718 



for good fruit induce us to pay some heed to the preservation of the 

 little birds with whose aid alone the fruit can be raised. Why is it 

 that insects with their wonderful rapidity of increase do not wholly 

 overrun us, and destroy alike our prosperity and our repose? Why, 

 simply because God has stocked our woods and our fields with count- 

 less varieties of birds which day and night wage incessant warfare upon 

 them, and thus accomplish that for which all our own devices are 

 wholly insufficient. 



But let us not think that the difficulties which thicken around us 

 of late are unalloyed evils. On the contrary, I believe that in one 

 respect at least they have been and are now being productive of essen- 

 tial advantage. Say what we will of the high and noble calling of the 

 farmer, the fact is apparent to the most obtuse perception that in 

 public estimation the business has hitherto been looked upon mainly 

 as a drudgery, in which the hands had much and the mind but little 

 to do — as a business in which men might engage who had neither 

 the shrewdness for a successful merchant, the mental application that 

 makes the lawyer, or the habit of observation without which one 

 cannot be an eminent physician; though every year, about election 

 time, the candidates who want votes would canvass the country and 

 talk about its noble yeomanry, and laud to the skies the honest 

 laborer who wields the spade and the hoe, though taking especial care 

 to avoid soiling their own fingers with either — yet the real dignity of 

 the agricultural profession has been always looked upon as a thing 

 rather to be talked about and boasted of than to be really believed in. 



Farmers themselves are principally to blame for this; it is their 

 fault if their employment has been thought less worthy the ambition 

 of the intelligent and enterprising young man than some other callings. 

 I repeat but a well known fact when I say that in ninety-nine of every 

 hundred cases where the farmer selects one of hia sons as unusually 

 bright and apt to learn, and provides him with the means of a better 

 education than he affords the rest, he does so with a view to placing 

 him in some other occupation — behind the counter, or in the teacher's 

 desk, or in one of the professions. He thus tacitly holds out to the 

 world that the life of the farmer is a physical drudgery merely, and 

 that the active mind is unsuited to it, and finds its proper sphere 

 alsewhere. The true dignity of labor will be properly understood and 



