OUR HOMES. 53 



the habits of the people and their business pursuits will be found. 

 The line of forty degrees mean tenjperature is near Quebec, and 

 the line of seventy degrees crosses Florida. Without tracing the 

 social organization of British America north of the isotherm of 

 40°, or that of the Southern States, it is sufficient that we 

 give our attention to the central portion of this belt, embracing 

 the Eastern, Middle and Western States, and westward to the 

 Pacific. 



Here the industry of the people is methodical, their habits prov- 

 ident, ever ready to adopt and improve upon the practical arts of 

 life. Such is the spirit manifested in accumulated wealth, in 

 inventive capacity, in labor saving machinery, and in associated 

 capital to carry out the most colossal schemes. This belt receives 

 the bulk of immigration from the Old World, which now counts a 

 third of a million each year. The climate and soil of this portion 

 of America is very similar to the region of the Black Sea, where 

 it is supposed the Caucasion race had its origin. If that region 

 could produce a race with moral feelings and intellectual powers, 

 within a physical structure of beauty and perfection, superior to 

 that of any other spot on earth, surely here that superior specimen 

 of manhood ought to thrive and maintain unimpaired his original 

 organization. 



When the crowded" state of Europe projected its surplus of 

 people upon this continent, some ti'ifling circumstances directed 

 the Celtic* branch of the Caucasian family to the southward, which 

 left this rugged belt, a century later, open to the Teutonic branch 

 of the same family — the only people possessing the qualities equal 

 to the task of changing so vast a forest into fruitful fields. 



Nowhere else in the temperate zone has there existed, in the 

 historic period, so extensive and dense a forest as occupied this 

 country from Maine to Florida, and westward to the , land of 

 prairies. And probably nowhere else, in a period of two centu- 

 ries, has man accomplished a task in one kind of labor, so vast in 

 its magnitude, so important and far-reaching in its effects, and 

 bearing with such directness and force upon the destinies of civil- 

 ized man, as the removal of these forests. The task may now be 

 considered as accomplished. The great obstacle that our fathers 

 encountered is removed. The existing slender remnant certainly 

 is no clog to the nation's prosperity. 



The young women of to-day can gain but a faint idea of the 



* One writer on ethnology gives this " Kelt," •' Kelts." 



