"I don't blame the boys for going into something else long's other things pays better; but I say--and I say what I know--that the man who holds the prosperity of this country in his hands, the man that actually makes the money for other people to spend, the man that eats three good, simple, square meals a day and goes to bed at 9 o'clock so that future generations with good blood and cool brains can go from his farm to the Senate and Congress and the White House--he is the man that gets left at last to run his farm, with nobody to help him but a hired man and a high protective tariff. The farms in our State is mortgaged for over $700,000,000. Ten of our Western States--I see by the papers--has got about three billion and a half mortgages on their farms, and that don't count the chattel mortgages filed with the town clerks on farm machinery, stock, waggins, and even crops, by gosh! that ain't two inches high under the snow. That's what the prospect is for farms now. The Government is rich, but the men that made it, the men that fought perarie fires and perarie wolves and Injins and potato bugs and blizzards, and has paid the war debt and pensions and everything else, and hollored for the Union and the Republican party and high tariff and anything else that they was told to, is left high and dry this cold winter with a mortgage of seven billions and a half on the farms they have earned and saved a thousand times over." "Yes; but look at the glory of sending from the farm the future President, the future Senator and the future member of Congress." "That looks well on paper; but what does it really amount to? Soon as a farmer boy gits in a place like that he forgets the soil that produced and holds his head as high as a hollyhock. He bellers for protection to everybody but the farmer, and while he sails round in a highty-tighty room with a fire in it night and day, his father on the farm has to kindle his own fire in the morning with elm slivers, and he has to wear his son's lawn-tennis suit next to him or freeze to death, and he has to milk in an old gray shawl that has held that member of Congress since he was a baby, by gorry! and the old lady has to sojourn through the winter in the flannels that Silas wor at the rigatter before he went to Congress. "So I say, and I think that Congress agrees with me, Damn a farmer, anyhow!" He then went away. A CONVENTIONAL SPEECH |DURING the recent conventions a great many good speeches have been made which did not get into print for various reasons. Some others did not even get a hearing and still others were prepared by delegates who could not get the eye of the presiding officer. The manuscript of the following speech bears the marks of earnest thought, and though the author did not obtain recognition on the floor of the convention I cannot bear to see an appreciative public deprived of it: