NEEDS OF NEW ENGLAND AGRICULTURE. 69 



land cotton spinning is to young manufacturers. They must 

 see in it a field for profitable work, a field of good promise. 



We can effect no radical change for the better, until we can 

 tie the artery by which our reddest heart's blood is flowing to 

 tho factories, to the cities, to the West, to the professions, any- 

 where to get away from its native field of action. We must 

 keep our best young men at home ; " keep the boys on the 

 farm " is the hackneyed phrase. Very good ! How shall we 

 do it ? The old recipe of making home delightful, and teaching 

 the cherub that agriculture is an occupation that has been 

 vastly honored by all generations of men, and is the most cer- 

 tain of all to secure a comfortable old age, and a peaceful 

 death in bed, has been tried a hundred times over, and has a 

 hundred times failed. Our cherub does not want a delightful 

 home where he milks fourteen cows before breakfast, and 

 spends his winter evenings with his overtasked family, in a 

 room heated by a close stove. He cares nothing for the abstract 

 opinion of any generation of men, past or present; old age is 

 too far away for him to heed whether it is to be comfortable or 

 not ; and he would not give the snap of his fingers to die in 

 bed. He does not consider dying at all. What engages him 

 now is to know how he shall live ; and the sentimental influ- 

 ences that have been tried so long have failed to convince him 

 that he will live as well on the farm as away from it. What 

 your young man wants is precisely what your middle-aged man 

 wants. There is one word that expresses all our desires, or 

 rather a leading desire of all our hearts ; and that is, " money." 

 lie wants to be rich. Whatever form his ambition may take, 

 we can translate it for him into the word " money," and he 

 will resolve it into its equivalent at his own sweet will. 



Is it all sordid love of money then ? Is there no poetry in 

 farming? To be sure there is, just as there is poetry in all 

 exercise of the mind. There is none in the turning of a damp 

 sod, 'as the plough creeps under and around it ; but what 

 poetry may there not flow through the mind of him who, lean- 

 ing over the plough-stilts, watches its life-like heaving before it 

 settles to its bed, and rests on its curling edge the feet of a 

 thought whose head is in the skies. The poetry is in the 

 suggestiveness, and there are suggestions, thank God, in every 

 occupation. He is a blind dolt who can go through this mar- 



