l)i; BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



bearing upon the larger question of schooling, to which 

 I am coming in a few minutes. 



I will say, in the first place, that the old folks drive the 

 bo}^ away from the farm in many cases because they do not 

 take the boy into business, particularly when he leaves 

 college. Having had a good deal of experience, extending 

 over many years, with farmer boys going to college, I have 

 become convinced that the chief reason why many of the 

 college boys do not go back to the farm is because they 

 have no opportunity to go into business with their fathers ; 

 whereas, we nearly always find that the merchant or the 

 manufacturer or the engineer expects, as a matter of course, 

 to take his son into business with him. Perhaps he will only 

 give him day wages, or hire him by the month, for the 

 first few years ; but the boy expects eventually, if he proves 

 himself worthy, that he is to be associated in his father's 

 business. A farmer will hold the farm until he is sixty-five 

 or seventy years of age, giving the boy very little interest 

 in the farm, and rarely a proprietary interest, mostly as a 

 laborer ; and the young man, therefore, having no capital 

 and no opportunity to go into business for himself, goes to 

 teaching or other work ; and by the time the father gives up 

 his work the son has increased his business so that he does 

 not care to take up the farm, — unless, when he has secured 

 a competency or adequacj^ he goes back to the farm late in 

 life, very largely because of his personal desire to do so. 



In the second place, the farm is not always worthy of the 

 educated and ambitious young man. Not so very long ago 

 a farmer said to me, in a complaining way, that he had 

 sent his boy to an agricultural college, and had hoped that 

 the bo}^ would come back to his farm after he had graduated, 

 but he had gone off to the city and engaged in other occu- 

 pations. I said, " If that young man had gone back to your 

 farm, I should have thought his education had been in vain." 

 The farm was scarcely worthy of the young man. The 

 young man who has been to school has higher ambitions, a 

 larger horizon ; and the farm he left when he went to school 

 cannot be attractive to him unless he has an opportunity 

 to d(n'elop the farm into something better. If he does not 



