A farm is the only proper home. Working for yourself is the only true independence. Labor on the land in the open gives health and long life. Raise a living and sell the surplus. Work all the time, but don’t overwork. Make faces at the cynic who says the farmer and his wife and children work fifteen hours a day and then starve. It isn’t so. Work alone is not farming; you must manage. Farming needs intelligence and care, nothing more so. Everywhere you see good farm-homes and poor ones; the difference is in the farmer. What the good farmers do, all can do. In this book, the author tells how to lay out the land, how to prepare and plant and harvest, and how to make life joyous. He has boiled down the experience of himself and his friends and the information contained in bulletins and books and catalogs. A cobbler or clerk or typo, can take this book and with his tennis-made muscle and his trade accuracy can make a bare living the first year, a good living the second, and start a bank account the third. I know it because I helped do it in my youth and I have seen it done all my life. One of the obstacles in the way of town families going to the country is separation from friends and going among strangers. Another is the conscious ignorance of the work and a sense of helplessness. These are real and valid difficulties. They are equivalent to the difficulties besetting a German or Norwegian farmer coming alone into an American community in a new state. The hundreds of thousands of European farmers who came to the states every year from the forties to the end of the eighties overcame this difficulty by organizing colonies of friends and neighbors and settling in one spot. They thus had society and they had the benefit of their best leaders. Then their old friends kept coming in smaller squads. This is the way for town people to do. Find six or ten or a dozen and go together. Even if all are not relatives or friends they may be of the same class or trade. To any such colony I will furnish the money to pay for all the land they need and let them begin paying the cost price of it at the end of five years and finish in ten, with 4 per cent. interest. They may pick the tract and bargain for the price. Upon their showing that the agreed number are ready to go and are able to make the improvements and provide the working equipment, I will advance the money to pay for the land. They can divide it up to suit themselves. I have furnished farms already plowed, fenced and housed, and horse and cow free of charge. But these empty-handed folk, who have saved nothing out of their former occupation, lack the qualities to manage for themselves and to succeed at farming. They are too helpless and dependent. Their best plan is to hire out in the country until they learn farm work and life, then rent a piece of land, and then buy.