law and devotes the best of bis life and energies to the skillful practice of the 

 profession, let U3 show him that the same study, and time, and skill, and energy 

 will secure for him, in comfortable and luxurious living, the full equivalent of 

 his professional income, and we may rest assured that we have nailed that boy 

 to the farm to the end of his days. 



Do you ask how we are to show him this.' We must point to instances, — 

 which we need not go far to find — where intelligent and energetic men ar e 

 actually accomplishing such results, and are making more than comfort 

 able living from their farms. Or, better still, let us show it to him 

 in our own lives and our own business. Let us put a little more energy, 

 a good deal more thought and a good deal more capital into our farming. 

 Let us sell a little bank stock and use the money to make our farming more 

 worthy of us. Or, even better yet, let us send him away to live a year 

 with the best farmer we can hear of, and give him to understand that when he 

 comes home again, with his mind made up to become a good farmer in sober 

 earnest, he shall lack nothing that our means or our encouragement can supply, 

 to start him on his way. And then, when the time does come, let us be men 

 about it, and really try to make him happy and hopeful in his new pursuit, 

 — avoiding especially the most common fault of fathers — jealousy of their sons' 

 movements. Let us slacken the restraint in which we have kept him as a child, 

 and make him feel as much of the freedom of manhood as he would do had he 

 gone to town to live by himself. Let us exercise the control of companionship, 

 not of authority, and let us try to make the boy a good fellow, by being a good 

 fellow with him. Take away the "stern parient" (dement and give him at home 

 —within reasonable limits — the same sort of freedom he would have abroad. 



There is another branch of our subject that is not less important than the one 

 we have just considered. We must do all in our power to keep the young men in 

 our ranks, but we must not forget to keep our ranks worthy of them. We must 

 waken ourselves up, set our eyes to the front, and march on. We have lolled 

 on long enough in the easj'-going way. It is time, now, for us to take up the 

 pace of the other arts and to manage our farms more skillfully and more effect 

 ually. Progress enough has been made, in the introduction of the new harvest 

 ing machinery, to show that a most radical change is possible, ami it is a radicaj 

 change that we need. It is difficult to define in fixed terms just what the 

 i hange should be. It depends on circumstances; but whatever it is, it must 

 reach to the bottom. Farming must be made a business in which the same edu- 

 cated intelligence shall find employment, that is now engaged in the more at- 

 tractive pursuits, and it must furnish the same means for refined and elegant liv- 

 ing that they furnish. With this change it will become the most attractive of all 

 pursuits, for the simple reason that while it will be as profitable as any other 

 safe business, its prosecution will involve an amount of mental activity and st iciie 

 tific speculation that cannot fail to delight an intelligent man. 



We must work for refinement, and elegance, and luxury. It is balderdash to 

 say that we like * 'plain living and hard work." If we do, it is because we are 

 too poor or too mean to pay for something better, and because we make it a 



