standard of the farmer’s calling and make it what it should be.  It is very easy to see why these men have not been retained in the past; it is safe to predict that they will not be retained in the future, unless a thorough reform be instituted.  These men cannot be kept on a routine farm, or tied to a home which has no higher life than that of a workshop or a boarding-house.  It is not because the work of the farm is hard that men shun it.  They will work harder and longer in other callings for the sake of a better style of individual and social life.  They will go to the city, and cling to it while half starving, rather than engage in the dry details and the hard and homely associations of the life which they forsook.

The boys are not the only members of the farmer’s family that flee from the farmer’s life.  The most intelligent and most enterprising of the farmer’s daughters become school-teachers, or tenders of shops, or factory-girls.  They contemn the calling of their father, and will, nine times in ten, marry a mechanic in preference to a farmer.  They know that marrying a farmer is a very serious business.  They remember their worn-out mothers.  They thoroughly understand that the vow that binds them in marriage to a farmer seals them to a severe and homely service that will end only in death.

As a consequence of this sifting process, to which we have given but a glance, a very decidedly depressing element is now being rapidly introduced into New England farming life.  The Irish girls have found their way into the farmer’s kitchen, and the Irish laborer has become the annual “hired man.”  At present, there are no means of measuring the effect of this new element; but it cannot fail to depress the tone of farming society, and surround it with a new swarm of menial associations.

In our judgment, there is but little in the improved modes of farming, in scientific discoveries, and new mechanical appliances, to be relied upon for the elevation of New England agriculture and the emancipation of New England farming life.  The farmer needs new ideas more than he needs new implements.  The process of regeneration must begin in the mind, and not in the soil.  The proprietor of that soil should be the true New England gentleman.  His house should be the home of hospitality, the embodiment of solid comfort and liberal taste, the theatre of an exalted family-life which shall be the master and not the servant of labor, and the central sun of a bright and happy social atmosphere.  When this standard shall be reached, there will be no fear for New England agriculture.  The noblest race of men and women the sun ever shone upon will cultivate these valleys and build their dwellings upon these hills; and they will cling to a life which blesses them with health, plenty, individual development, and social progress and happiness.  This is what the farmer’s life may be and should be; and if it ever rise to this in New England, neither prairie nor savanna can entice her children away; and waste land will become as scarce, at last, as vacant lots in Paradise.