r it a gross insult to be
offered a shilling. As with poverty, so with dram-drinking and with
crime; all alike are conspicuous by their absence. In a village of one
thousand inhabitants there will be a poor-house where five or six
decrepit old people are supported at the common charge; and there will
be one tavern where it is not easy to find anything stronger to drink
than light beer or cider. The danger from thieves is so slight that it
is not always thought necessary to fasten the outer doors of the house
at night. The universality of literary culture is as remarkable as the
freedom with which all persons engage in manual labour. The village of a
thousand inhabitants will be very likely to have a public circulating
library, in which you may find Professor Huxley's "Lay Sermons" or Sir
Henry Maine's "Ancient Law": it will surely have a high-school and half
a dozen schools for small children. A person unable to read and write is
as great a rarity as an albino or a person with six fingers. The farmer
who threshes his own corn and cuts his own firewood has very likely a
piano in his family sitting-room, with the _Atlantic Monthly_ on the
table and Milton and Tennyson, Gibbon and Macaulay on his shelves, while
his daughter, who has baked bread in the morning, is perhaps ready to
paint on china in the afternoon. In former times theological questions
largely occupied the attention of the people; and there is probably no
part of the world where the Bible has been more attentively read, or
where the mysteries of Christian doctrine have to so great an extent
been made the subject of earnest discussion in every household. Hence we
find in the New England of to-day a deep religious sense combined with
singular flexibility of mind and freedom of thought.

A state of society so completely democratic as that here described has
not often been found in connection with a very high and complex
civilization. In contemplating these old mountain villages of New
England, one descries slow modifications in the structure of society
which threaten somewhat to lessen its dignity. The immense
productiveness of the soil in our western states, combined with
cheapness of transportation, tends to affect seriously the agricultural
interests of New England as well as those of our mother-country. There
is a visible tendency for farms to pass into the hands of proprietors of
an inferior type to that of the former owners,--men who are content with
a low