neighborhood; and if the wives of their neighbors come to spend an
afternoon, they harness their horses, and drive off to attend to
some distant business that will detain them until the women get
away. It is useless to say to me that this is an extreme picture,
for I know what I am writing about, and know that I am painting
from the life. I know that there are hundreds of thousands of
American farmers whose life and whose ideas of life are cast upon
these models. Some of these are as coarse and hard as I paint
them, and others are only a little better. Such a farmer's boy is
brought up to the idea that work is the grand thing in life. Work,
indeed, is supposed by him to be pretty much all of life. It is
supposed to spoil farmers to get any thing but work into their
heads; and scientific agriculturists will bear witness that they
have been obliged to fight the popular prejudices against "book
farming" at every step of their progress. They will also testify
that the improvements made in farming and in the implements of
agriculture have not been made by farmers themselves, but by
outsiders--mechanics, and men of science--who have marvelled at
the brainless stupidity which toiled on in its old track of
unreasoning routine, and looked with suspicion and discouragement
upon innovations. The reason why the farmer has not been foremost
in improving the instruments and methods of his own business, is,
that his mind has been unfitted for improvement by the excessive
labors of his body. A man whose whole vital energy is directed to
the support of muscle has, of course, none to direct to the
support of thought. A man whose strength is habitually exhausted
by bodily labor becomes, at length, incapable of mental exertion;
and I cannot help feeling that half of the farmers of the country
establish insuperable obstacles to their own improvement by their
excessive toil. They are nothing more than the living machines of