Your prosperity depends upon the inventor. The world advances by the
assistance of all laborers; and all labor is under obligations to the
inventions of genius. The inventor does as much for agriculture as he
who tills the soil. All laboring men should be brothers. You are in
partnership with the mechanics who make your reapers, your mowers and
your plows; and you should take into your granges all the men who make
their living by honest labor. The laboring people should unite and
should protect themselves against all idlers. You can divide mankind
into two classes: the laborers and the idlers, the supporters and the
supported, the honest and the dishonest. Every man is dishonest who
lives upon the unpaid labor of others, no matter if he occupies a
throne. All laborers should be brothers. The laborers should have equal
rights before the world and before the law. And I want every farmer to
consider every man who labors either with hand or brain as his brother.
Until genius and labor formed a partnership there was no such thing
as prosperity among men. Every reaper and mower, every agricultural
implement, has elevated the work of the farmer, and his vocation grows
grander with every invention. In the olden time the agriculturist
was ignorant; he knew nothing of machinery, he was the slave of
superstition. He was always trying to appease some imaginary power by
fasting and prayer. He supposed that some being actuated by malice, sent
the untimely frost, or swept away with the wild wind his rude abode.
To him the seasons were mysteries. The thunder told him of an enraged
god--the barren fields of the vengeance of heaven. The tiller of the
soil lived in perpetual and abject fear. He knew nothing of mechanics,
nothing of order, nothing of law, nothing of cause and effect. He was
a superstitious savage. He invented prayers instead of plows, creeds
instead of reapers and mowers. He was unable to devote all his time to
the gods, and so he hired others to assist him, and for their influence
with the gentlemen supposed to control the weather, he gave one-tenth of
all he could produce.

The farmer has been elevated through science and he should not forget
the debt he owes to the mechanic, to the inventor, to the thinker. He
should remember that all laborers belong to the same grand family--that
they are the real kings and queens, the only true nobility.

Another idea entertained by most farmers is that they are in some
mysterious wa