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 lower standard of comfort and culture; while the sons of the old farmers go off to the universities to prepare for a professional career, and the daughters marry merchants or lawyers in the cities.  The mountain-streams of New England, too, afford so much water-power as to bring in ugly factories to disfigure the beautiful ravines, and to introduce into the community a class of people very different from the landholding descendants of the Puritans.  When once a factory is established near a village, one no longer feels free to sleep with doors unbolted.