Another cause which has tended to the deterioration of the farmer’s life is its solitariness.  The towns in New England which were settled when the Indians were in possession of the country, and which, for purposes of defence, were settled in villages, have enjoyed great blessings; but a large portion of agricultural New England was differently settled.  It is difficult to determine why isolation should produce the effect it does upon the family development.  The Western pioneer, who, leaving a New England community, plants himself and his young wife in the forest, will generally become a coarse man, and will be the father of coarse children.  The lack of the social element in the farmer’s life is doubtless a cause of some of its most repulsive characteristics.  Men are constituted in such a manner, that constant social contact is necessary to the healthfulness of their sympathies, the quickness of their intellects, and the symmetrical development of their powers.  It matters little whether a family be placed in the depths of a Western forest, or upon the top of a New England hill; the result of solitude will be the same in kind, if not in degree.

Now the farmer, partly from isolation and partly from absorption in labor, is the most unsocial man in New England.  The farmers are comparatively few who go into society at all, who ever dine with their neighbors, or who take any genuine satisfaction in the company of the women whom their wives invite to tea.  They may possibly be farmers among farmers, but they are not men among men and women.  Intellectually, they are very apt to leave life where they begin it.  Socially, they become dead for years before they die.  The inhabitants of a city can have but a poor apprehension of the amount of enjoyment and development that comes to them through social stimulus.  Like gold, humanity becomes bright by friction, and grows dim for lack of it.  So, we say, the farmer’s life and home can never be what they should be,—­can never be attractive by the side of other life containing a true social element,—­until they have become more social.  The individual life must not only occupy a place above that of a beast of burden, but that life must be associated with all congenial life within its reach.  The tree that springs in the open field, though it be fed by the juices of a rood, through absorbents that penetrate where they will, will present a hard and stunted growth; while the little sapling of the forest, seeking for life among a million roots, or growing in the crevice of a rock, will lift to the light its cap of leaves upon a graceful stem, and whisper, even-headed, with the stateliest of its neighbors.  Men, like trees, were made to grow together, and both history and philosophy declare that this Divine intention cannot be ignored or frustrated with impunity.