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dustry, coupled with perseverance and economy in most branches of 

 business, is tolerably sure to succeed. But with the success of the 

 parent, and his consequent devotion to the labors of his office, or his 

 counting room, that necessary vigilance and watchfulness over the 

 proper education and employment of his child, is too often neglected. 

 Honestly feeling the strength of his own self-reliance, he trusts that 

 the son may follow in his own laborious and successful course. But 

 a few years only pass, and that son has arrived at manhood, vitiated, 

 perhaps, by adverse associations, or if still within the path of safety, 

 unfitted by education, or the false estimate of his position in life, to 

 succeed in the beaten track of parental example. In a great majo- 

 rity of cases, capital, toilfully gathered, and safely invested, is squan- 

 dered, or lost in business adventure by the misapplication of the son, 

 while the hopeful parent had never considered, that when he had fur- 

 nished the means, he could not regulate the brains to control it ; and 

 aftr, perhaps, repeated trials, he withdraws him from business alto- 

 gether, an unsuccessful and disappointed man ; and the parent him- 

 self, if he escape the ruin of the son, is at a loss to know how he shall 

 provide for his decent employment, or witness the wasting of his own 

 gains during life time in an unprofitable support for in this country, 

 thank God, a man must do something to make him respectable. And 

 yet the well meaning and laborious parent is scarely to blame. He 

 has looked abroad among the pursuits of the world, and finds none 

 more generally successful than the one he himself has occupied. But 

 risen, perchance, from comparative poverty himself, he cannot real- 

 ize that the strong incentive for exertion, which existed in his own 

 case, is absent in the son, and therefore, that they each look out upon 

 the world from widely different premises. 



Nor, during all this probation of anxiety and solicitude, has it ever 

 occurred to the father, that Agriculture held out the safest mode of 

 investment for a portion of his gains ; and if not the most rapid in 



