Litchfield enquirer., 1880-02-05
Farming.

Farming.
 Farming is not fun but it certainly has it's advantages, and very great ones which we do not sec adverted to in.sYoung Farmers" com ,nunications, of this and last week, and we hope not to be considered quite as asDives' dog even if we do attempt to soothe the irri- .ation under which he so evidently writes
 There is an old saying that high rate of interest inevitably implies bad security. It is very much 80 with the occupations. Some offer low pay, hard, steady but sure work; others, high pay but uncertain employment young man concludes, for instance, to become lawyer. He invests eight or nine years time. and five or six thousand dollars. fitting for college, getting his degree, and studying his profession. Often he fails more or less completely; often he drags wearily along, up to the ears in debt, and tempted into practices that are simply moral ruin. It is our belief. though we have not examined the record, that scarcely third of the young men admitted to the bar of this county within the past twenty years have found the practice of law success ful business. So, too, in mercantile business, but small percentage succeed. The bulk of New York merchants come to bankruptcy, sooner or later, we are told. The minister, we judge, is the surest of a living of any pro- fessional man yet, taking his own view of the matter, his is pretty hard life.
 We shall indulge in no soft words about the preferableness of manual labor to intellectual. It is healthier, but not so pleasant That is one of the happiest and most hopeful tenden- cies of human nature which favors brain de- velopment in preference to mere muscular development. But as we go up ill the scale of avocations we find life more and more of lot tery. Intellectual employment offers greater prizes. but it also offers more blanks and the sorriest, most hopeless condition of man is that of the person bred to intellectual employment, but unable to get living by it.
 The comparative desirableness of manual labor and intellectual labor is one of the ques- tions that is as old as time. It has always been debated and never decided. One curl ous fact we have observed in this connection :: that farmers generally envy business and pro- fessional men their good living, their good clothes. their apparently light work; while, on the other hand, the intellectual laborer looks with longing to the independence the com parative freedom from care, the safe co ape tency of the farmer. Probably both would be better contented if each could adequately ap- preciate the burdens the other has to beai
 Modern tendencies, at least here in America, are towards an increase of intellectual, de- crease of manual labor. Invention has so in- creased the productiveness of labor that we can eat better food, wear better clothes, and still have more time for reading and recrea- feels this. He works fewer hours in day, he rides his moving machine instead of swinging his scythe, and he drives a pair of horses where his father drove oxen. In the good old times we read of, the farmer hardly had time even to grumble at the men who wore broad: cloth .a''':' E. ..1e
 The labor of a single American produces more to-day than did the labor of two Ameri- cans century ago. As race we are no longer hard worked (unless it be our women.) The dangerous feature of American growth, however, is the tendency of property to accu- mulate in the hands of the few. The article we copied from the Atlantic week since, on the Bonanza farms of the West," issignifi- cant as seeming to prove that the spirit of mo- nopoly has finally invaded agriculture. We are glad to notice that the Western papers, commenting on this article, are able to throw doubt on some of it's statements of fact. In all the older states the tendency seems to be towards smaller rather than larger farms Such is said to be the case even in Texas and California. Nevertheless the fact remains un- disputed that in the most fertile districts of the far Northwest, the land monopolists, with their many just and unjust advantages, are roofing out the small farmers and homestead settlers who have generally been the successful pioneers of the West. It would almost seem as if our Pacific railroad system, and our land grant system, founded as they are on fraud and corruption, were likely to culminate in system of agriculture and race of landlords worse even those that have brought pauperism and famine on the Ireland of today.