Rensselaer Union, Volume 6, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 May 1874 — Agricultural Congress. [ARTICLE]

Agricultural Congress.

The Agricultural Congress, in its ses sion at Atlanta on the 15tta, unanimously adopted the following resolutions ■ While recognizing the valne of railroads and the necessity for their further extension, we deem the cost of transportation by rail of ernde products of fields, forests and mines so disproportionate to the cost of water carriage as to render it the duty of the United States to improve the rivers in the interior and connect them with the ocean by artificial waterways, giving the Mississippi Valley continuous water transit to the seaboanf, and to enter at once upon the work of constructing artificial water-wave adequate to the present and prospective demands of Inland transportation, and continue it by annual installments of aid nntll unrestricted channels of trade are opened, not only through the Mississippi Valley bat connecting the Mississippi Birer with the Atlantic Ocean via the lakes, the Ohio, Kanawha and James Bivers, and Atlantic & Great Western routes. That the Agricultural Congress believes It is within the people to reform the corporate transportation system by the same agencies which created them, viz.: State legislation controlled by public opinion; and that we oppose any Isglslation under the plea of regulating commerce between the States which interferes with the authority heretofore exercised by the State over railroads entirely within or passing out of its borders. Reports were adopted, recommending that the Government appropriate one-half of the net proceeds of the sale of public lands to agricultural colleges organized under the act of 1802, and that the Government reduce the tax on tobacco to a uniform rate of twelve cents per pound,' and that articles used in the manufacture of tobacco come duty free. Gen. Jackson was re-elected President and C. W. Greene Secretary; J. S. Grinnell was elected Vice-President. C. W. Greene, Secretary, resigned, and George E. Morrow, editor of INgWisconsin Farmer , was elected in his pISCe. The next meeting of the Congress will be held at Cincinnati on the second Wednesday in September, 1875.