THIRD ANNUAL YEAR BOOK — PART VI. 419 



get credit for as much more, if he needs it, and then he is ready to rent 

 a farm and do business for himself. I have had intimate relations with 

 several men who began not many years ago as hired men on the farm, 

 who now live in their own good farm homes and are rearing their fami- 

 lies in comfort and plenty and honor. Such cases are not exceptional. 

 The isolation of farm life is passing. The telephone, rural mail delivery, 

 better roads and the interurban car are doing the business. 



We get so used to fooling ourselves. Just think of the isolation of the 

 family of a man of moderate salary in a great city. In a 

 cheap, cheerless flat, nine miles from the up-town house where the head 

 of the family is employed: from early morning till late evening wife 

 separated from husband, children from father, isolated by impassable 

 social barriers from all except those of their own class, and fortunate If 

 even a few congenial souls know of their existence. Compared with that 

 environment the average farm neighborhood is a social elysium. It can 

 be safely affirmed that there is no better, cleaner and more attractive 

 business today than that of farming No business is making better 

 progress than farming. Numerous recent discoveries of great importance 

 in agricultural science and rapid advancement in general knowledge of 

 agricultural processes mark this time and put agriculture in the front 

 rank of progress. 



If any young man suspects that he has brains enough to farm all 

 right, with a surplus he could not employ in the business, let him try to 

 learn what is known about agriculture and to keep up with the knowl- 

 edge that is being daily added. It would be a pity for farming and a pity 

 for the young man to turn down the business because he thought he had 

 more brains than could be fully employed in it. A capable, intelligent 

 farmer may enjoy more legitimate leisure than men in most any other 

 kind of business. Among many more inducements to young men to choose 

 farming for a business let me mention only this one. Every farm is an 

 independent business concern, a business unit, and every farmer is inde- 

 pendent, his own master and his own manager. Nobody is over him. 

 He plans his own work and works out his own plans. Other kinds of 

 business are concentrating more and more and nothing can stop it until 

 it gets to the ^nd of the process, whatever that end may be. One head 

 does the thinking and planning and gives orders and a thousand obey, 

 begin or quit, rise or fall, as the head decides; but the farmer is the man 

 that is his own master, politically, socially, economically free. 



CROP ROTATION. 



W. H. Stevenson in Breeders' Gazette. 

 Grain and live stock write the secret of the successful farmer's agri- 

 cultural supremacy. Many interesting accounts have been published in 

 your journal regarding the splendid achievements of the landed princes 

 among our famers who have successfully based their extensive operations 



