The Lure of the City and the Reality of Hard Times

In conversation with one of our prominent farmers, the other day, we were informed that 'the boys' had become very much dissatisfied with the farm, and that the old gentleman expected soon to be called upon to part with them. They were already turning their eyes ambitiously toward the city as the field of future conquests. It had now become his sole concern to devise some means by which he might successfully plant his ambitious young progeny among the imagined emoluments of the city.

Would that we could take this friend and his discontented sons with us and make them acquainted with the heartaches, the cankering cares, disappointments and blasted hopes that leaven the whole round of city existence; or review before them the vast army of the unemployed who now crowd the great and even smaller cities of our land. From their ranks hundreds of ex-clerks and mechanics are anxiously crowding back into the country, from whence they came a few years since, to retrieve their lost fortunes, while others have fallen into the snares of vice which beset them in the city, and have become hopeless vags and outcasts. Again, we would present to them the more successful compeers of these, who, by dint of perseverance have elbowed their way into situations where they are toiling on year after year at starvation salaries. It does indeed seem strange that so many promising young men should eagerly abandon what may be esteemed one of the noblest of occupations—that of husbandry—to starve in the city. In our own small city even, we can count up a large number of them who are hopelessly vibrating about from pillar to post, apparently satisfied to put up with all sorts of disappointments rather than go back on the farm and live independently.