-and if they have not made
their money by farming they have spent their money in farming--and
have enriched the language of every age and clime with eloquent
and beautiful tributes to this noblest occupation of man.

"Perhaps this is the reason you call upon lawyers to speak on
occasions like this, when the varied products of the farm, in their
rich profusion and excellence, are spread before us. Besides, it
is the common opinion that lawyers can talk as well about things
they don't know as things they do know--and on either side of the
question, without respect to the merits or morals of the topic.
Your worthy secretary, in inviting me to speak for a few minutes
on this occasion, said that I was quite at liberty to choose the
subject of my remarks. So I have chosen as a text a discovery I
have made very much like that of Benjamin Franklin, who advised
the people of Paris that he had made a great discovery--that being
wakeful one morning he discovered that the sun rose at Paris at
five o'clock, and that if they would rise with the sun and go to
bed with the sun they would save an enormous sum--millions of francs
--in the cost of candles and lamps, and greatly improve their health
and morals. So I have discovered that our farmers have become
machinists, and, instead of working themselves, they make the
horses, mules, and especially the machines, do nearly all the work
of the farm.

"I have observed in the numerous fairs I have attended since they
were first introduced in Ohio, and especially since the war, a
marked change in the articles exhibited. Formerly the chief
attraction was the varied exhibition of fruits, grain, cattle,
horses, sheep, hogs, poultry--all the productions of the farm--and
the chief benefit then derived from our state and county fairs was
to excite competition in the size, excellence and abundance of
these purely animal or agricultural productions. Formerly the
tools and implements of husbandry were few, simple and plain, the
chief of which were the plow, the scythe, the cradle, the sickle.

"Later by degrees there appeared new devices--new implements of
husbandry--the mower, the reaper, the thresher, the binder, the
sulky plow, an infinite variety of mechanical contrivances to make
the labor of the farmer easier, or rather to dispense with a
multitude of laborers, and substitute in their places the horse,
the mule and the steam engine. In other words, to convert the
business of farming f