Successful farming implies, first of all, steady and dogged hard work, coupled with prudent and watchful skill. When the hopes of enthusiastic agricultural reformers are considered with the practical eye of cold common sense, they must inevitably be condemned to disappointment. In so far as they constitute an incentive towards improvement, they work great good; but the success of the future is to be attained too often through the distressing failure of the present. The art is an experimental one, and the temptations to extend experiments are enticing. Unfortunately, novel processes depend for their success upon contingencies which are likely to be disregarded at the outset; and, however much any improvement may be destined to prosper after its application shall have been practically tested and modified, it is altogether likely that its first introduction will result in failure. The mere money losses coming of these failures are not so serious; but the discouragement and disappointment that they entail exert the gravest influence where what is chiefly needed is the encouragement of success. It is something to know the direction that improving effort should take; and it seems to be generally conceded that what American agriculture needs, at the East and at the West, but especially at the East, is _an improvement in the character of its personnel_. There is everywhere ample opportunity for the profitable and successful introduction of modified processes and of new industries. There is, too, hardly an instance where the processes and industries now pursued are not susceptible of great improvement of detail. There are few farms so well managed and so successful, that if given into the hands of better, more intelligent, and more enterprising farmers, they would not produce better results. The father is working according to his light, and is directing his work by such intelligence as his natural capacity and his training have given him. His brighter son, with more natural intelligence, with a better education, and less trammelled by traditions and prejudices, might so modify the same industry as to make it more certain, more profitable, and in every way more satisfactory. The change that is now taking place, especially in New England, is toward the greater economy of living, and the harder work and closer management of business, that comes with immigrant proprietorship; and this element is by no means to be depended upon for the improvement of our farming. It may result in a more money-making agriculture, but it will supplant our best political element by the introduction of what has thus far seemed to be one of the worst. Look at this question as we will, it is difficult to see how else than by improving the race of American farmers we are to accomplish any result whose good effect will be radical and lasting. This brings us around to that threadbare subject of the vague discussion of agricultural writers: "How to keep the boys on the farm."