A few years ago a wave spread over the fashionable world whose mandate was that it was not respectable to engage in any useful occupation. Fortunately, that wave has passed on, to be remembered only as one of the curiosities of social evolution, as related to the progressive nations and races, so that now it is not quite respectable not to be useful to society in some active manner. It is true that many men and women are as tireless as children in doing something under the name of "Sport" that they would not be hired to do under the name of "Work," but such are usually of the _nouveau riche_ class who think to accentuate their new position in the stratum of fortune called "society" by a show of independence and leisure. The real sentiment of the age, however, is that useful occupation is necessary to respectability, and the most important discovery for any age or for any individual is that _true happiness can result only from_--is the evidence and fruit of--_conscious usefulness_. Nothing else is so important to character-formation as ample facilities for finding out the occupation that each child would rather engage in than do anything else or nothing. The range of the useful occupations is not so great but what preference tests can easily be secured in every community near at hand. Manual-training institutions furnish a very wide range of choice, and parental farms can be located near to urban communities for nature tests, while a taste for the sea will accompany a tendency to wander abroad and will draw as a magnet to the source of its fascination.[4] [4] Vacant lots in cities can even be used for the purpose of nature study by planting potatoes in them, as demonstrated by the Governor of Michigan. There are millions of children born in the city whose yearnings may be for the farm, the sea, or the woods. The pessimistic cry of the present time is that country youth flock to the city and congest labor conditions there while the cultivation of the land is neglected. With a proper appreciation of the value of character-building or useful-habit-forming, and systematic provision of tests for preference of occupation, this unbalance of the proper division of labor need not obtain. From our own observation and experience we know that there are more city children who would delight in country occupations, if they only had a chance to know something of the possibilities of pleasure in them, than there are country children who can find a preference for city limitations. The parental farms already established prove this to be true, and a very important discovery in connection with them is that they can be made not only self-sustaining but profitable.