“The great miracle that still goes on,”

to work the transformation of the brown seeds which he drops into the soil into fields of green and gold, and gazing upon landscapes shifting with the seasons and flushed with new tints through every sunlit and moonlit hour, does not apprehend that his farm has higher uses for him than those of feeding his person and his purse, he might as well dwell in a coal-mine.

Our soil is sterile, our modes of farming have been rude until within a few years; and under the circumstances,—­with the Yankee notion that the getting of money is the chief end of man,—­exclusive devotion to labor has been deemed indispensable to success.  The maxims of Franklin have been literally received and adopted as divine truth.  We have believed that to labor is to be thrifty, that to be thrifty is to be respectable, that to be respectable is to afford facilities for being still more thrifty; and our experience is, that with increased thrift comes increased labor.  This is the circle of our ambitions and rewards.  All begins and ends in labor.  The natural and inevitable result of this is both physical and mental deterioration.

It is doubtful whether the world furnishes a finer type of man, physically and intellectually, than the Irish gentleman.  He is handsome, large, courageous,—­a man of fine instincts, brilliant imagination, courtly manners, and full, vital force.  By the side of the Irish gentleman, there has grown for centuries the Irish peasant.  He is ugly, of stunted stature, and pugnacious; and he produces children like himself.  The two classes started from a common blood; they now present the broadest contrast.  We do not say that freedom from severe labor on one side, and confinement to it on the other, are entirely responsible for this contrast; difference of food and other obvious causes have had something to do with it; but we say that hard labor has, directly and indirectly, degraded from a true style of manhood the great mass of the Irish peasantry.  They are a marked class, and carry in their forms and faces the infallible insignia of mental and physical degeneration.

We would by no means compare New England farmers with the Irish peasantry.  We only present the contrast between these two classes of the Irish population as the result of unremitting toil on one side, and a more rational kind of life on the other.  If we enter a New England church, containing a strictly rural assembly, and then visit another containing a class whose labor is lighter, and whose style of life is based upon different ideas, we shall see a contrast less marked, perhaps, but presenting similar features.  The farming population of New England is not a handsome population, generally.  The forms of both men and women are angular; their features are not particularly intellectual; their movements are not graceful; and their calling is evident by indubitable signs.  The fact that the city assemblage