Western Reserve chronicle. [volume] (Warren, Ohio) 1855-1921, 1870-05-25
THE FARMER.

The farmers office is precise and
important, but you must not try
to paint him in roSe-color; you can
not make pretty compliments to fate
and gravitation, whose minister he is.
He represents the necessities. 1t is
the beauty of the great economy of
the world that makes his cOmeliness.
He bends TO the order of the seasons,
the weather, the soils and crops, as
the sails of a ship bend to the wind.
He represents continuous, hard labor,
wear in, year out, and small gains.
He is a slow person. timed to nature
and not to city watches. He takes
the pace of seasons, plants and chem
istry. Nature never hurries atom
by atom, little by little, she achieves
her work. The lesson one learns
in fishing, yachting, hunting or
planting, is the manners of nature.
Patience with the delays of wind
and sun, delays of the seasons, bad
weather, excess or lack of water-pa-
tience with the slowness of our feet,
with the parsimOny of our strength,
with the largeness of sea and land
we must traverse, etc.
The farmer times himself to nature,
and acquires that livelOng patience
which belongs TO her. Slow, narrow
man, his rule is, that the earth shall
feed and clothe him; and he must
wait for his crop to grow. His enter
tainments, his liberties and his spend
ing must be OH the farmers scale,
and not on a merchants. 1t were as
false for farmers to use a wholesale
and massy expense, as for States to
use a minute economy. But if thus
pinched on one side, he has cOmpen-
satory advantages. He is permanent,
clings to his land as the rocks do. In
the town where l live, farms remain
in the same families for seven and
eight generations and most OF the
first settlers, q635, should they reap
pear on the farms to-day, would find
their own blood and names still in
possession. And the like fact holds
in the surrounding towns.
This hard work will always be
done by one kind of man; not by
scheming spectators, nor by soldiers,
nor professors, nor readers of Tenny-
son but by men of endurance-deep-
chested, Iong-winded, tough, SLOW
and sure and timely. The farmer has
a great health and the appetite of
health, and means to his end; he has
broad lands for his home, wood to
burn great fires, plenty of plain food !
his milk, at least, is unwateredi ana
for sleep, he has cheaper and better
and more of it than citizens.
He has grave trusts contided to
him. In the great household of Ma
ture, the farmer stands at the door of
! the bread-roOm, and weighs to each
his loaf. 1t is for him to say whether
men shall marry or not. Early mar
riages and the number of births are
indissolubly connected with abun-
dance of food; or, as Burke said,
"Man breeds at the mouth" Then
he is the Board of Quarantine. The
farmer is a boarded capital of health,
as the farm is the capital of wealth ;
and it is for him that the health and
power, moral and intellectual, of the
cities came. The city is always re-
cruited from the country. The men
in the cities who are the centres OF
energy. the driving-wheels of trade,
politics or practical arts, and the
women of beauty and genius, are the
children or grandchildren of farmers,
and are spending the energies which
| their fathers hardy, silent life accu-
mulated in frosty burrows, in poverty,
necessity and darkness.
He is the continuous benefactor.
He who digs q well, constructs stone
! fountain, plants a grove OF trees by
the roadside, plants an orchard, builds
| a durable house, reclaims a swamp, OF
as much as puts a stone seat by the
wayside, makes the land so far lovely
and desirable, makes fortune which
he -oaaaat- carry away with him, bat
which is useful to his country long
afterwards. The man that works at
home, helps society at large with
somewhat more of certainty than he
who devotes himself to charities. If
il be true, that not by votes of politi-
cal parties, but by the eternal laws OF
political economy, slaves are driven
out of a slave State as fast as it is sur
rounded by free States, then the true
abolitionist is the farmer, who, heed
less of laws and constitutions, stand
all day in the field, investigating his
| labor in the land, and making pro-
duct with which no forced labor can
compete.
We commonly say that the rich
man can speak the truth, can afford
honesty, can afford independence of
opinion and action; and that is the
theory of nobility. But it is the rich
man in a true sense-that is to say,
not the man of large income and
large expenditure, but solely the man
whose outlay is less than his income,
and is steadily kept so.
In English factories, the boy that
watches the loom to tie the thread
when the wheel stops, to indicate
that a thread Is broken, is called
ninder. And in this great fac
tory of our Copernican globe, shift
ing its slides; rotating its constella-
/ tions, times and tides; bringing now
the day of planting, then OF water
ing, then of wedding, then of reap
ing, then of curing and storing-the
farmer is the nlinder. His machine
is of colossal proportions-the dame
ter of the water-wheel, the arms of
the levers, the power of the battery,
are out of all mechanic measure;
and it takes him long to understand
its parts and its workings. This
pump never "sucks ;" these screws
are never loose; this machine is
never out of gear; the vat and pis-
ton, wheels and tires, never wear out,
but are self-repairing. - EDlcrSOR's 8