The Plymouth weekly Democrat. (Plymouth, Ind.) 1860-1869, 1869-04-08
farm ano 6onsebola.
Shall We Encourage Boys to Stay on
the Farm?

By all means, if they want to stay; if
they have q taste for farm life, and take
to it more kindly than to any other pur-
suit If boy takes an honest pride in
turning straight furrow, rearing fine
calves and building fine hay stacks, doubt
less the farm is the place for him. If he
prefers to 90 to the county fair to attend
ing Dan Rice's circus. if he selects the
Prairie Farmer that came in the same
mail with the New York Ledger, that boy
has taste for farming that it will do well
to encourage.
But how about the other boys, to whom
farming is an uncongenial employment,
and whose only lively step in the field is
taken when the trumpet calls to dinner
Shall we encourage them to stay on the
farm, with the fact staring US in the face
that they have no natural aptitude for the
business, and consequently will never be-
come good farmers? Much as we respect
and honor the pursuit of agriculture, we
think we should not. We cannot see how
either the farm or the boys are to be
benefited by the procedure. The fact is,
we have too many poorly managed farms,
and too many poor farmers to hold out in
ducements for increasing the number of
them.
1t would be much wiser course, every
way, to find out what a boy is good for, if,
indeed be is good for anything in particu-
lar, before you encourage him to adopt
any particular calling. IF the only good
a boy ever did ABOUT the farm was to re-
pair the pumps, hang gates, make mole.
traps, put in rake teeth, file the saw, and
hang the grind-stone, and he did these
things well, obviously the farm is not the
place for him, but machine shop is.
If boy will walk half dozen miles,
after the days work is done, to hear po-
litical speech, if he takes time from his
play to attend trials before a Justice Of the
peace, and sits up half the night, when he
is going to school, to learn declarations
which bring down the house at spelling
school, most likely he will do the world
more good if you put law book and not
a manure fork into his hand.
If he earns more money trading jack
knives and fish lines on rainy days, than
he does hoeing potatoes and cutting grain
in fair weather. give him chance to han
die yard stick, and not have him around
troubling other boys who are handling
horse rakes and pitch forks, and like the
employment.
Again, if boy is skillful in skinning
small animals and stuffing birds, if he prac-
tised making pills of mud when he was a
child and extracted teeth from the jaws of
dead horses with piDcers when he got
older; If he reads physiologies when his
brothers are engaged in perusing Robin
son Crusoe, he will be far more likely to
succeed with lancet than with scythe.
1t has become very fashionable lately to
exhort farmers to encourage their boys to
stay on the farm irrespective of their abili-
ty or taste to become good farmers but
we cannot see the property of it. On the
other hand, we see many good reasons why
boys who do not promise to become good
farmers should be encouraged TO try their
hands at something else while they are
still young. Because boy was born on a
farm it is no reason why he should always
stay there if nature gave him gifts for
something else, but denied him the inner
ent faculties for becoming a successful
farmer. In India persons are born into
Caste but can never get out of it. In an
cient Egypt children were obliged to fol-
low the occupation of their parents to the
latest time. But we have never heard of
any good, but heard of good deal
Of evil coming from it. The farm is
good place for boys to stay on unless
they have an aversion to farm life, and
have, at the same time, a strong inclina-
ton to go into some other kind of bust
ness that is more copgenial to them in
hwich case we think they had better go
their way, and the sooner the better
Prairie Farmer.