of the worst.

Look at this question as we will, it is difficult to see how else than
by improving the race of American farmers we are to accomplish any
result whose good effect will be radical and lasting. This brings us
around to that threadbare subject of the vague discussion of
agricultural writers: "How to keep the boys on the farm."

The devices recommended for accomplishing this result have thus far
failed of their object. The average farmer boy is not a sentimentalist,
and he is not likely to be moved by the sort of talk so often lavished
upon him. To use a vulgarism, he has an extremely "level head." He fails
to realize the attraction and the dignity which are implied by what he
is told of the nobleness of his father's calling, of the purifying and
elevating influences of a daily intercourse with nature. He is not to be
caught with this sort of chaff. His cultivation has not been of that
aesthetic character that he has an especial drawing toward nobleness, or
purity, or elevation. Nature, as he knows it, shows at times an
unattractive side; and he fails to recognize precisely what is meant by
Mother Earth as a source of dignity. To him Mother Earth is an exacting
parent, calling for constant and regular toil, and whipping him on day
by day with weeds to be hoed, dry gardens to be watered, snowdrifts to
be shovelled, and an almost endless round of embarrassments to be
overcome. As for the purity and simplicity of the farmer's life, he
knows very much better than to pin his faith to it. To him the farmer's
house is too often a place where the mother is overworked, tired,
wearied with constant annoyance, and made peevish and fretful. The
conversation of hired men and young neighbors and brothers is not
marked by refined delicacy and simplicity, as he understands these
terms. At the end of all our preaching he will say, at least to himself,
that this is probably the sort of talk that we consider appropriate to
the occasion, but that, if we knew what he knows about farming, we
should see how little effect it is likely to have. If he sought our
motive in saying it, he would conclude that we were interested in
keeping up the supply of farm labor; and that so far as _he_ was
concerned, since he must work for a living, he would work at some other
industry if he could get a chance, and leave those who were less
fortunate to work on the farm.

The more sentimental and more influential considerations governing in
this m