120 
COUNTY AGRICULTURAL SOCIETIES. 
to me more than anything else in this country keeps hack the 
theory and practice of farming. Most farmers are ambitious 
to educate their children, and to do this they send them, to 
school. If the farmer is well to do in the world, he sends his 
sons and daughters away from home to some boarding school— 
and they come back with new notions, new desires, new ambi¬ 
tions. The brighter and more ambitious of the sons desire to 
be merchants, physicians or lawyers—and as soon as possible 
desert their farm life and take to other occupations. The 
daughters wish to live in town ; they wish to marry merchants, 
or doctors, or lawyers—they wish father to sell the farm and 
move into some village where they can enjoy themselves better 
—where they have more company, &c. Undoubtedly there 
are exceptions to this rule, but that such is the general result 
of the kind of education I have spoken of, I think none will 
deny. 
Now this takes place and takes place continually, in spite of 
the continual glorification of farmers and farmer life by ora¬ 
tors and writers, by the politicians and the press. It takes 
place in spite of the well known fact that of all the money 
* 
made in the country, by far the largest share is made by the 
cultivators of the earth—in spite of the well known fact that 
where one merchant and business man succeeds, very many en¬ 
tirely and ruinously fail—where one doctor or lawyer gets a 
practice worth any exertion, a hundred gain a bare subsistance 
and live a life far less comfortable and independent than any 
farmer who is not ruinously in debt. 
It is well known that many an unsuccessful merchant and 
lawyer sighs to get back to farming again, and sighs in vain, 
because he has not the means to purchase a farm, and his hab¬ 
its of life have unfitted him and his family for the severe trials 
and privation necessary to make a farm by hard labor alone. 
It is well known that many a successful business man does turn 
back with eagerness to farm life as soon as he is able to do 
so, and many more wish to do it, but are kept in town by fam¬ 
ilies that are not willing and are unfitted by their habits to live 
