1882.] HOME MANUFACTURES. 193 



his corn in growing weather. Though dweUing in the midst of 

 pastoral quiet, his blood is stirred by the din of booming business 

 abroad, in the air. The kiting of fancy stocks, even, is as pleas- 

 ant to him as the rustling of corn leaves in the summer wind, if 

 he has never known the bottom to drop from under the finest 

 speculations, or crops to fail by the ground refusing to carry out 

 the first sappy promise of the season. 



Aged men will remember, however, when home industry and 

 home manufactures had a different signification ; when their own 

 door-sills and hearth-stones were the headquarters of business; 

 when the shop or mill was an adjunct of the farm ; when every 

 kitchen, or the spare room was a domestic factory, devoted to fur- 

 nishing the wants of the household. Then every farm-house was 

 a "kindergarten" school, a nursery of industrial genius and do- 

 mestic art. Then boys learned the whole of a trade, with the use 

 of tools they might easily own. Then girls were familiar with the 

 construction of textile fabrics — linen, wool, cotton, and silk, from 

 their earliest recollection. Then we had home manufactures in 

 the strictest sense, for every farmer's home was a manufactory. 



How that state of things has been all but swept away from New 

 England, by education, fashion, law, custom, and accident, many 

 middle-aged people know by actual experience, and many young 

 ones by credible hearsay. In some localities the new generation of 

 workers is as foreign to the old Yankee civilization as if it had 

 been transplanted from the old world, and is less like the best 

 Yankee type than that now immigrating from certain northern 

 parts of Europe. 



Instead of noiurishing those old hives of industry, many things, 

 have tended to weaken and destroy them. Where one after an- 

 other, the children were tempted away, and famihes were broken 

 up, what else could the old people of the ancient farm do but die, 

 or how could the old sciences, crafts and arts of life by which they 

 lived so well do but perish with them ? Another Wendell Phillips 

 might make a long list of the arts that are lost to the Yankee 

 farm. So popular has been recently, and perhaps still is the no- 

 tion of an extreme division of labor that many see no connection 

 between agriculture and mechanics. Farm life is no longer con- 

 sidered in certain circles the life of universal intellect, but the 

 merest drudgery of digging the earth. Over and over again has the 

 present speaker been called to account by the rnen of his time for 

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