;
and we know, from the constant flocking of farmers' sons and daughters
to even the least attractive employments of the town or village, that
this distaste is everywhere a controlling one.

It is easy to say that the farmer's life must be made more cheerful,
attractive, and refined, and less arduous; but it is by no means easy
to see how the improvement is to be brought about. The cardinal defect
is the loneliness and dulness of the isolated farmhouse. Intelligent and
educated young women, brought up among the pleasantest surroundings,
marry young farmers, and undertake their new life with the determination
that, in their case at least, the more obvious social requirements shall
be met. During the earlier years after marriage they adhere to their
resolution, and are regular in attendance at the church and public
lecture; and they keep up, so far as possible, social intercourse with
their neighbors. But as time goes on, as the family increases, as toil
begins to tell on health and strength and energy, they drop out, little
by little, from the habit of going abroad, until often for weeks
together they never exchange a look or thought with any human being
outside of their own households. Aside from the overworked members of
their own families, their companionship is confined to hired men who
smell of the stable, and to hired girls with whom they are yoked in the
daily round of household duties.

Having given much consideration to the subject, I have come to believe
that the agriculture of Continental Europe is far more wisely arranged
than ours; for there, almost as a universal rule, isolated farm-life is
unknown. The reward of the cultivator is less, and his labor is at least
as great. The people are of a very much lower order, and are lacking in
the cultivated intelligence which distinguishes so many of our own
farming class. Women and even young girls perform rude labor in the
field and in the stable; and those aspirations which are born of a
universal diffusion of periodical literature are almost unknown. At the
same time, when the hard and long day's work is over, there comes to all
the inexpressible relief and delight of the active social intercourse of
the village, where the tillers of the country for a mile around have
gathered together their homes and their herds, and where the most
intimate social life prevails.

Observation even indicates that the habit of out-of-door labor has had
no injurious effect upon t