anics, or are teaching school, or are in
trade, or have emigrated to the West. There have been taken directly
out from the New England farming population its best elements,--its
quickest intelligence, its most stirring enterprise, its noblest and
most ambitious natures,--precisely those elements which were necessary
to elevate the standard of the farmer's calling and make it what it
should be. It is very easy to see why these men have not been retained
in the past; it is safe to predict that they will not be retained in
the future, unless a thorough reform be instituted. These men cannot
be kept on a routine farm, or tied to a home which has no higher life
than that of a workshop or a boarding-house. It is not because the
work of the farm is hard that men shun it. They will work harder and
longer in other callings for the sake of a better style of individual
and social life. They will go to the city, and cling to it while half
starving, rather than engage in the dry details and the hard and
homely associations of the life which they forsook.

The boys are not the only members of the farmer's family that flee
from the farmer's life. The most intelligent and most enterprising of
the farmer's daughters become school-teachers, or tenders of shops, or
factory-girls. They contemn the calling of their father, and will,
nine times in ten, marry a mechanic in preference to a farmer. They
know that marrying a farmer is a very serious business. They remember
their worn-out mothers. They thoroughly understand that the vow that
binds them in marriage to a farmer seals them to a severe and homely
service that will end only in death.

As a consequence of this sifting process, to which we have given but a
glance, a very decidedly depressing element is now being rapidly
introduced into New England farming life. The Irish girls have found
their way into the farmer's kitchen, and the Irish laborer has become
the annual "hired man." At present, there are no means of measuring
the effect of this new element; but it cannot fail to depress the tone
of farming society, and surround it with a new swarm of menial
associations.

In our judgment, there is but little in the improved modes of farming,
in scientific discoveries, and new mechanical appliances, to be relied
upon for the elevation of New England agriculture and the emancipation
of New England farming life. The farmer needs new ideas more than he
needs new implements. The process of r