In 1860 our animals of all kinds, including the Illinois deer—commonly called swine—the oxen and horses, and all others, were worth about one thousand million dollars; now they are worth about four thousand million dollars.
Are we not getting rich? Our national debt today is nothing. It is like a man who owes a cent and has a dollar.
Since 1860 we have been industrious. We have created two million five hundred thousand new farms. Since 1860 we have done a good deal of plowing; there have been a good many tired legs. I have been that way myself. Since 1860 we have put in cultivation two hundred million acres of land. Illinois, the best State in the Union, has thirty-five million acres of land, and yet, since 1860, we have put in cultivation enough land to make six States of the size of Illinois. That will give you some idea of the quantity of work we have done. I will admit I have not done much of it myself, but I am proud of it.
In 1860 we had four million five hundred and sixty-five thousand farmers in this country, whose land and implements were worth over sixteen thousand million dollars. The farmers of this country, on an average, are worth five thousand dollars, and the peasants of the Old World, who cultivate the soil, are not worth, on an average, ten dollars beyond the wants of the moment. The farmers of our country produce, on an average, about one million four hundred thousand dollars' worth of stuff a day.
What else? Have we in other directions kept pace with our physical development? Have we developed the mind? Have we endeavored to develop the brain? Have we endeavored to civilize the heart? I think we have.
We spend more for schools per head than any nation in the world. And the common school is the breath of life.
Great Britain spends one dollar and thirty cents per head on the common schools; France spends eighty cents; Austria, thirty cents; Germany, fifty cents; Italy, twenty-five cents, and the United States over two dollars and fifty cents.
I tell you the schoolhouse is the fortress of liberty. Every schoolhouse is an arsenal, filled with weapons and ammunition to destroy the monsters of ignorance and fear.
As I have said ten thousand times, the school-house is my cathedral. The teacher is my preacher.
Eighty-seven per cent, of all the people of the United States, over ten years of age, can read and write. There is no parallel for this in the history of the wide world.