3 88 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tion is stationary or dwindling with greater or less rapidity, ac- 

 cording as the district in question is more or less exclusively 

 rural. Then the percentage of young people and children is 

 much smaller than fifty years ago. The old-fashioned large fami- 

 lies are the rare exception, and the young folks are early drawn 

 away from the old homestead. In my native town the school dis- 

 tricts have been reduced from twenty-one to eleven, and many of 

 these enlarged districts have only a half or fourth the pupils of 

 the original divisions. The real decline of the native stock is 

 greater than the decrease in numbers would indicate, for there is 

 a decided increase in the foreign element, which with all its vir- 

 tues is not qualified to strengthen and perpetuate the old New 

 England type of character and spirit. Nor is this state of things 

 confined to a few obscure places among the mountains, for some 

 of the historic towns founded by the Puritans are undergoing the 

 same process of decline or change of population. Many of the 

 large towns, deprived of the former stream of recruits from the 

 country, are fast changing from Anglo-Saxon to Celtic and from 

 Protestant to Catholic. 



5. In the last thirty years the colleges have been strengthened 

 in endowments and appliances, and are doing a better and wider 

 work than formerly ; the larger towns have excellent high 

 schools, and the well-endowed academies are strong and well at- 

 tended. But, with the rural districts far removed from these ad- 

 vantages, there is no provision for secondary education. The un- 

 graded district school, with its brief school term, is the beginning 

 and the end of local opportunities. The unendowed academies of 

 forty years ago, then filled with young people, are dead and have 

 left no successors. It is true, some young people resort to the 

 high schools and endowed academies, but secondary education 

 here is far less general than in the former time, while many are 

 lost to the college and higher education whom a good local acad- 

 emy of the old type would stimulate to an extended course of 

 study. In one of the most picturesque districts of New Hamp- 

 shire is an endowed academy that thirty-five years ago had an 

 annual attendance of more than four hundred, and sent to college 

 each year thirty boys, to say nothing of a dozen girls as well and 

 widely trained for whom no college opened its doors. The same 

 school has less than one fourth the old number of students and 

 graduates. It is fair to say that the decadence of this school is 

 partly due to the larger advantages offered by better-equipped 

 rivals, but the main cause of decline is the dearth of young people 

 in its natural region of supply, and the diminished interest in 

 higher education. 



6. Many churches have dwindled into insignificance, or have 

 been blotted out altogether, owing to deaths and removals, with no 



