LECTURES AND ESSAYS EEAD AT INSTITUTES. 407 



It will be suflBcient, then, to discuss the question, "How shall the loys be 

 kept on the farm?" And, of course, what is needed is not abuse of those in 

 fault, but honest, intelligent criticism; not cant, but candor; not the blow- 

 ing of beautiful bubbles, but sober, earnest, careful, critical, thoughtful 

 examination. It is uot to be lamented that all the boys do not stay on the 

 farm. It is not to be deplored that all the graduates of the agricultural col- 

 leges do not go back to the farm where thev were reared. Many of them 

 ought to become manufacturers, merchants, lawyers, journalists, doctors, and 

 ministers, carrying into the town the good sense and thrift that purifies while 

 it strengthens; and into the rural districts, with professional or mercantile 

 business, the inspiration to active social intercourse that overcomes reserve. 

 Each year ought to lessen the difference between the isolated, unsocial life of 

 the country and the culture and refinement of the city; but we want the 

 brightest, most active, enterprising, and vigorous boys to stay on the farm ; 

 or, having completed a good scientific education, to return to the farm and 

 help develop its best possibilities. 



The principle which prompts us to better our condition, usually a calm 

 and dispassionate desire, is born into the world with us, and abides with us 

 till we lie in the grave. The boys on the farm, as it too often is, sec that " in 

 the sweat of his brow " their father earns his bread. The frosts bite, the 

 winds wither, the sun scorches, the floods drown, tlie insects devour, and 

 mildews mysteriously blight. Long years of patient, sordid drudgery seem to 

 be rewarded with merely a scant competence for old age. The boys naturally 

 long for a pleasanter, more genteel, and more lucrative employment, one 

 which is not sordid ; one in which the person and clothes may be kept clean; 

 one in which the form may be kept upright as nature intended, and the hands 

 white, soft, and supple, not hard, cramped, callous, and misshapen ; one in 

 which they may be brought into nearer relation to others socially, may use 

 brain more and muscle less, and may feel a closer resemblance to the ideal 

 human being, than to a machine. Ignorant of the world and its ways, and of 

 the grand possibilities of life and living, of service, profit, and enjoyment on 

 the farm, they believe any employment, — profession, business, trade, agency, 

 Icerkship, — anything not demanding manual labor, preferable to the toil and 

 drudgery and meager compensation of the farmer's calling. And so one goes 

 to the town high-school, is pitchforked through an elementary course of Latin 

 and Greek, ''drilled in proparoxytoues and properispomena, and in logaoadic 

 dactylic duplex dupliciter trochaic acatalectics ;" attends medical lectures, sees 

 a pauper corpse or two cut to pieces, crams for examination, steals a diploma, 

 and "with all his blushing honors thick upon his vacant head," begins to kill 

 people scientifically, stuffing stomachs of which he knows nothing, with drugs 

 of which he knows still less. "A charge to keep I have," is a doctor's song. 

 Another allows the law to perpetrate a fraud on the corn-field and potato 

 patch, and snatch him away to a short term of reading, then a long term of 

 seedy starvation, when he enlists in the greedy army of long-legged, eager- 

 eyed, nervous beggars, seeking public office or government position, and "in 

 the sea of upturned faces, distends his hungry jaws to catch a sop from the 

 public table or a scrap from the public trough." Another, fired with philan- 

 thropy, and stupefied with theology, thrusts his head through the clerical col- 

 lar, turns his brain into a gland to secrete and discharge every week two ser- 

 mons, and no end of cant, and all his life looks back with envy and chagrin 

 on the free, healthful, independent life of the farmer. Another becomes an 

 editor, a walking bundle of items and talking squibs, advertising railroads 



