NECESSARY PREPARATION 105 



it. Our selection of a business is governed by 

 circumstances, desires, direction, talent, or birth. 

 Many of us are born into a business. The ma- 

 jority of men engaged in the business of farming 

 were born into it. A few take it up from desire, 

 direction or talent. And this has been true in 

 every age, and accounts for the fact that in the 

 past there has been so little preparation for the 

 carrying on of the business upon the part of those 

 who have been engaged in it. The farmer boy 

 born upon the farm, who did not catch a vision 

 of the business of city life, simply drifted into 

 the footsteps of his father who likewise had 

 drifted into the business of farming, and learned 

 from him the lesson of the business. The edu- 

 cation that he secured from the schools he attended 

 was not along the line of farming, for the train- 

 ing for the business of farming has had no place 

 in the curriculum of the schools of the past, and 

 too often the education he secured from the com- 

 mon schools was scarcely enough for the simple 

 transactions of life. If, in getting his education, 

 he caught no other vision of business life, he 

 stayed upon the farm and learned its lessons from 

 the school of "the way father did it." If 

 father's way was the right way, and sad to say, 

 generally it was not, he became as proficient as 

 father, and if it was his lot to farm rich virgin 

 soil, or soil that had not lost its fertility, he made 

 a success from a viewpoint of dollars and cents. 

 But the environment of the father became the 

 environment of the son, and if the father had the 

 broad vision of the business of farming, the son 

 caught it also. Farm practices were transmitted 



