THE FARMER'S CALLING.
If any one fancies that he ever heard me flattering farmers as a class, or saying anything which implied that they were more virtuous, upright, unselfish, or deserving, than other people, I am sure he must have misunderstood or that he now misrecollects me. I do not even join in the cant, which speaks of farmers as supporting everybody else—of farming as the only indispensable vocation. You may say if you will that mankind could not subsist if there were no tillers of the soil; but the same is true of house-builders, and of some other classes. A thoroughly good farmer is a useful, valuable citizen: so is a good merchant, doctor, or lawyer. It is not essential to the true nobility and genuine worth of the farmer's calling that any other should be assailed or disparaged.
Still, if one of my three sons had been spared to attain manhood, I should have advised him to try to make himself a good farmer; and this without any romantic or poetic notions of Agriculture as a pursuit. I know well, from personal though youthful experience, that the farmer's life is one of labor, anxiety, and care; that hail, and flood, and hurricane, and untimely frosts, over which he can exert no control, will often destroy in an hour the net results of months of his persistent, well-directed toil; that disease will sometimes sweep away his animals, in spite of the most judicious treatment, the most thoughtful providence, on his part; and that insects, blight, and rust, will often blast his well-grounded hopes of a generous harvest, when they seem on the very point of realization. I know that he is necessarily exposed, more than most other men, to the caprices and inclemencies of weather and climate; and that, if he begins responsible life without other means than those he finds in his own clear head and strong arms, with those of his helpmeet, he must expect to struggle through years of poverty, frugality, and resolute, persistent, industry, before he can reasonably hope to attain a position of independence, comfort, and comparative leisure. I know that much of his work is rugged, and some of it absolutely repulsive; I know that he will seem, even with unbroken good fortune, to be making money much more slowly than his neighbor, the merchant, the broker, or eloquent lawyer, who fills the general eye while he prospers, and, when he fails, sinks out of sight and is soon forgotten; and yet, I should have advised my sons to choose farming as their vocation, for these among other reasons:
I. There is no other business in which success is so nearly certain as in this. Of one hundred men who embark in trade, a careful observer reports that ninety-five fail; and, while I think this proportion too large, I am sure that a large majority do, and must fail, because competition is so eager and traffic so enormously overdone. If ten men endeavor to support their families by merchandise in a township which affords adequate business for but three, it is certain that a majority must fail; no matter how judicious their management or how frugal their living. But you may double the number of farmers in any agricultural county I ever traversed, without necessarily dooming one to failure, or even abridging his gains. If half the traders and professional men in this country were to betake themselves to farming to-morrow, they would not render that pursuit one whit less profitable, while they would largely increase the comfort and wealth of the entire community; and, while a good merchant, lawyer, or doctor, may be starved out of any township, simply because the work he could do well is already confided to others, I never yet heard of a temperate, industrious, intelligent, frugal, and energetic farmer who failed to make a living, or who, unless prostrated by disease or disabled by casualty, was precluded from securing a modest independence before age and decrepitude divested him of the ability to labor.
II. I regard farming as that vocation which conduces most directly and palpably to a reverence for Honesty and Truth. The young lawyer is often constrained, or at least tempted, by his necessities, to do the dirty professional work of a rascal intent on cheating his neighbor out of his righteous dues. The young doctor may be likewise incited to resort to a quackery he despises in order to secure instant bread; the unknown author is often impelled to write what will sell rather than what the public ought to buy; but the young farmer, acting as a farmer, must realize that his success depends upon his absolute verity and integrity. He deals directly with Nature, which never was and never will be cheated. He has no temptation to sow beach sand for plaster, dock-seed for clover, or stoop to any trick or juggle whatever. "Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap," while true, in the long run, of all men, is instantly and palpably true as to him. When he, having grown his crop, shall attempt to sell it—in other words, when he ceases to be a farmer and becomes a trader—he may possibly be tempted into one of the many devious ways of rascality; but, so long as he is acting simply as a farmer, he can hardly be lured from the broad, straight highway of integrity and righteousness.
III. The farmer's calling seems to me that most conducive to thorough manliness of character. Nobody expects him to cringe, or smirk, or curry favor, is order to sell his produce. No merchant refuses to buy it because his politics are detested or his religious opinions heterodox. He may be a Mormon, a Rebel, a Millerite, or a Communist, yet his Grain or his Pork will sell for exactly what it is worth—not a fraction less or more than the price commanded by the kindred product of like quality and intrinsic value of his neighbor, whose opinions on all points are faultlessly orthodox and popular. On the other hand, the merchant, the lawyer, the doctor, especially if young and still struggling dubiously for a position, are continually tempted to sacrifice or suppress their profoundest convictions in deference to the vehement and often irrational prepossessions of the community, whose favor is to them the breath of life. "She will find that that won't go down here," was the comment of an old woman on a Mississippi steamboat, when told that the plain, deaf stranger, who seemed the focus of general interest, was Miss Martineau, the celebrated Unitarian; and in so saying she gave expression to a feeling which pervades and governs many if not most communities. I doubt whether the social intolerance of adverse opinions is more vehement anywhere else than throughout the larger portion of our own country. I have repeatedly been stung by the receipt of letters gravely informing me that my course and views on a current topic were adverse to public opinion: the writers evidently assuming, as a matter of course, that I was a mere jumping-jack, who only needed to know what other people thought to insure my instant and abject conformity to their prejudices. Very often, in other days, I was favored with letters from indignant subscribers, who, dissenting from my views on some question, took this method of informing me that they should no longer take my journal—a superfluous trouble, which could only have meant dictation or insult, since they had only to refrain from renewing their subscriptions, and their Tribune would stop coming, whenever they should have received what we owed them; and it would in no case stop till then. That a journalist was in any sense a public teacher—that he necessarily had convictions, and was not likely to suppress them because they were not shared by others—in short, that his calling was other and higher than that of a waiter at a restaurant, expected to furnish whatever was called for, so long as the pay was forthcoming—these ex-subscribers had evidently not for one moment suspected. That such persons have little or no capacity to insult, is very true; and yet, a man is somewhat degraded in his own regard by learning that his vocation is held in such low esteem by others. The true farmer is proudly aware that it is quite otherwise with his pursuit—that no one expects him to swallow any creed, support any party, or defer to any prejudice, as a condition precedent to the sale of his products. Hence, I feel that it is easier and more natural in his pursuit than in any other for a man to work for a living, and aspire to success and consideration, without sacrificing self-respect, compromising integrity, or ceasing to be essentially and thoroughly a gentleman.