“IN A MORAL POINT OF VIEW,”

says Lord John Russell, “the life of the agriculturist is the most pure and holy of any class of men; pure because it is the most healthful, and vice can hardly find time to contaminate it; and holy because it brings the Deity perpetually before his view, giving him thereby the most exalted notions of supreme power, and the most fascinating and endearing view of moral benignity.”

Farmers, you take pains to get two teams, so that the boys can take hold at the ploughing and in the corn.  See to it that you also get the boys a light wagon, so that they can go to a picnic or a bee without discommoding you.

START YOUR BOYS OUT IN THIS WAY,

and they will not abuse their opportunities.  Instead of going six miles on Sunday to a lake or river, they will “turn out” of their own accord and go to church with their heads up, self-reliant, perhaps just a little bit proud.  Why?  Because when they sneak off to a river, it is because they have nothing with which they are decently pleased for all their hard toil.  Make your home a pleasant place for your sons, even if it be at great hazards.  It will all come out right.  Give the children some comforts before you take big chances on a short-horn herd.  Rig up a bath-room, a swing, a sort of gymnasium.  Buy games of recreation, such as your taste approves.  Buy above all things good books and plenty of them.  Remember some book in your own old childhood-home!  What a gigantic influence that book has exercised on your whole life!  It does not seem to you that your sons will pay so much attention to the books in your house, but they will.  Some one book will furnish a key to a life—­will sway its reader while young, while old, until he goes over the bounds of its dominion into the next life.  You and Society both desire your young people to

STAY OUT OF THE CITIES.

The safety of our Great Republic entirely depends upon the existence of a conservative class of independent individuals, unable to become crazed, through laziness, over some miserable idea unconnected with the business of living.  When any great wrong is to be righted by absolute force it is necessary that the body exercising that force should be amenable to a sense of practical justice.  If it shall be necessary to take the railroads away from their owners, or to close the boards of trade, or to go the other way and farm out the post-office and machinery of the government to get rid of the crime of office-hunting,—­why then, the action of independent men is necessary—­the doings of wage-workers are not satisfactory, and are almost always fatal to the order of things which was to be renovated.  If this Republic have any vitality not enjoyed formerly by the democracies now buried in the yellow pages of history, it is the tremendous scope of her quarter-section farms.  Not many