380 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



"sentimental education/' and yet again "classical education" — 

 the vast numbers of public schools in which not only are all 

 branches of learning taught, but the text-books for teaching 

 them supplied at the public expense (we are confining ourselves 

 to the New England States) ; the enormous diffusion of cheap lit- 

 erature, or of good literature at cheap prices ; the great prepon- 

 derance of fiction over other reading matter — all these, they tell 

 us, surely and unerringly tend to depopulate farms and to render 

 farm life distasteful to those who live upon them. The farmer's 

 daughter is unwilling to rise early to milk the cows ; the farmer's 

 son does not care to fodder the cattle or drive them to the plow 

 or to the harvesting. The daughter has read higher things and 

 prefers her piano, and the son has heard of opportunities of amass- 

 ing wealth galore in the cities, and every Sunday newspaper tells 

 him of what others have done and of what, therefore, it is assumed 

 that he can do in amassing equal wealth in their streets. This 

 sort of thing is rehashed until it has become a literature in itself, 

 and need not be more than referred to here. But is this the real 

 reason after all ? There used to be a proposition quite equally 

 relied upon by these very statistical societies (though I have not 

 heard much of it lately) which ought to counterbalance or com- 

 pensate for this tendency of the rural youth to cities. It used to be 

 said, I believe, that the cessation of a certain branch of any given 

 industry released a certain proportion of power, which turned itself 

 to some other ; for example, that the loss by a city like Portland 

 of its India sugar trade, or by New Bedford or by Sag Harbor of 

 its whaling interests, would be no loss to the community at large, 

 because the handlers of sugar or of whales would gravitate to 

 other employments, and so the economical balance of the com- 

 munity be preserved. If this principle still obtained, then — in 

 view of the large creation of entirely new industries within the 

 last ten or twenty years, such as, for example, the electric power 

 and light, the telephone, the typewriter, the clipper of newspapers 

 (the last three of which certainly do not discriminate in favor of 

 the stronger sex ; or, if they discriminate at all, might be said to 

 discriminate against it) — this principle of mutual release ought 

 to be still to the fore ; but somehow or other it is not as famil- 

 iarly quoted now as it was once. I have, for example, heard it 

 gravely argued by a gentleman in New York city, who writes 

 much and well upon economical and politico-economical ques- 

 tions, and who is an enthusiastic free-trader, that, if the doctrine 

 of protection was carried far enough to create new industries in 

 the United States, those industries would require the building of 

 great mills and factories; and that, while those factories were 

 being built, the time of thousands of working people would be on 

 their hands, and that the loss of wages incurred by some thou- 



