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farm life, dissatisfied with the unattractiveness of the home, for- 

 saking it at the first opportunity. believe me, life is infinitely 

 more than the hoarding of money or the adding of acre to acre. 

 It is worth more, a thousandfold more, to your sons and daughters 

 to become men and women with cultivated intellects, gentle man- 

 ners, with minds trained to love good books, to enjoy refined so- 

 ciety ; worth infinitely more to them is this than the inheritance of 

 the best farm in Christendom. To help them toward this is an aim 

 transcendently higher than to accumulate a fortune to leave them. 

 The day seems to have come, especially with us in the East, 

 when fanning, like everything else, is to be broken up into its 

 several branches, and the farmer himself is to become a special- 

 ist in some distinct department of agriculture. Send the boys, 

 then, if you can, to college ; the better a young man's education, 

 other things being equal, the larger hi^ success wherever you put 

 him. At least send him to one of our agricultural colleges and 

 help him determine that department of farming for which he is 

 best suited. It may be that he is naturally a horseman ; cultivate 

 his taste. Let him learn all about the care and breeding of the 

 best horses that the markets demand, and then give him a start. 

 Perhaps it is cattle toward which his inclinations run, or poultr} 7 , 

 or fruit, or flowers. In each one of these departments there is 

 abundant opportunity for the largest success right here in New 

 England, and the specialist is the one who reaps the largest finan- 

 cial advantage. 



And now, to gather up in a word what has been said. The farm- 

 er of the New World has started with the tremendous advantage 

 of a system of land tenure that subjects him to none of the griev- 

 ous burdens that they know who dwell in a country that must sup- 

 port the oppressive evil of a landed gentry. He has displayed in 

 the brief history of his country a spirit of progress, a quickness of 

 apprehension, a keenness of insight, a grasp of thought, a tenacity 

 of purpose, that places him in the foremost rank of the world's ag- 

 riculturists. He is moving now, we may safely hope, toward a 

 still larger and nobler conception of his calling ; realizing more 

 vividly the vital needs of the State and of his own inherent man- 

 hood, the deep necessities of his home and family as above the 

 mere possession of hoarded gold. The broader the plain on which 

 he lives, the higher the ambitions that stir his soul, the wider the 

 culture he gives his sons and daughters, the deeper the principles 

 of character and life that underlie his whole activity, the grander 

 the power he will exert in State and Nation, the sooner will triumph 

 those laws of eternal right and truth, only in obedience to which 

 can we cry with holy enthusiasm, " God save the Commonwealth." 



