20 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



THE FARMER AND THE MAN. 



From an Address before the Middlesex North Agricultural Society, Sept. 15, 1858. 



BY FREDERIC HINCKLEY. 



There are three ends which the labor of the farmer, like all 

 other labor, has no answer. The first of these is to secure the 

 Means of Living. A grand essential for the accomplishment of 

 any thing in life is, of course, the continuance and support of 

 life itself. Viewed in this light, regarding existence as deriving 

 its value from the purposes it accomplishes, all effort for its 

 preservation and enlargement becomes justifiable and praise- 

 worthy. It is the different way of looking at life, in this 

 respect, which makes much of the contrast between the plodder 

 or the sensualist on the one hand, and the man of energy, 

 enterprise and nobleness on the other. One is content but to live, 

 with such pleasures as his unrefined, uncultivated capabilities 

 enable him to appreciate ; and to him life becomes a pure 

 selfishness, or an unmitigated drudgery. The living, or the 

 struggle for it, exhausts all his energies ; and so he plods on, 

 like the horse he rides, or the ox he goads to his daily toil, 

 content to work and eat and sleep as they ; with no ambition 

 beyond this incessent labor, no aim but his daily fill, his animal 

 living. While the other, valuing life for the uses to which it 

 can be put — not only for the enjoyment that can be had from 

 it, but for the good that may be done with it — finds himself 

 stimulated by that to greater and more successful endeavors for 

 the maintenance of life itself, and what is more, inevitably 

 rises to the cherishing of a higher purpose in his toil. 



Among these higher purposes is the second end of all labor, 

 viz. : Success in one^s avocation. By this I do not mean success 

 in making money in it, but in exalting the character of the 

 workmanship, perfecting the products of the labor. There is 



