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

ma kind 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.