due consideration
of the argument in its favor, that, if the social influences
inseparable from village-life could be secured to the American farmer,
the greatest drawback of his life would be done away with. It remains,
unfortunately, a serious question, how far such a radical change is
practicable. There is little doubt that the family would naturally drift
into some more costly style of living; and the necessity for hauling to
a distant home all the crops of the fields, and of hauling out the
manure made at the homestead, would add somewhat to the expenses of the
business.

In the case of the individual farmer now cultivating land upon which he
lives, it is not unlikely that he would find a certain pecuniary
disadvantage in the change. But, as a broad question of the future
benefit of our agriculture, it must be conceded that whatever will tend
to make the occupation more attractive cannot fail, by enlisting the
services of more intelligent minds, to insure its very decided
improvement. As the case now stands, the farmer's son will become a
clerk or a mechanic rather than remain a farmer, because clerks and
mechanics live in communities where there is more to interest the mind,
and where, too, the opportunities for enjoyment and amusement are
greater. The farmer's daughter will marry the clerk or the mechanic
rather than a farmer, because she knows the life of a farmer's wife to
be a life of dulness and dearth, while she believes that the wife of the
clerk or mechanic will be condemned to less arduous labor, and will have
much more agreeable surroundings. I have no means of judging what may
have been the experience in Deerfield, Mass., for instance; but I am
confident that many a mechanic's daughter, and indeed many young women
of much higher position in life, would consider her lot a fortunate one
in becoming the wife of a farmer whose homestead lay on the beautiful
street of this old village.

All that is here said is, to a certain extent, mere theory; but the
subject is one that has not thus far met any practical solution, and in
which, therefore, nothing except theorizing is possible. The broad fact
is that the farming class in this country is degenerating by the
withdrawal of its best blood; and still more serious injury is being
done to it by the introduction of the lower class of foreigners. It may
well be doubted whether it is possible so to modify the manner of life
of the isolated farmhouse as to make it