The Mountain Echo

Stick to the Farm.

The Birmingham New South gives this sensible advice to the young farmers of the south:

We are aware that a spirit of unrest is abroad among the young farmers of the south. For some years their labors have been hard and their profits small and slow to accumulate. Many of them fancy that a surer, shorter, less laborious road to competence may be found in the professions, in trade, or in other kinds of labor. In this they are mistaken. The depression is widespread - wide as the civilized world; it permeates every avocation, every rank of society. The professions are overcrowded. Here and there is a professional man who acquires competence and fame; but for every one of these there are scores who eke out a meager subsistence, very many of them not knowing how they are to pay their board or house rent at the end of the month, nor their grocer's and butcher's bills at the end of the week. One reads and hears of the successful ones, but not of the others; just as one reads of the few who draw the big lottery prizes among the news items of the public prints, but the names of the thousands who draw blanks - never!

And in the mercantile business - few young farmers can form a conception of the physical and mental labor the merchant and his clerks and other employes must undergo. For the former, days of toil and sleepless nights of anxious thought! For the latter, days of unremitting slavish work, with uneasy doubts as to what the future, with the vicissitudes of trade, may bring - Homeless and without means of employment! Can our young farmer friends fancy the full meaning of these words? And how many merchants succeed in their business? We have seen it stated by good authority that not more than five out of a hundred retire from business with a competence. The other ninety-five see their capital slowly melt to nothingness, or it is swept away at one fell swoop that brings bankruptcy and ruin to the merchant and loss of position to his employes.

And what of the other forms of labor in which millions are engaged? What of the great army of wage workers - is peace, plenty and contentment found in their ranks? Is there no unrest there? What of the privations they and their families have endured for years? And remember that most of them are without homes of their own. What of the exactions of which they complain whether justly or unjustly we shall not stop to inquire? Consider the strikes and lockouts of the present decade, the thousands thrown out of employment, the days, weeks, months and years of enforced idleness. And remember that every strike and lockout is a sharp two-edged sword that cuts both ways. Employers and employes alike suffer.

Let the young farmer compare lots with all these - the professional men, the merchants and their employes, the wage-worker and their employers. His homestead is his own, safe to him and his beyond peradventure. It is his capital, that cannot pass from him by slow degrees nor lost by one calamitous stroke. For him there are no strikes nor lockouts; he may always find employment. He has always a roof to shelter him and his family, food and raiment for both, for every farmer can make with reasonable care and industry a supply of everything he and his family need for food, except sugar and coffee. After home supplies for man and beast, which every farmer can make, there comes his money crops.