the ones that distinguish it from others. These parts constitute trades.
They require a special training to perform them, and the more perfectly
they can be performed by any one, the more successful will that person
be considered as a tradesman. A fine workman receives more pay for less
work than one who does rougher work, simply because it is the minute
parts that bring in the profit. This is so in the mechanical trades; it
is so also in farming and yet many seem to be unaware of the fact. How
numerous are those who leave out the minutia; mechanics learn a trade in
a short time at least well enough to make a living by it. Many farmers
have spent their whole lives upon farms and are still scarcely able to
make a decent living; and the reason of it is because they have left
undone those parts which would, if performed, bring in profit.

It is not the lack of an education that causes so much poor success. It
is a lack of care in action and a want of observation in seeing. A man's
experience is what makes him wise. He gains this experience by coming in
contact with and observing those things which he meets.

In schools children are taught from the works of men. These works are
arts, and since art is but the imitation of nature, all education is but
imitation of that which the farmer boy has the chance of seeing before
it becomes second hand. There is no place that has greater facilities to
give observation its full scope than a farm. All farmers can, with the
aid of the right kind of books and papers, be reasonably well educated,
and most of them have a better comparative knowledge than they think
they have. Many of the city cousins are superficially educated. City
people can talk, but the greater part of the talk of many of them might
be more properly called chattering. No farmer need feel below them
because he is more retired and has a greater amount of modesty.

It is true, perhaps, that one can not seem more insignificant than he
really is. Great men are constantly dying, but the living move on just
the same. Each person's position seems valuable to few, and yet there is
almost an entire dependence of man to man. Every one can not fill the
highest positions, but they should make the best possible use of the
faculties that are given them. If this is done there will be no regrets
in the future in regard to what might have been done in the past. Life
will then be thought worth living and much more happiness will cluster