It is a common experience of farmers'
wives to pass week after week without exchanging a word or a look with a
single person outside of their own family circles.

The young couple start bravely, and with a determination to struggle
against the habit of isolation which marks their class. But this habit
has grown from the necessity of the situation; and the necessities of
their own situation bring them sooner or later within its bonds. During
the first few years they adhere to their resolution, and go regularly to
church, to the lecture, and to the social gatherings of their friends;
but home duties increase with time, and the eagerness for society grows
dull with neglect. Those who have started out with the firmest
determination to avoid the rock on which their fathers have split, give
up the struggle at last, and settle down to a humdrum, uninteresting,
and uninterested performance of daily tasks.

In saying all this,--and I speak from experience, for I have led the
dismal life myself,--it is hardly necessary to disclaim the least want
of appreciation of the sterling qualities which have been developed in
the American farm household. But it may be safely insisted that these
qualities have been developed, not because of the American mode of farm
life, but in spite of it; and, as I think over the long list of
admirable men and women whose acquaintance I have formed on distant and
solitary farms, I am more and more impressed with certain shortcomings
which would have been avoided under better social conditions. If any of
these is disposed to question the justice of this conclusion, I am
satisfied to leave the final decision with his own judgment, formed
after a fair consideration of what is herein suggested.

If American agriculture has an unsatisfied need, it is surely the need
for more intelligence and more enterprising interest on the part of its
working men and women. From one end of the land to the other, its crying
defect--recognized by all--is, that its best blood, or, in other words,
its best brains and its best energy, is leaving it to seek other fields
of labor. The influence which leads these best of the farmers' sons to
other occupations is not so much the desire to make more money, or to
find a less laborious occupation, as it is the desire to lead a more
satisfactory life,--a life where that part of us which has been
developed by the better education and better civilization for which in
this century we have