of his method and his labor, is to become a scientific farmer.  He will then have an interest in his labor and its results above their bare utilities.  Labor that does not engage the mind has no dignity; else the ox and the ass are kings in the world, and we are but younger brothers in the royal family.  So we say to every farmer,—­If you would make your calling attractive to yourself and your boys, seek that knowledge which will break up routine, and make your calling, to yourself and to them, an intelligent pursuit.

A recent traveller in England speaks enthusiastically of a visit which he paid to an old farm-house in that country, and of the garden-farm upon which it stood, which had descended from father to son through a period of five hundred years.  He found a family of charming intelligence and the politest culture.  That hallowed soil was a beautiful body, of which the family interests and associations were the soul.  To be dissociated from that soil forever would be regarded by its proprietors as almost equivalent to family annihilation.  Proprietorship in English soil is one of the prime ambitions of the true Englishman; but we do not find in New England any kindred sentiments of pride in landed property and family affection for the paternal acres.  The nomadic tribes of Asia would seem to have quite as strong local attachments as Yankee landholders, most of whom will sell their homesteads as readily as they will their horses.  This fact we cannot but regard as one among the many causes which have conspired to despoil the farmer’s calling of some of its legitimate attractions.  The son slips away from the old homestead as easily as he does from the door of a hotel.  Very likely his father has rooted up all home attachments by talking of removing Westward ever since the boy saw the light.  This lack of affection for the family acres is doubtless owing somewhat to the fact that in this country landed property is not associated with political privilege, as it has been in England; but this cannot be the sole reason; for the sentiment has a genuine basis in nature, and, in not a few instances, an actual existence amongst us.

Resulting from the operation of all the causes which we have briefly noticed, there is another cause of the deterioration of farming life in New England, which cannot be recovered from in many years.  Actual farming life has been brought into such harsh contrast with other life, that its best materials have been sifted out of it, have slid away from it.  An inquiry at the doors of the great majority of farmers would exhibit the general fact, that the brightest boys have gone to college, or have become mechanics, 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