals are initiated and thousands annually converted to the faith of the great church of human industry. And this is the first revival of the kind ever instituted in a territory. To Nebraska belongs the honor and the good name of having placed a bright and worthy example before the sisterhood of children States which bound her on the south and west. Let us continue in the good work; let every heart's aspiration, every thought and effort be to make each succeeding fair give better and stronger testimony in favor of the resources and wealth of our vast and beautiful domain.

And while in the east the youth are being prepared for the so-called learned professions, law, divinity, and medicine, let us be content to rear up a nation of enlightened agriculturists. Men sturdy in mind and thought even as they are robust in body and active in all that pertains to the full development and perfection of the physical system of mankind, let it be our high aim, by our enlightened and well-directed training of both the body and the mind, to elevate and improve our race and make the western man the model, both physical and intellectual, from which all the world may be happy to make copies.

With such an ambition in the minds of the people, and an energy to gratify it, the future of this commonwealth is such a one as thrills the patriot's heart with grateful pride, and makes one sad to think that death may close the eye before it shall have rested upon the beauties of the Garden State that will have been builded up on these shores within the next ten years. When the valley of L'Eau