The Mean Yankees at Home

THOSE horrible Yanks! I have seen them in their native haunts. The most dreadful creatures become interesting when, regarding them only as objects of natural history, we creep up near their den, and watch them as they devour their prey, caress their cubs, and gambol in the sun. Perhaps a busy universe, which has heard already a good deal about the mean, low, cheating, infidel, and entirely odious Yankee, may yet be willing to lean back in its arm-chair for a short time, and learn how he looks to a stranger’s eyes, and how he comports himself amid his own hills and rocks, in that unique organization of his, a New England town.

There was published in this magazine, a year or two since, an article upon Chicago, which chanced to attract the notice of a young gentleman then residing among us, a citizen of the Argentine Republic, which is the United States of South America. He was so much struck with the exploits of the people of Chicago, that he translated the article into Spanish, and caused it to be published as a pamphlet in his native land, with a Preface calling upon his countrymen to imitate the spirit, energy, forethought, and patriotism displayed by the men of the prairie metropolis. It was well done of him ; for, indeed, the creators of Chicago have performed, and are performing, the task assigned them in a manner unexampled in the history of the world ; and the record of what they have done and are doing will for ages be a chapter in our history honorable to this nation and instructive to others. But perhaps one of those quiet towns sleeping among the umbrageous hills of New England is a triumph of man over circumstances and over himself not less remarkable than the more striking and splendid achievements of the Chicagonese. And what is Chicago but a New England town in extremely novel circumstances, that was forced to undertake enormous enterprises, and compelled to expand, in thirty years, into a high-pressure Boston? If I could only succeed in revealing to mankind the town of New England,— its defects as well as its merits, — I should have produced something worth translating into every tongue.

It is evident that the Yankee system, with modifications, is destined to prevail over the fairest parts of this continent, if not finally over the best portions of the other. It prevails already in the West as far as San Francisco, the famous Vigilance Committee of which was a veritable town meeting. Wherever the Yankee soldier has tramped the Yankee schoolmarm will teach. Noble and chivalric gentlemen may throw stones at her windows, burn her school-house, drive her from their neighborhood ; but she reappears, — she or her cousin, — and the work of Yankeefication proceeds. First Julius Caesar, then Roman civilization, then Christianity. The soldier must always go first, and open the country. In this fortunate instance, the gentle and knowing schoolmarm quickly follows the man of war, and she is preparing the way for the gradual reorganization of the South upon the general plan of New England towns. It is hard for the noble and chivalric gentlemen to bear, but it seems inevitable. The Carolinas may object, and Georgia expel; Texas may slay, and Louisiana massacre, - it will not avail ; this is the fate in reserve for them. The Yankee schoolmarm is extremely addicted to writing long letters home, which go the round of the village, are carried into the next county, and are sent at last to circulate by mail over all the land. Most graphic and powerful some of her letters are, and New England knows her new conquest in this Way. The schoolmarm’s lover has thoughts of settling there, when the land itself is “settled.” Her uncle the capitalist has long had an eye on those rich lands, those unused watercourses, those mines and quarries. She is merely one of the first to tread the path worn by the army shoe stamped U. S. A.

A New England town, the distant reader will please take note, is not a town, though it may have a town in it, and two or three villages besides. It is a subdivision of a county, or, to use the language of the law-books, it is “an organized portion of the inhabitants of a State, within defined limits ot territory, within the same county.” It may consist of only three or four hundred people, or of several thousands. Perhaps two thousand may be an average number, which gives about three hundred voters ; and the average circumference of the territory may be about ten miles. Every five years the selectmen are required to “ perambulate ” the boundaries, to see that the boundary-stones and guide-boards are right; and this work, I believe, is generally done in one day. The inhabitants of this area are an association for the performance of certain duties imposed upon them by the State. They are, says the law, a “ corporate body,” which is intrusted with powers defined and limited. It can fine you a dollar for driving over a bridge faster than a walk, or twenty dollars for declining a town office. It can itself be fined fifty dollars for not having a cattle-pound, five hundred dollars for not electing town officers, a thousand dollars if a person falls through a rotten bridge and loses his life, and three thousand dollars for sending to the legislature more members than it is entitled to. It is responsible — as much so as a railroad company — for any accidents happening through its fault, and can claim damages for an injury done to itself. It can sue and be sued as though it were one man. It can hold, hire, buy, sell, let, lease, or give away real estate. It can tax and be taxed, — both, however, for purposes named in the law, and for no others. For example, it can raise money by taxation to pay for schools, public libraries, the support of the poor, guide-boards, burial-grounds, bridges, roads, markets, pounds, hayscales, standard weights and measures, public clocks, houses destroyed to stop a conflagration, the prosecution and defence of suits. Such of these things as concern other towns, or the county, the State, the United States, or the universe, each town is compelled to provide, —bridges, pounds, roads, and schools, for example. But the towns may or may not vote money for hay-scales or a public library. The schools are a necessity; the library is merely desirable in a high degree. The cattle-pound protects neighboring towns from devastation ; but it is a question for each town to decide, whether or not it will have a public clock or a soldiers’ monument.

The governing power of a New England town is the whole body of voters in town meeting assembled. Speaking generally (for all the States of New England have not yet quite come up to the standard of the most advanced), we may say, that every man, white or black, is a voter, who can read the constitution of his State in the English language understandingly, and who is not an alien, a lunatic, a pauper, or a convict.

The exclusion of paupers is of small consequence, because in most of the towns there are no paupers able to go to the polls, and in many there are no paupers at all. At the time of the first cable celebration, Mr. Cyrus Field, desirous that all the world should rejoice, sent orders to his native village in New England that a banquet should be provided at his expense for the paupers of the whole town. The selectmen sent back word that there were no paupers; and there are none there now. Your mean Yankee is a stickler for justice ; and it would offend his sense of justice, that a man who had contributed nothing to the fund raised by taxation should have a voice in directing its expenditure. He is beginning to think, too, that it is hardly fair to tax a widow or an independent spinster, and refuse her a vote in town meeting. Here and there there is a bold Yankee who goes further than this, and pronounces it unwise to exclude such women as Miss Sedgwick, Mrs. Stowe, Miss Catherine Beecher, and Mrs. Horace Mann, while admitting to the franchise every male citizen who can be trusted alone out of doors, and who can boggle through a paragraph of the Constitution. In some towns, where a few crusty old farmers can always be depended on to defeat a liberal scheme, the votes of the ladies, it is thought, would give a lift to the library and a blow to the grog-shop, and help all the civilizing measures. The necessity of women’s assistance becomes more apparent as the towns advance in wealth and refinement; and the Yankee would long ago have seen this, and sought the aid of the decorative sex, but for a few words in an ancient epistle.

The exclusion from the polls of men who cannot read works nothing but good.¹ It is a measure absolutely necessary in the peculiar circumstances of the United States; and I will venture to predict that every State will in time adopt it, or, like the city of New York, become a prey to the spoiler. This law, however, excludes very few natives of the soil. If, in a New England town, there chances to be a native who cannot read and write, he is regarded as a curiosity, and is pointed out to strangers as one of the objects of interest in the place. There is one such man near Stockbridge, in Massachusetts, who was pointed out to me last summer as the only native of New England in all that region who could neither read nor write. The people appeared to be rather proud of him than otherwise, as though he had given no slight proof of an ingenious mind in having escaped so many boy-traps and man-traps, baited with spelling-books, as they have in New England. The reading law merely keeps away from the polls the grossly ignorant among the foreign population, who, being unable to read, are dependent upon other men’s eyes and minds for their political information, and who can be driven in herds to the polls by the party having the least scruples.

Major De Forest, in one of his valuable and entertaining articles on the “ Man and Brother,” has intimated an opinion that the black man will never associate in this country on equal terms with the white man. Never is a long time, and we cannot even see into the next century; but I should say that the condition of the colored people in New England supports the gallant Major’s conjecture. There are not more than twelve or fifteen thousand negroes in Massachusetts ; but they are so unequally distributed that you may occasionally find a considerable number of them in one town. They stand before the law equal to the white man ; their children sit in the public schools side by side with his; they are treated with consideration and respect ; they have the same opportunities to acquire property as the white man ; they go with him to the ballot-box, and vote on the same terms and conditions, — nevertheless, their social position is precisely the same in New England as it is in North Carolina. They usually live in a cluster of cottages in the outskirts of the village ; the men are laborers or waiters, and the women take in washing or go out to service. They live in peace and abundance, but they are no nearer social equality with the whites now than they were thirty years ago. They seldom get on so far as to own a farm, seldom learn a trade, and never run a factory or keep a store. In the free high schools —one of which nearly every town in New England supports, or helps support — a colored youth is rarely found. In and near Stockbridge, for example, there is a colored population of two hundred, and they have been settled there for many years ; but no colored boy or girl has ever applied for admission to the high school, though it is free to all.

But the negro is an indispensable and delicious ingredient in the too serious and austere population of New England. They appear to be the only people there who ever abandon themselves to innocent merriment. What a joyous scene is one of the negro balls so frequently given in some of the New England villages ! In the morning, the stranger notices upon the lordly, widespreading elm that shades the postoffice a neatly written paper, notifying the public that an “ entertainment ” is to be given that evening for the “benefit” of some afflicted person, — perhaps a woman whose husband a ruthless constable has taken off to jail. “All who wish to enjoy a good time are respectfully invited to attend, — admission, twenty-five cents,” for which a substantial supper of pork and beans and new cider is furnished. Soon after eight in the evening the village resounds with the voice of a colored Stentor, who calls out the figures of the quadrille, and all the world is thus notified that the “ entertainment ” has begun. The scene within the ball-room might make some persons hesitate to decide which destiny were the more desirable in New England, — to be born white or black. The participants seem so unconsciously and entirely happy ! An ancient uncle, white-haired and very lame, stands near the entrance, seizes the newcomers with both hands, and gives them a roaring and joyous welcome ; and there is a one-legged man with a crutch, and four mothers with infants in their arms, who go through a quadrille with the best of them. The mothers, however, when they grow warm with the dance, hand the blessed baby to a passing friend to hold. The band, which consists of two male fiddlers and a woman who plays the accordion, is seated upon a platform at one end of the long room, and plays with eyes upcast, ecstatic, andkeeps a heel apiece going heavily upon the boards. The room itself seems to be quivering. There is no walking through a quadrille here ; but each performer, besides doing his prescribed steps, cuts as many supplementary capers as he can execute in the intervals. A dance begins, it is true, with some slight show of moderation; but as it proceeds the dancers throw themselves into it with a vigor and animation that increase every moment, until the quadrille ends in a glorious riot and delirium of dance and fun. No Mussulman would ask these people why they did not require their servants to do their dancing for them. On the contrary, that famous pacha, catching their most contagious merriment, would have sprung upon the floor, and dashed his three tails wildly about among those shining countenances. Nevertheless, there was not the smallest violation of decorum ; all was as innocent as it was enjoyable. As the room was lined with white spectators, perhaps we shall some day learn the trick of cheap, innocent, and hearty enjoyment. One thing was very noticeable, and would certainly be noticed by any one familiar with the South, — the purity of blood exhibited in the faces of the company. Among the one hundred and fifty dancers, there were perhaps ten who were not quite black ; and this was an ancient settlement of colored people, dating back beyond the recollection of the present inhabitants. The only fault with which their white neighbors charge them is, that one or two in a hundred has not yet got the old plantation steal out of their blood. A person interested in the health question would observe the roundness and all but universal vigorous health of these children of the tropics, which is another proof that human nature in America does not dwindle necessarily.

“ In town meeting assembled.” Once a year, and oftener if necessary, the voters of this small and convenient republic meet to elect town officers, consider proposed improvements, and vote taxes. The town meeting is a parliament, of which every voter is an equal member, and the authority of which is final so long as its acts are legal. It is a public meeting clothed with power.

I will here respectfully invite the attention of the Argentine Republic, France, Italy, Austria, Russia, and all countries supposed to be groaning under the yoke of the oppressor, and hoping one day to throw off that yoke, to the following truth, now for the first time given to the world : —

THAT PEOPLE IS FIT FOR FREEDOM WHICH CAN HOLD A PROPER PUBLIC MEETING.

To us how easy! to a great part of the rest of mankind how impossible! Before a community reaches the stage of development which admits of the public meeting, there must exist in it considerable ability and knowledge, and there must be a certain prevalence of what may be styled the virtues of maturity, — self-conquest and self-control. Men must respect themselves, but respect one another also, and, along with a proper confidence in their own opinions, have a genuine tolerance for those of their neighbors. With an ability to convince others, there must be in the people the possibility of being convinced, as well as of frankly submitting to a decision the most adverse to that for which they had striven. A strong, keen, and constant sense of justice must be tempered by a spirit ot accommodation, an aversion to standing upon trifles, and a disposition to welcome a reasonable compromise. There must be in many of the people a true public spirit, and in some a very great and deep love of the public welfare, and a capacity for taking a prodigious amount of trouble for a public object. The desire to shine, so natural to immature persons and races, must have been by many outgrown, or, at least, exalted into a noble ambition to be of service, and thus to win the approval of the community. An insatiate vanity in only two or three individuals might render profitable debate impossible ; nor less harmful is that other manifestation of morbid self-love which we call bashfulness.

The horrible Yanks, with all their faults, do actually possess the qualities requisite for holding a public meeting in a higher degree than any other people. They have governed themselves by public meeting for two hundred years or more. It seems now instinctive in them, when a thing is to be done or considered by a body of men, to put it to the vote and be governed by the decision of the majority. The most curious illustration of this fact that has been recorded is the one related by Mrs. John Adams in one of her letters of 1774 to her husband. The men of Braintree and neighboring towns, alarmed lest the British general should seize their store of powder, assembled on a certain Sunday evening to the number of two hundred, marched to the powder-house, took out the powder, conveyed it to a place of safety, and secreted it. On their way they captured an odious Tory, and found upon him some still more odious documents aimed at the liberty of the Commonwealth. This man they took with them, and, when the powder was disposed of, they turned their attention to him and his documents. Readers familiar with the period do not need to be reminded that these men, marching so silently and seriously on that Sunday evening, were profoundly moved and excited. All New England, indeed, was thrilling and palpitating with mingled resolve and apprehension. Nevertheless, instinct, or ancient habit, was stronger than passion, even at such a crisis, in these two hundred Yankee men, and therefore they resolved themselves into a public meeting. Upon the hostile warrants being produced and exhibited, it was put to the vote whether they should be burnt or preserved. The majority voting for burning them, the two hundred gathered in a circle round the lantern, and looked on in silence while the offensive papers were consumed. That done, — and no doubt there were blazing eyes in that grim circle of Puritans as well as blazing papers, — “ they called a vote whether they should huzza ; but, it being Sunday evening, it passed in the negative.”

The reader who comprehends the entire significance of that evening’s performance knows New England. If I were a painter, I would try and paint the scene at the moment the blazing papers flashed light into the blazing eyes. If I were a king, I should think several times before going to war with people of that kind.

After a practice of two centuries, the Yankees would be able to hold a very good town meeting without assistance, and yet everything relating to it is prescribed and regulated by statute. The people must be notified in just such a way ; the business to be done must be expressed in the summons ; and nothing can be voted upon or discussed unless it has been thus expressed. In case the selectmen of a town should unreasonably refuse to call a town meeting, any ten voters can apply to a justice of the peace, and require him to issue a call. Every possible, and almost every conceivable, abuse or unfairness has been anticipated and guarded against by the legislature, and yet the town meeting is absolutely unfettered in doing right. It may also do wrong if it chooses, provided it does wrong in the right way, and the wrong is of such a nature as to harm nobody but itself. And I will here observe, that, if anyone would know how deeply rooted in the heart of man is the love of justice, and would inspect the most complete system of fair play mankind possesses, let him buy, keep, and habitually read the volume containing the Constitution and Revised Statutes of Massachusetts. Most of the standard law books are interesting and edifying, but this one is the most instructive and affecting of them all. It shows, in a striking manner, how much better the heart of man is than his head ; for the community which wrought out this beautiful system of justice and humanity believed, while it was doing it, in the doctrine of total depravity ! Delightful inconsistency ! Would that all the head’s mistakes could be so gloriously refuted by the other organ !

The principal town meeting of the year generally occurs in the spring, when the town officers are elected by ballot. The town officers are : Three, five, seven, or nine selectmen, who are the chief officers, and take care of things in general; a town clerk ; three or more truant officers ; three or more assessors ; three or more overseers of the poor; a town treasurer; one or more surveyors of highways ; a constable ; one or more collectors of taxes; a pound-keeper; two or more fenceviewers ; one or more surveyors of lumber ; one or more measurers of wood and bark; a sealer of weights and measures ; a ganger of liquid measures ; a superintendent of hay-scales. Here is a chance for office-seekers! But, unfortunately, the emoluments attached to these offices are as small as the duties are light; and it has been found necessary to compel men to serve in them, if elected, under penalty of a fine of twenty dollars, — a sum much larger than the usual amount of the fees. But then no man can be made to serve two years in succession. These officers being elected, the town parliament proceeds to consider proposed improvements and appropriations; and you may frequently hear in the town hall excellent debating, very much in the quiet and rather homely manner of the British House of Commons, when country members get on their legs to discuss country matters. There is usually a total abstinence from all flights of oratory, for every man who speaks or votes has a personal and pecuniary interest in the question under debate. He who advocates a stone bridge in place of the rickety old wooden one knows that he will have to pay his share of the expense; and he who opposes it knows that he will have to cross the rickety structure, and will have to pay his part of a thousnnd-dollar fine when it lets a pedler through to destruction.

In the list of town magnates just given the reader may have noticed “truant officers.” They must be explained.

There is one thing upon which these mean Yankees are entirely and unanimously resolved, and it is this : That no child, of whatever race, color, or capacity, shall grow up among them in ignorance. In the oldest of their records we find the existence of the schoolhouse taken for granted. When there was no church in a town, no courthouse, no town-hall, there was always a school-house, which served for all public purposes ; and ever since that early day the school system has been extending and improving. Very pleasant it is of a summer day to ride past the little lone school-houses, and peep in at the open door, and see the schoolmarm surrounded with her little flock of little children, whose elder brothers are in the fields ; nor less pleasant is it to mark in every village the free high school, where the pupils who have outgrown the common school continue their studies, if they desire it, to the point of being prepared for college, and snatch a daily hour for base-ball besides. Indeed, it is an excellent thing to be a child in this land of the Yankees. If you are a good boy or girl you have these common and high schools for your instruction ; if you are a bad boy, they send you off to a reformatory school to be made better, or to a ship school to be changed into a good sailor ; and if you are a bad girl, there is a girls’ industrial school for you, where you will be taught good morals and the sewingmachine. And they do not leave the bad boys and girls to go on in their evil ways until they are developed into criminals. The towns in Massachusetts are now authorized to appoint the truant officers before mentioned, whose duty it is to take care that every child between the ages of six and sixteen shall avail itself either of public or private means of education. No miserly parent, no hard master, no careless guardian, can now defraud a child of his right to so much instruction as will make it easy for him to go on instructing himself all his life.

By way of showing how much in earnest the Yankees are in this matter, I will insert upon this page certain "bylaws concerning truants and absentees, which I had the pleasure of reading last summer on a handbill displayed in the post-office of a small village in New England. It seems to me that these by-laws may convey a valuable hint to the Argentine and other republics. The following selection maybe sufficient for our purpose : —

“ 2. Any child between the ages of six and sixteen, who, while a member of any school, shall absent himself or herself from school without the consent of his or her teacher, parent, or guardian, shall be deemed a truant.” (Penalty, a fine of twenty dollars, or a term not exceeding two years in a reform school.)

“3. Any child between the ages of six and fifteen, who shall not attend some public school or suitable institution of instruction at least twelve weeks in a year, six of which shall be consecutive in the summer term, and six of which shall be consecutive in the winter term, shall be deemed an absentee.

“ 4. ABSENTEES OF THE SECOND CLASS. — Children between the ages of seven and sixteen years of age, wandering in the streets or loitering in stores, shops, or public places, having no lawful occupation or business, and growing up in ignorance, are hereby placed under supervision of the truant officers, so far as the law provides. The first offence shall be reported to parent, guardian, or master of said child by a truant officer, and, in case of tire failure to secure said child the requisite amount of schooling or instruction elsewhere, he shall be fined twenty dollars ; for the second offence of the same person, the child shall be sent to the almshouse or to tire State Reform School, or the nautical branch of the same, or State Industrial School for girls, for a period agreeable to the statutes, as the justice of the court having jurisdiction of the same shall decide.”

‘‘6. It shall be the duty of every truant officer to inquire diligently concerning all persons, between the ages aforesaid, who seem to be idle or vagrant, or who, whether employed or unemployed, appear to be growing up in ignorance, and to enter a complaint against any one found unlawfully absent from school, or violating any of these by-laws.

“7. It shall be the duty of every truant officer, prior to making any complaint before a justice, to notify the truant or absentee child and its parents or guardian of the penalty for the offence. If he can obtain satisfactory pledges of reformation, which pledges shall subsequently be kept, he shall forbear to prosecute.”

In one of those country towns of New England, a person likely to be elected a truant officer would have some knowledge of all the inhabitants. Hence it is now almost impossible for the most perverse or neglected child to avoid getting a little schooling. Each town, I should add, pays for the maintenance of children sent from it to a reformatory school, provided the parents or guardians cannot. The female teachers employed in the common schools receive now from five to eight dollars a week, and the master of a country high school from eight hundred to two thousand dollars a year. Twelve hundred dollars is very frequently the salary. Now, in a New England village, an active man who has a saving wife and an ordinary-sized garden, can live decently upon the salary last named, send a son to college, and give his daughters lessons on the piano.

I suppose that in New England there is a less unequal division of property than in any other region of a civilized country. I chanced to be in a country bank there last July, about the time when the coupons due on the first of that month bad been mostly paid, and the money for each individual had been done up in a neatly folded small package. The village was small, and remote from any important centre ; and these packages of greenbacks belonged to the farmers, mechanics, and manufacturers of the neighborhood. I think there must have been half a peck of them,—perhaps a hundred packages. There are country towns in New England where nearly every respectable house has some United States bonds in it. and the Savings Bank will wield a capital of half a million dollars besides. Reason: diversified industry. These Yankees, finding themselves planted upon a soil not too productive, were compelled at a very early period to become good political economists ; and while the fathers scratched the hard surface of the soil for a few bushels of corn, the sons rigged small schooners, and fished off the coast for cod. By and by they got on so far as to build ships, in which they sailed to the coast of Guinea, brought thence a load of slaves and a few quills of gold-dust, sold the slaves to the West-Indians for molasses, brought the molasses home, distilled it into rum, took the rum to Guinea for more slaves, sent most of the gold-dust to England for manufactured goods, and made the rest into watch-chains and gold beads. Thus Newport was enriched ; thus was founded in Rhode Island the manufacture of jewelry and silver-ware which has attained such marvellous proportions. This infernal commerce is now regarded by the people of New England as wise and honest Catholics regard the Inquisition and the Massacre of St. Bartholomew; that is, they wonder how their forefathers could have been guilty of it, and attribute it chiefly to the general barbarism of the age.

But the diversified industry remains, and it has enriched New England. Those streams which wind about the wooded hills and mountains of this region, useless as they are for navigation, shallow, winding, rocky, and rapid, frequently have such a descent that there can be a factory village every mile or two of their course for many successive miles. Travellers by such railroads as the Housatonic know this to their sorrow ; for these villages are so frequent along the banks of the Housatonic River, that there is a stopping-place, at some parts of the line, every mile and a half. Among the glorious, wood-crowned hills of Berkshire I have passed in an afternoon ride the following manufactories: an iron-smelting furnace ; two very extensive manufactories of the finest writingpaper, the linen rags for which are brought from the shores of the Mediterranean ; a large woollen mill ; a small, factory of folding-chairs and campstools ; a manufactory of something in cotton ; a mill for grinding poplar wood into material for paper ; and some others, at a little distance from the road, the nature of which could not be discerned. All these may be seen in a ride of ten miles along the Housatonic, and all are kept in motion by that little bustling stream.

So much of this diversified industry as is legitimate(i. e. unforced by a stimulating tariff) is beneficial ; the rest is excessive and hurtful. It is excellent for the farmer to have a market near his barn, but it is bad for him to have to pay such a price for labor as neutralizes that advantage. These numberless factories absorb female labor to such a degree that I have known a family try for four months to get a servant-girl in vain ; and the few girls ill a village that will go out to service are often the refuse of creation, and rule their unhappy mistresses with a rod of iron. The factories, too, are attracting to some parts of New England Irish and German emigrants much faster than they can be assimilated. I read in a religious Report: “The mountain regions [of Massachusetts] are continually drained of a large part of thenmost enterprising population ; the furnaces buy up the farms for the sake of their wood, and, having ‘ skinned them,’ — in the expressive language of the region, — sell them out at low prices to foreigners, who are thus, in a number of places, coming into possession of hundreds of these mountain acres. This transfer of population, while apparently beneficial both to those who go and those who come, throws new burdens on the churches, and adds new embarrassments to the already difficult problem of a general popular Christianization. Considerable numbers of the Canadian French are now coming into Berkshire, turning its forests into fuel for the mills and founderies.”

This is partly owing to the tariff stimulation of the factories, and tends to show that stimulation is no better for the body politic than for the corporeal system of man. The truth remains, however, that diversified industry is one of the chief secrets of a country’s prosperity and progress. The most desperate and deplorable poverty now to be seen on earth — so I am assured by an intelligent and universal traveller — is in some of the sugar and coffee districts of Cuba, where Nature has lavished upon the land her richest gifts. There is room there for the planter, the slave, and the importer of manufactures ; all others cringe to the plantation lord, as toadies, beggars, or white trash.

It is curious to see how the emigrants, who arrive in the country at the rate of a thousand a day, distribute themselves over the land, and settle just where they are wanted. These obscure factory villages of New England swarm with Irish people and Germans ; but no Yankee sends for them. They come. If they do well, they induce their relations and friends to join them ; if work is scarce, if the factory closes, they either scatter among the farmers to subsist, and wait for the reopening, or a band of them moves off to Iowa, Wisconsin, or Minnesota. In the back country, employers will make considerable sacrifices to avoid closing their works during the long, snow-bound winter, partly from benevolent feeling, partly from their unwillingness to create a destitution which it will fall to them to relieve. Here, as elsewhere, it is only about one third of the workmen who save their money and improve their position in the world; another third about hold their own, or can get credit in dull seasons sufficient to carry them over to the next period of superabundance ; another third live in such a way that, if work ceases this week, they must go hungry the next, unless more provident people help them. Some of the factories in odd, out-ofthe-way nooks of New England are of such antiquity that men who went into them as boys are now gray-headed foremen or partners. Upon the whole, I must confess that some of the factory villages, with their rows of shabby cottages close together, their tall factory buildings humming with machinery, and all the refuse of manufacture lying about, do not leave an agreeable impression upon the mind of the visitor. But whatever in them is merely unpleasing to the eye admits of easy and inexpensive remedy.

The time was when very few men would be farmers in New England who could help it, and farming there is still far from being an attractive or popular occupation. The dearness of labor compels most of the proprietors of the soil to work with their hands from the rising of the sun to the going down of the same ; and, so long as this is the case, the more capable of our idle species will extol the noble occupation of the farmer, and avoid it. But the business is rising in dignity. It is beginning to detain the superior sons of farmers from the city, and now and then lures from the city a volunteer who brings to the soil a highly trained and sure intelligence. The railroads go everywhere, and enable the farmers of the most northern town of Vermont to send to New York (three hundred and fifty miles distant) commodities as bulky as hay and as perishable as blackberries. Along the lines of those quiet country railroads to points two hundred miles distant from New York or Boston a milk-train nightly passes, gathering up from every station its quota of cans of milk for the next morning’s supply of those cities. They have a way now of “ curing ” milk, which, without injuring it, causes it to keep longer, and prevents the cream from rising. A farmer among the hills of Berkshire, who cures his milk by this process, has sent to New York (one hundred and fifty miles off), every night for the last eighteen months, two hundred cans of milk, and has only lost one can by the milk spoiling. For the information of milk consumers, I will here communicate the fact, that the milk which costs us in New York the “war price” of ten cents a quart yields the Yankee farmer only four cents. The strangest thing of all is, that it cannot be brought to our doors for much less than ten cents. Another thing incredible (but true) is, that the Yankee farmer does not water the milk, nor even put into each can the “lump of ice to keep it,” of which we hear in convivial hours.

Special farming appears to be more remunerative than general agriculture, and is one of the causes of the growing attractiveness of the business. The factories, wherein the milk of a hundred farms is made into cheese or butter, are an unspeakable relief to farmers’ wives. Labor-saving machinery is doing wonders for the farming interest, and will do more. The high prices of produce during the last seven years have cleared many thousand farms in New England from encumbrance, and put away in their owners’ money-boxes a few United States bonds. In a word, although few honest men will ever find it an easy thing to live, and every one of the legitimate occupations makes large demands of those who exercise them successfully, it may now be said of farming in New England, that it invites, and will sufficiently reward, intelligent labor. The difficulty is the first five years. After that, if you manage well, you may have as much money as is necessary, and work no harder than is becoming. Probably there is now no business in which a little sound sense and extra judicious expenditure yield results so certain, so lasting, so desirable as this of farming.

It seems strange that the mean Yankees should have taken so much trouble as they have to make their homes and villages pleasant to the eye. If the New-Yorker wishes to find a delightful village in which to spend the summer, he has only to go up in a balloon some fine afternoon in June, when the wind is blowing toward the east, and, when the balloon is over New England, let himself gently descend into a field, and make for the nearest collection of houses. He will be almost certain to have reached a pleasant place ; but if not, there will be sure to be one a very few miles distant. I have been in New England towns of four or five thousand inhabitants, in which I could not discover by diligent search one squalid house, one untidy fence, one decidedly disagreeable object. They make their very woodsheds ornamental, and pile the wood in them so evenly that the sawed ends of the sticks make a wall smooth, clean, and compact, pleasing to behold. A frequenter of New England could tell when he had reached that strange land by the wood-piles. Almost everything you see or handle there is a mechanical curiosity, for the Yankees take infinite trouble to invent troublesaving implements and apparatus. They have most curious and novel hinges, locks, latches, padlocks, keys, curry-combs, pig-troughs, and horseshoes ; and nothing pleases them better than to be the first to have a new and startling invention, such as a frontdoor key that weighs half an ounce (a pretty little thing of polished steel, fit for the vest pocket, and yet capable of turning a huge lock), or a stove that puts on its own coal, or a gate that opens as the horseman approaches and closes when he has passed through, or a flat-iron that keeps itself hot, or a gas-burner so contrived that the gas lights by being merely “ turned on.” A genuine Yankee delights to expound such things to the stray New-Yorker, and, in his eagerness, does not mark the impenetrable blank of his guest’s countenance as he strives to look as though he understood them. A Yankee establishment, including house, fences, gates, barn, stable, wood-shed, chickenyard, pig-sty, and tool-box, is a museum of ingenuities, all of which will “work,” and all of which were made with a purposed symmetry and elegance.

Some of the older villages have grown exceedingly lovely. A long, wide street, not straight, — O no, not straight, — nor violently crooked either, but gentlycurving as a country road usually does, which sets off to the best advantage the grand old elms lining the street on both sides, and affords many a glimpse of the pretty houses nestling under them, — such is the usual village of New England. Few white fences, few white houses, but almost all that man has made is of a hue to harmonize with the prevailing colors of nature. The pillared edifices of fifty years ago, and the elaborate picket fences, have nearly disappeared, and all is becoming villa-like, neat, subdued, elegant. The width of the street gives room for two wide strips of grass, which beautifully relieve the heavy, dark masses of foliage on each side ; and these masses are further relieved by the lawns, the flowers, and the flowering shrubs that surround every house. Sometimes of a morning, when the sun slants across the street, and lights up the grass so that it looks like sheets of emerald, and touches with glory every object, and brings into clear view the distant, pleasing bend of the road, transmuting its very dust into gold, — sometimes, I say, about 7 A. M., in one of these older villages of New England, when the jaded citizen steps out upon the path, and looks up and down the street, the view is such as to melt; his heart and haunt him in his softer moments ever after. The scene is at once so peaceful and so brilliant, and its beauty has not been too dearly purchased. It is not one man’s ostentation or one class’s privilege which has created this enchanting scene ; it is not a gorgeous castle, and an exclusive park, with a squalid village near by. This loveliness is the result of a sense of the becoming which pervades the community, and which the whole community has indulged. The cost in money is trifling indeed. Looking over the records of a town in Vermont, I happened to fall upon an entry which showed that the town had paid for planting those mighty elms in its public square twenty - five cents each. There are many men in the United States who would count it a rare piece of good luck to be able to buy one of them for twenty thousand dollars, — cash on delivery in good condition.

Of late years there has been a revival of interest in the matter of village decoration in New England. This movement originated in the mind of a public-spirited lady of Stockbridge, Mrs. J. Z. Goodrich, who, in 1853, was chiefly instrumental in forming the famous Laurel Hill Association of that place, since imitated in other towns. The objects of these associations, as expressed in their constitutions, are “ to improve and ornament the streets and public grounds by planting and cultivating trees, cleaning, trimming, and repairing the sidewalks, and doing such other acts as shall tend to beautify and improve such streets and grounds.” Every person over fourteen who agrees to pay one dollar a year for three years, or who plants and protects one tree under the direction of the executive committee, is a member of the association. Any one may become a life-member by paying ten dollars a year for three years, or twenty-five dollars at one time. To interest the children in the matter, who might otherwise injure the young trees, or tread carelessly on the edges of the paths, all persons under fourteen are admitted members by paying twenty-five cents a year for three years, or “by doing an equivalent amount of work annually for three years, under the direction of the executive committee.” This executive committee, who, of course, do all the work of the association, consists of the president, the four vice-presidents, the treasurer, the secretary, and fifteen others, “part of whom shall be ladies.” The committee meets once a month, determines what shall be done, at what expense, and under whose supervision. The result is, that the village is properly shaded, the grass on each side of the road is cut at proper times, the paths are trimmed and kept free from weeds, the public ground is improved and beautified, the cemetery is duly cared for, the happiness of every civilized being in the place is increased, and the value of all the village property is enhanced. Once a year the association meets to elect officers, to hear what has been done, how much spent, and what else is needed and desired. Sometimes this annual meeting is held in midsummer out of doors in the public park, and the ladies seize the opportunity to make it a kind of village festival.

Speaking of these associations reminds me of another of the many ways in which the Yankees in their native towns display their meanness. Ever since New England was settled, the inhabitants have had dinned in their ears, two or three times a week, such sentiments as that it is more blessed to give than to receive, that strength is bestowed upon the strong that they may help the weak, and wisdom upon the wise that they may guide the foolish. In fact, the very Constitution of Massachusetts contains an Article upon the encouragement of literature, which, it says, ought to be encouraged for the following reasons : “ To countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in dealings, sincerity, good-humor, and all social affections and generous sentiments among the people.” Hence we can hardly find a town in New England, of any considerable age or wealth, which has not been the recipient of a gift or gifts from one or more of its inhabitants. There is little Stockbridge, among the hills of Berkshire, where the lynx and the otter are still caught, and from which the bear has not been long gone. The village contains but fifty or sixty houses, and the whole town has only a population of about nineteen hundred and fifty ; but the following is an imperfect catalogue of the gifts which it has received. First, its remarkably beautiful public ground, containing ten or twelve acres, was a gift to the town from the family known to the whole country by the talents of one of its members, the late Miss Catherine Sedgwick. Upon this fine park the public high school has been built, behind which the ground rises into a rocky and almost precipitous hill, densely covered with wood, affording a capital playground to the boys, and a most agreeable retreat to all the people. Near by is a solid stone structure, the public library building, given to the town by Mr. J. Z. Goodrich. Another native of Stockbridge, Mr. Jackson, had previously had the meanness to start a public library by the gift of two thousand dollars’ worth of books, to which other residents had added many valuable volumes ; whereupon Mr. Goodrich builds this solid and spacious edifice to contain the books, and to afford a pleasant reading-room for the people in the afternoons, when many of them can spend an hour or two over the papers and magazines. That done, the town took fire, — in town meeting assembled,— and voted four hundred dollars a year for the increase of the library, and the compensation of the young lady who serves as librarian (from 2 to 5 P. M., five days a week). Then President Hopkins, of Williams College, hearing what was going on in his native place, gave to the library an unusually interesting collection of minerals. Other contributions of pictures and books have followed fast ; until really the library of little Stockbridge is only inferior to such ancient establishments as that of Newport, which also has grown to its present importance chiefly by gifts and bequests. In Stockbridge, too, there is a very elegant fountain, the marble figures of which, executed in Milan, were presented by a wellknown New-Yorker, John H. Gourlie, who has a cottage near it. The town, however, excavated and built the fountain, the water of which comes from mountain springs some miles away. Incredible as it may seem, this ridiculous little village has had the insolence to tap a mountain, and bring excellent spring water into every house that chooses to have it! Another gift is a carved marble drinking-fountain, temporarily placed at the side of the librarybuilding. Finally, there is a handsome monument of brown stone, erected, at a cost of two thousand dollars, to the immortal and dear memory of the men of Stockbridge who fell in the war. This was built by general subscription.

The propensity to make presents to the public is so general and so strong in New England, that it requires checking and warning rather than stimulating. In the course of time, when the progress of civilization shall have still further loosened the general clutch upon money, and the man who has the mania for needless accumulation will be generally recognized as a madman, it will probably become necessary to further regulate this matter of public gifts and bequests by law. No man has a right to saddle posterity with a hurtful burden. There is not a man in a million wise and far-seeing enough to give away a million dollars without doing more harm than good. By and by we shall see men competing for the honor and privilege of giving something to the public, and town meetings will be called to consider whether a proffered sum of money will be, upon the whole, and in the long run, a benefit or an injury. There are colleges in New England the efficiency of which would be doubled if the trustees could disregard those conditions of gifts and bequrests which frustrate the giver’s benevolent intentions.

To a New-Yorker who finds himself for the first time in New England, it is a great disappointment that he can find no Yankees about. In the ridiculous comedy of The American Cousin, the audience is given to understand that Asa Trenchard, the Yankee hero of the play, is a native of Brattleboro’, Vermont. A visitor to that delightful town is as likely to find an Asa Trenchard there as he would be to meet a Tony Lumpkin at a dinner-party in Windsor Castle. Brattleboro’, forsooth ! it would be difficult to discover on earth a village less capable of producing such a preposterous ass. They have a club there for taking the periodicals of continental Europe, such as the Revue des Deux Mondes, the numbers of which circulate from house to house. They have a Shakespeare Club, which assembles on winter evenings to read and converse upon the plays of that poet, each member of the club taking a part. They form other winter clubs to study a language in common under the same teacher. They have an endowed library, for which, no doubt, some liberal soul or souls will provide a building erelong. They have also some vigorous ball clubs and an engine company ; but I defy Tom Taylor to discover among them any creature ever so remotely resembling Mr, Trenchard, Salem Scudder, or any of the other stage Yankees. The stage Yankee is gone from the earth. There are no “Yankees” in New England outside of the theatre. Indeed, we may say of the whole of the Northern States, that rusticity in all its forms is disappearing, and everything, as well as everybody, Is getting covered with a metropolitan varnish. Go where you will, you cannot get far beyond the meerschaum pipe, white kids, lessons on the piano, and the Atlantic Monthly.

A melancholy feature of village life in New England is the great number of intelligent, refined, and gifted ladies who have no career nor rational expectation of one. A large proportion of the young men leave their native towns at an age when marriage cannot be thought of; they repair to a city, or plunge into the all-absorbing West, and are seen no more, until, perhaps, at fifty-five, their fortunes made, their families grown up, they come back to spend the evening of their days near their childhood’s home. Consider, for example, the case of the well-known Field family, and you will see why there are so many old maids in New England. There were six vigorous, ambitious boys of them, sons of a Puritan clergyman, whose doctrine and whose salary were both of the old school. When this fine old bulwark of the faith had given his boys a college education, and assisted them into a profession, what more could he or Berkshire do for them ? They must needs adopt Napoleon’s tactics, and “ scatter to subsist.” One, indeed, stayed at home, where he was long a leading lawyer of Western Massachusetts, and represented it in the State senate. Another became a New York merchant, and forced a reluctant world to re-lay the Atlantic cable. Another tried for fame and fortune at the New York bar, and won a superfluity of both. Another distinguished himself as a naval officer. Another emerged to the public view as editor of a leading religious newspaper. Another made his way to a seat on the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States. These able men have had a career in the world, as thousands of other New England lads have had, and are having. But what of the “ girls they leave behind them ” ? Some, it is true, go forth, and make a career ; but many seem compelled to remain at home, where they amuse themselves as best they can with German lessons, gardening, fairs, ecclesiastical needle-work, and going out to tea ; willing to do any suitable work, but unwilling to deprive of it work-women who must have it. It is easy enough to find villages in New England where there are twenty admirable girls under thirty years of age, and not one marriageable young man.

A precious relief it is to these when the long June days bring at length, after the slow winter and tardy, tedious spring, the first summer visitors, with their huge trunks piled high on the village coach. Not for the new fashions’ sake, — O dear, no! There is not a device nor passing whim of fashion which these Yankee girls do not know as soon as it is known in the Fifth Avenue. No city damsel need expect, to astonish them with her novelties from Paris. Such of the Yankee girls as have been so unfortunate as to catch the clothes mania, now raging in most Christian countries, are walking Harper’s Bazars of fashionable knowledge. Very many of them make their own dresses, and trim their own bonnets, but they do it in the most recent and killing manner. The gay summer birds that come to these sweet nooks of New England are welcome for many reasons : they fill the churches, patronize the fairs, enliven the street, and join, the tea-parties ; but they cannot tell the Yankee girls anything they do not know already, unless it is what Tostée really does, my dear, in La Grande Duchesse.

A curious thing about New England is the variety of eccentric characters to be found there. In almost every town there is a farmer or mechanic who has addicted himself to some kind of knowledge very remote from his occupation. Here you will find a shoemaker, in a little shop (which he locks when he goes to dinner or to the post-office, much to the inconvenience of customers), who has attained celebrity as a botanist In another village there may be a wheelwright who would sell his best coat for a rare shell ; and, not far off, a farmer, who is a pretty good geologist, and is forever pecking away at his innocent rocks. Again, you will find a machinist who is enamored of “large-paper ” copies of standard works, and rejoices in the possession of rarities in literature which he cannot read. I know an excellent steel-plate engraver, who, besides being a universal critic, is particularly convinced that the entire railroad system of the world is wrong, — ties, rails, driving-wheels, axles, oilboxes, everything, — and employs his leisure in inventing better devices. Then there are people who have odd schemes of benevolence, such as that of the Massachusetts farmer who went to Palestine to teach the Orientals the true system of agriculture, and was two years in finding out that they wouldn't learn it. There are morose men and families who neither visit nor are visited ; and there is, occasionally, a downright miser, of the ancient type, such as we read of in old magazines and anecdote books. There are men, too, of an extreme eccentricity of opinion. I think there are in Boston about a dozen as complete, immovable, if not malignant, Tories, as can be found this side of Constantinople, — men who plume themselves upon hating everything that makes the glory of their age and country. And, speaking of Boston, — solid, sensible Boston, — what other city ever accomplished a feat so eccentric as the production of those twin incongruities, George Francis Train and the Count Johannes?

In matters more serious there is an occasional eccentricity still more marked. So, at least, it is said by those who look deeper than the smiling summer surface of New England. In the religious Report ² quoted above I read a startling passage to this effect: “ Our purely American communities, that have had a natural growth, are (with an exception soon to be named) religious and church-going communities.” That exception, says the Report further on, is where “some form of religious error” — i. e. a creed different from ours — has prevailed. In some such places there is an obstinate indifference to worship and to religious truth, and even to religious questions in general. In others, a mental indisposition of peculiarly mischievous character substitutes for this indifference an acrid hostility. This epidemic — which in some localities has become endemic — is characterized by a general habit of opposition, — a habit, not of eclecticism or of criticism, but of attack and denunciation ; not of broad survey and genial correction, but of perverse misconception and invective.” In several communities, continues the Report, “ the results begin to appear in a retrogression towards the paganism of the later empire, — a virulent hatred of Christianity, an assertion of the sufficiency of philosophy and the uselessness of religion, a contempt for worship and the Lord’s Day, and a doubt of immortality.”

This is eccentric indeed. It is such eccentricity as the summer visitor seldom has an opportunity of observing; for in the villages which he frequents the entire population on Sunday morning seems to come forth in its excellent Sunday clothes, and gently wind its way to the churches, — much to the discomfort of a city pagan, whom this apparent unanimity leaves to a silent, reproachful solitude. I think the most “ acrid ” of the pagans of “the later empire,” who should witness, from a convenient point, the long lines of well-dressed people strolling churchward on Sunday in a green New England village, all gardens and loveliness, would be compelled to confess (to himself) that this weekly grooming of the whole people, this peaceful assembling, this silent, decorous sitting together for an hour or two, these friendly greetings at the church doors, and the chatty stroll home with neighbors, is rather a good thing than otherwise, and certainly very much better that staying at home in the same old clothes, doing the same old work, and being “acrid.” If the pagans of the later empire are numerous enough, they should hasten to establish a Sunday gathering, and so get rid of their acridity; for there are but two evils in the world, and one of them is illhumor.

But how changed is New England religion from the time when Jonathan Edwards made mad the guilty and appalled the free in Northampton and Stockbridge a hundred and twenty years ago ! Strange being ! Wonderful creed ! There was a certain Sunday morning in Northampton, in 1737, when the gallery of the church gave way in consequence of the heaving of the ground in spring. The account which Edwards gives of this event is a most curious study of character, of history, and of mania. He gives, first of all, a careful, exact explanation of what he would have called the “natural causes ” of the catastrophe, — showing how the ends of the supporting timbers were drawn out of their sockets by the bulging of the wall. Then be describes the event: “The gallery, in falling, seemed to break and sink first in the middle, so that those who were upon it were thrown together in heaps before the front door. But the whole was so sudden, that many of those who fell knew nothing what it was, at the time, that had befallen them. Others in the congregation thought it had been an amazing clap of thunder. The falling gallery seemed to be broken all to pieces before it got down ; so that some who fell with it, as well as those who were under, were buried in the ruins, and were found pressed under heavy loads of timber, and could do nothing to help themselves.” But no one was killed, and only one seriously hurt. Why was this ? Mr. Edwards answers: “It seems unreasonable to ascribe it to anything else but the care of Providence in disposing the motions of every piece of timber, and the precise place of safety where every one should sit and fall, when none were in any capacity to care for their own preservation.” Hence he continues: “We thought ourselves called on to set apart a day to be spent in the solemn worship of God, to humble ourselves under such a rebuke of God upon us, in time of public service in his house, by so dangerous and surprising an accident ; and to praise his name for so wonderful, and as it were miraculous, a preservation.”

The stranger who now visits the church belonging to the society of which Jonathan Edwards was the minister finds himself introduced into a spacious and elegant edifice, with all the modern improvements in upholstery and cabinet work. The scene is bright and cheerful. A fine organ, well played, soothes and exalts the mind, and a highly trained quartette discourses beautiful music. If the gallery should break down some Sunday morning, the occupants would not have far to fall, and the church would bring an action against the builder. The sermon, of course, is not such as the acrid pagans of the later empire approve; but it is better than a man can be reasonably expected to produce who has to preach twice a week, and the first necessity of whose position is, not to offend the people that pay him.

In these transition times it is hard to be a clergyman in New England ; for whether the clergyman advances faster than the people, or the people get ahead of the clergyman, the result is equally distressing to the weaker party. Perhaps there is not a more agonizing situation on earth than that of the clergyman of a modern fastidious church, who, having a sickly wife, six children, and no head for business, has incurred the hideous calamity of knowing too much. If ever we have in America a great fictitious literature, much of the agony of the same will be of that internal and spiritual nature here referred to.

The time was when there was an intimate connection between these town governments and the church, — the established church of New England, — and when all other beliefs and rites were forbidden. Once a man could be lawfully taxed against his will for the support of the Congregational minister, and it was death to say mass. But New England, from its first settlement to the present hour, has always given that sole certain evidence of spiritual life which is afforded by “growth in grace.” The essential difference between a wise and a foolish person, between a superior and an inferior community, is, that one learns and the other does not. The Mathers and Edwardses of a former generation are succeeded by the Channings, Beechers, Parkers, Motleys, and Emersons of this; and these, in their turn, will be followed by men equal to the task of carrying on and organizing the regeneration which has been so worthily begun. The old restraints and privileges have long ago been abolished, and perfect religious and irreligious freedom prevails. A family can now take a ride on Sunday afternoon, or receive visitors on Sunday evening, without exciting consternation or calling out the constable. In almost every village all the principal sects are represented, and there is usually the utmost possible friendliness between them. At the Congregational church you will generally find the solid aristocracy of the place, — the president of the railroad, the president of the bank, the master of the high school, the employing manufacturers, the old doctor, the rich farmers, the large store-keeper, and the colored man who thinks he waited on General Washington in the Revolutionary War. But, in some towns, the Unitarians have a share of these great men, as well as a good number of the polite people who are sometimes described in New England as “literary.” In most villages there may now be found a pretty little box of an Episcopal church, half hidden in foliage, which in summer, during the reign of the summer visitors, is filled to overflowing with the gayest costumes ; though in winter, they say, the attendance dwindles to a company which is as small in number as it is fervent in zeal. There is, also, usually a Methodist church, and frequently a Baptist, which have their proportion of adherents. Each of these denominations maintains a vigorous Sunday school, and the friendly rivalry between the schools gives the poorer children many a picture - book, doll, cake, and picnic which they would not otherwise have.

Perfect freedom, I have just said, prevails in religious matters in New England; but this has not long been the case. Some of the elderly people in the elderly towns found it hard to tolerate the building of Catholic churches in their midst, and consequently Catholics occasionally found it difficult to buy ground for the purpose. No one had any lots to sell, or a preposterous price was asked ; the true reason being, that the wink had been passed among the land-owners, and an understanding come to that the priest was not to have any land. I am acquainted with a large town in Vermont where these tactics were successful for some years, in spite of the disorderly Sundays in the Irish quarter, which were a weekly argument in favor of the priest’s coming. At length, by stratagem, the requisite lots were obtained ; and then the Catholics, being put upon their mettle by this inconsiderate opposition, took their revenge by building a twenty-thousanddollar church of brick instead of a three-thousand-dollar one of wood, as first proposed. Not content with this fell vengeance, they carried their animosity so far as to behave ever after with the strictest propriety on Sundays.

The stranger is surprised to find in small sequestered villages, renowned perhaps in the annals of Puritanism, Catholic churches of good size, with thick walls of handsome and well-cut stone, nearly as white as marble, and surrounded by lawns and shrubbery, not very ill kept. The explanation of the mystery sometimes is, that in these remote villages among the mountains there are human minds all alive to the stir and impulse of the time, to whom the men, the books, the ideas, the aspirations, the dismay, and the despair of the age are more real and familiar than to us who live in distracting cities ; and some of these yearning, imaginative souls have listened in their seclusion to the rending cry of Lacordaire in Notre Dame, to Hyacinthe, to Newman, and have been seduced to abandon the hereditary fold, and fly, shivering, to the ancient ark. Hence the Catholic churches are sometimes more costly than they naturally would be, and we find in them a crowded congregation of Irish laborers and their families, and one solitary native of ancient name and wealth, who contributed a large part of the building fund. Along the northern border, where many of the laboring class are French, there are a few rather ancient Catholic churches; in some of which the sermon is in French one Sunday and in English the next, and French confessions alternate with English on Saturdays. It were much to be desired that some religion had power enough on the frontier to put an end to the petty smuggling that goes on there continually, corrupting the poor man who perpetrates the offence, and the summer visitor who instigates or rewards it.

I think the Catholic bishops must reserve a few wild priests for the remoter country congregations, where there is little chance for proselyting. I witnessed a Catholic service, a summer or two since, in the very heart of New England, which was a chapter of Charles O’Malley come to life, — a bit of old Ireland transferred bodily to the New World. Toward nine o’clock on Sunday morning, the hour appointed for the semi-monthly mass, the people gathered about the gate under the trees, while the ruddy and robust priest stood at the church door, accosting those who entered with a loud heartiness that made every word he uttered audible to the people standing without and to the people kneeling within. He was a jovial and sympathetic soul, who could (and did) laugh with the merry and grieve with the sad ; but it was evident that laughter came far more natural to him than crying. When he had concluded, at 9.15, a boisterous and most jovial conversation with Mrs. O’Flynn at the door, every word of which was heard by every member of the waiting congregation, he entered the church, and proceeded to the altar, before which he knelt, holding his straw hat in his hand. His prayer ended, he went into a small curtained alcove at the side, where his priestly robes were hanging. Without taking the trouble to let the curtains fall, he took off his coat, in view of the whole assembly, and put on part of his ecclesiastical garments, unassisted by his only acoIyte, — a little boy in the usual costume, who stood by. He then went again to the altar, and arranged the various objects for the coming ceremonial ; after which he stepped aside and completed the robing, —not even going into the alcove, but standing outside, and reaching in for the different articles. He might have spared the congregation the pain of seeing his struggles to tie his strings behind him ; but no ; he chose to perform the whole without help and without disguise. When all was ready, he said the mass with perfect propriety, and with unusual manifestations of feeling. But the sermon, if sermon it could be called, was absolutely comic, and much of it was intended to be so. There had been a fair recently for the re-decoration of the altar ; and in the first part of his discourse the gratified pastor read a list of the contributors, with comments, in something like the style following : —

“ Mrs. McDowd, $ 13.50 ; and very well done, too, considering they had nothing but cake upon their table, — no, not so much as an apple. John Haggerty, $2.70 ; and indade he’s only a boy, a mere lad, — and a good boy he is. Mrs. O’Sullivan, $37.98; yes, and $27.42 before. Ah ! but that was doing well, — that was wonderful, considering what she had to contend with. Mrs. O'Donahue, $7.90; and every cent of it got by selling a ten-cent picture. Very well done of you, Mrs. O'Donahue! Peter O’Brien, $12.00; good for you, Peter, and I thank you in my own name and in the name of the congregation..... Total, $489.57. Nearly five hundred dollars! It’s really astonishing ! and how much of it. my children ” (this he said with a wink and a grin that excited general laughter), — “and how much of it do you think your priest will kape for himself? Not much, I ’m thinking. No indeed. Why should I kape it? What do I want with it ? I have enough to eat, drink, and wear, and what more does a priest want ? I have no ambition for money, — not I; and you know it well. You know that the whole of this money will be spent upon the altar of God ; and we shall spend it with the greatest economy. Not Brussels carpet, of course. That would cost four or five dollars a yard. Good ingrain will do well enough for us at present, and last long enough too; for can’t it be turned ? You know it can. Twenty years from now, when we are all dead and gone, they ’ll be turning and turning and turning it, and holding it up to the light, and saying, ‘ I wonder who laid down this ould carpet ! ’ In all my life, I never saw such an altar as this in a church of this size ” (turning to the altar, and surveying it with an indescribably funny attempt to look contemptuous), — “so mane, so very mane ! I tell you, if I had been here when this altar was made, I ’d have wheeled the man out of church pretty quick.” (These last words were accompanied with the appropriate gesture, expressive of taking the delinquent carpenter by the back of the neck, and propelling him thereby down the aisle.) “ But what shall I say of those who have given nothing to this fair ? Ah ! I tell you, when the decorations are all done, and you come here to mass on Sunday mornings, and see God’s house and the sanctuary where he dwells all adorned as it should be with the gifts of the faithful, and when you think that you gave not one cent towards it, I tell you you'll blush if there’s a blush in you.”

After proceeding in this tone for twenty minutes, during which he laughed heartily himself, and made the people laugh outright, he changed to another topic, which he handled in a style well adapted to accomplish the object intended. He said he had heard that some of the “ hotel girls ” had been swearing and quarrelling a good deal that summer. “ Ah,” he continued, “ I was sorry to hear it ! The idea of ladies swearing! How wrong, how mean, how contemptible, how nasty, how unchristian ! Don’t you suppose that the ladies and gentlemen at the hotel have heard how many Protestants are coming into the bosom of the Catholic Church ? Don’t you suppose they watch you? They know you’re Catholics, and don’t you suppose they ’ll be judging of Catholics by you ? And, besides, who would marry a swearing lady? Tell me that! The most abandoned blackguard that walks the streets wouldn’t marry a girl that he had heard swear, for he knows very well that she’d be a bad mother. If I were a young man, and heard my true love swear, do you think I ’d marry her? Hey? do you think I would? By no manes! And I wish to God I had spoken about this before ; for now the season is almost over, and many of the Protestant people have gone home, and very likely are talking about it now in New York and Boston. You know what they 'll say. They 'll say, 1 If that’s the way Catholic ladies behave, you don’t catch me turning Catholic.’ ”

At the conclusion of his discourse he took up the collection himself, saying, as he left each pew, “ Thank you,” in a strong, hearty tone of voice ; and if any one took a little extra trouble to reach over, or put into the box something more than the usual copper coin, he bowed, and said, “ I thank you very much, madam, —very much indeed.” He was a strange mixture of the father and the ecclesiastic, of the good fellow and the gentleman. In Tipperary, in the Colleen Bawn, in Charles Lever, we are not surprised to find him ; but who would have expected to make his acquaintance in a secluded valley of New England, and to discover that he has the largest congregation in the neighborhood? And O how much better is such a priest than one of the howlingdervish description !

So much for life in a New England town ; for I have left myself no room to speak of the unequalled efficiency of the Yankee town system in time of war. No despot has ever invented a mode of bringing out “the last man and the last dollar” half so simple, cheap, prompt, and certain as this. As soon as a call for troops is flashed over the wires, the officers of each town can ascertain exactly how many men they have to produce ; and they know where the men are, and what the men are, who are most open to an offer. They know what the families of the soldiers require, and those soldiers have an assurance that their families will not suffer in their absence. It was this town system that saved the country in the late war.

Universal liberty may be a dream. Henry Clay’s pleasing fancy of a continent of closely allied Republics settling all differences and difficulties by an occasional Congress on the Isthmus of Darien, wherein the honorable giant from Patagonia would join in harmonious debate with the honorable dwarf from Greenland, may never be realized. But if universal liberty is not a dream, if the whole habitable earth is ever to be occupied by educated, dignified, and virtuous beings, it is probable that those beings will arrange themselves in self-governing communities, similar in magnitude, similar in institutions and laws, to a New England town. It is strange that such people as Yankees are said to be, struggling for life in the wilderness against savage man and savage nature, should have hit upon methods which seem scarcely capable of essential improvement.