42 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



THE FARMER'S CALLING. 



From an Address before the Hoosac Valley Agricultural Society. 



BY J. N. DUNHAM. 



The great and pressing desire of man is to get rich — to get 

 rich the quickest and easiest way is the study of nearly all ; 

 and men pursue the various branches of business within their 

 reach, selecting for themselves the road to wealth. Skill, 

 industry, and good luck combined, succeed. Skill and industry 

 sometimes fail, and good luck occasionally succeeds, without 

 the aid of either industry or skill. Some people are rich 

 because they could not well prevent it, and some are poor 

 because they cannot well be otherwise. Indolence and poverty 

 do not always go hand in hand, neither does wealth and 

 industry. 



Farmers, like other men, desire to get rich, to own broad 

 fields and large herds, to have fine horses, and to live in fine 

 houses. All this is right, and they should be encouraged. I 

 am glad to know that the farmers represented in this society 

 are prosperous, and many of them wealthy. But farmers are 

 not always content. The brilliant success of some of our 

 manufacturers has at times created an uneasiness among certain 

 of our farmers, and in some instances they have sold their 

 farms to embark in other business, and have only awoke from 

 their fanciful dreams of wealth, in the Court of Insolvency. 

 When they witnessed the brilliant success of their neighbor, 

 they failed to remember that two fortunes had been scattered 

 at the same water-power. The success of the merchant at times 

 looks large in the eyes of a farmer, but he fails to remember 

 that tlie merchant's successor is reduced to poverty, and his 

 neighbor across the way can pay but twenty cents on a dollar. 

 He also sees the men of the professions, as he supposes, living 

 easily ; but he forgets that these men are the drudge servants 



