Orleans County monitor. [volume] (Barton, Vt.) 1872-1953, 1900-03-12
OUR FARMERS.
KEEPING THE BOYS ON THE FARM

We do not think it best that all
farmers boys be kept on the farm
Many of them are better adapted to
some other business and the cities and
great marts of trade need the fres b
blood and rugged constitution of the
farm bred boy to carry on great enter
prises. Nearly all the leaders in the
great commercial, manufacturing and
professional life Of the country were
atsome time farm boys, doing the very
things that many boys are doing upon
the farms today. The success they
have achieved made their leaving tho
farm a wise move for the country,
but there are thousands of men who
left the farm while boys, and are now
filing places in the industrial world,
that would have been better off
mentally, morally and financially if
they had remained upon the farm and
the country would have been better
off had they remained there.
"Parents have much to do toward
repulsing from or attaching their boys
to the farm" says writer in India ma
Farmer. eff they are avaricious and
mercenary and skimp their boys in
the necessaries of life, imposing on
them constant hard toll without any
relaxation, restraining them from
youthful associations, using them as
the lowest menials or the four footed
beasts on the farm, arbitrarily order
ing them about and using threats and
blows; such treatment would drive
the ambitious boys from the farm and
make them disguised with the pri-
mordial calling of man. IF the parents
are dissatisfied with their calling it is
but natural that the boys will be. If
it is united sentiment of the parents
that the farmers life is both pleasant
and honorable, and that the tilling of
the soil is profitable and essential to
the existence of the nation, their boys
will most likely stay on the farm.
Parents should inculcate in their
boys the idea that agriculture is not
an ignonminious calling, but one that
is highly honored by all civilized ma
tons, as all have created a depart
ment in their national schools for the |
tiller Of the soil, something that no
other vocation can boast of. Our own |
nation has so honored us that they
give us a cabinet officer, whose wis
dom is acknowledged and his advice
is sought after in governmental af-
fairs.
Boys are apt to measure things by
5heir exterior, they compare the
fashionable, loquacious law
yer with the farmer, in his rough
garments. They notice the uncouth-
ness of his exterior and the lack OF
'uavity and of style of the farmers.
This they in some way associate with
he idea that the farmer is unsophisti-
,ated or verdant. The sooner the
10Y learns his mistake the better for
lin, and parents should teach them
hat gold is found in the rough quartz
'owlder and not in the smooth mar
lie, and that beneath a homely garb
nd blunt address may be a mind
with the finest thoughts
nd deepest wisdom, and a heart
whose every emotion is for the bet
erment Of his fellow man. If the
esire is to make a farmer of a boy,
he parents should commence to in
ulcate the love for this vocation in
is infancy, when the mind is plastic ]
nd easily nodded into the shape de- l
red. Some of the religious denomi- 7
ations have demonstrated this fact /
nd say, Give US the control OF the I
hildren until they are fourteen years :
Id; then you can have Them This {
leans that at that age the mind can {
Q imbued or indelibly fixed in it's T
rinciples. So it is with an avoca- T
on; they can be taught that their
Ither's calling is the best, and be- F
ome thoroughly imbued so that this t
ocation becomes part of their I
entail being" F