III. The farmer's calling seems to me that most conducive to thorough manliness of character. Nobody expects him to cringe, or smirk, or curry favor, is order to sell his produce. No merchant refuses to buy it because his politics are detested or his religious opinions heterodox. He may be a Mormon, a Rebel, a Millerite, or a Communist, yet his Grain or his Pork will sell for exactly what it is worth--not a fraction less or more than the price commanded by the kindred product of like quality and intrinsic value of his neighbor, whose opinions on all points are faultlessly orthodox and popular. On the other hand, the merchant, the lawyer, the doctor, especially if young and still struggling dubiously for a position, are continually tempted to sacrifice or suppress their profoundest convictions in deference to the vehement and often irrational prepossessions of the community, whose favor is to them the breath of life. "She will find that _that_ won't go down here," was the comment of an old woman on a Mississippi steamboat, when told that the plain, deaf stranger, who seemed the focus of general interest, was Miss Martineau, the celebrated Unitarian; and in so saying she gave expression to a feeling which pervades and governs many if not most communities. I doubt whether the social intolerance of adverse opinions is more vehement anywhere else than throughout the larger portion of our own country. I have repeatedly been stung by the receipt of letters gravely informing me that my course and views on a current topic were adverse to public opinion: the writers evidently assuming, as a matter of course, that I was a mere jumping-jack, who only needed to know what other people thought to insure my instant and abject conformity to their prejudices. Very often, in other days, I was favored with letters from indignant subscribers, who, dissenting from my views on some question, took this method of informing me that they should no longer take my journal--a superfluous trouble, which could only have meant dictation or insult, since they had only to refrain from renewing their subscriptions, and their _Tribune_ would stop coming, whenever they should have received what we owed them; and it would in no case stop till then. That a journalist was in any sense a public teacher--that he necessarily had convictions, and was not likely to suppress them because they were not shared by others--in short, that his calling was other and higher than that of a waiter at a restaurant, expected to furnish whatever was called for, so long as the pay was forthcoming--these ex-subscribers had evidently not for one moment suspected. That such persons have little or no capacity to insult, is very true; and yet, a man is somewhat degraded in his own regard by learning that his vocation is held in such low esteem by others. The true farmer is proudly aware that it is quite otherwise with _his_ pursuit--that no one expects him