MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS 397 



FARM FOR YOUITG ME:N^. 



JAMES PARTON CONSIDERS AGRICULTURE A PROFESSION. 



I do not know one educated young man of American birth who 

 thinks of farming as a profession. I have sat for ten minutes over this 

 paper trjing- to recall an individual who had even spoken favorably of 

 agriculture as a vocation to live by. Farming appears to have com- 

 pletely passed out of the thoughts of young men in the eastern States 

 as a desirable career. Is not this somewhat strange in a nation, the 

 founders and first rulers of which were farmers, almost to a man ? Ac- 

 cording to a recent statement a considerable number of students in our 

 college are willing to go into foreign countries as missionaries, and all 

 the professions appear to have some attraction for the young and am- 

 bitious, excepting, alone, this first and chief of all, the cultivation of 

 the soil. 



Not long ago, standing upon the eminence which is the site of a 

 famous New York university, one of the professors said : "We suc- 

 ceeded with everything here, except in the department of agriculture. 

 We can not make our students take an interest in farming. The ma- 

 chine shop, as you see, flourishes ; it is a scene of absorbing interest 

 every day. All our other shops and laboratories attract attention more 

 or less, and every kind of study pursued here has its votaries. But 

 when it comes to tilling the magnificent farm which Congress has given 

 us, it is all up-hill work. The American youth of this age will not hoe 

 corn if he can help it. A good many of our students have been brought 

 up on farms. They have hoed com and driven cows from their 7th 

 year. They have done all that kind of work they ever mean to do un- 

 less compelled by inexorable necessity." 



Who can blame them ? Let awy reasonable being visit one of our 

 old-fashioned, one-horse farms in any of the older States, and he will 

 not be disposed to scold those sons of farmers. One day last summer 

 I sought shelter from a shower in the barn of one such on the coast of 

 New England, a farm that dates back 200 years, upon which seven gen- 

 erations of laborious and thoughtful people have expended their 

 strength. The interior of that huge old barn was a spectacle of dilapi- 

 dation. Three good-sized country churches could have stood side by 



