all the rest of whom are slaves. With the new combinations forming in
the business of the world, new experiences are constant. The man
employing three hundred fortunate workers to-day, may be himself
searching for work next year. The man getting $5,000 a year to-day may
next week be trying to find labor at a dollar a day, and may absolutely
fail. The financial panic has no such thing in store for the farmer. He
will live on, just as his brook runs on, and when the sleek magnates in
the hotel-parlor decree that he must lose his farm, as they need it for
a "colony," he will rise up and smite them, and thereafter the sleek
magnate will be an affair of the past. Young man, if you have not an
absolute genius for something else, stay on the farm. Read books which
will make you desire to be a pure man, just for the noble name it will
give you. If you can get as great a desire to be a good man as you have
to be a purse-proud man, you will be on the right track; for you will
see that honesty is easier in the perfumed fields than it is in the
polluted air of a city business-house. Read over the biographies, and
see how certainly all our great men got their greatness in the open air
of the country. Take a big city, for instance. Has it not surprised you
to see how few great men New York or Chicago have furnished to the
nation? The city levels men. It drags them down. Their individualities
are put into a dredge-box, and the flour of mediocrity is scattered on
all alike.
"IN A MORAL POINT OF VIEW,"
says Lord John Russell, "the life of the agriculturist is the most pure
and holy of any class of men; pure because it is the most healthful, and
vice can hardly find time to contaminate it; and holy because it brings
the Deity perpetually before his view, giving him thereby the most
exalted notions of supreme power, and the most fascinating and
endearing view of moral benignity."
Farmers, you take pains to get two teams, so that the boys can take hold
at the ploughing and in the corn. See to it that you also get the boys a
light wagon, so that they can go to a picnic or a bee without
discommoding you.