[5] 



ping. It is perhaps to this mistake, that we owe the discovery of 

 America, and of the sea-route to India ; for, failing to make their 

 living, much less their fortunes, at home, the enterprising part of the 

 population sought them in the discovery and conquest of distant lands. 



HOW WE REPEAT HISTORY. 



And our own population is once more repeating history, under the 

 influence of the same causes. Armed with better implements of tillage, 

 it takes them but a short time to &quot; tire&quot; the soil first taken into culti 

 vation; which is then turned out, while the fence is transferred to 

 another tract, newly cleared. This in its turn is exhausted by contin 

 uous cropping, year after year, with the same cotton and corn. By 

 this time, probably, our backwoodsman finds the neighbors getting too 

 close to him for comfort, and his land and &quot;improvements&quot; are for 

 sale at whatever price he can get for them ; and the next winter finds 

 him on his way to Texas or the territories where, in time, he will re 

 peat the same cycle of operations. 



It is to the roving propensities of these hardy pioneers, that we owe 

 the rapid development of the Far West, to whose conquest they are 

 steadily advancing. But we have long passed this stage of develop 

 ment, and it is high time fur us to be looking forward to a state of 

 things that can endure permanently. 



HOME IMPROVEMENTS. 



There is but little incentive to the improvement of our homes, so long 

 as there always lurks in the back-ground the probability of abandoning 

 them before long, or selling them at a mere fraction of their value. So 

 long as this feeling prevails, only what is most absolutely needful for 

 the moment, or the near future, and will bring ready cash in the event 

 of a sale, will be looked to by the settler. Thus is destroyed all home 

 feeling all tendency to the establishment of a home ; that home which 

 is so powerful in its influence for good or evil on the young. 



So long as our children learn from us to regard our homes merely as 

 the Indian or Arab does his temporary camping-ground as a thing to 

 be abandoned so soon as we have succeeded in stripping it of its first 

 flush of fertility, by a rapid process of exhaustion by injudicious crop 

 ping, without even rest or rotation : so long will they fail to develop in 

 any high degree those social qualities which distinguish the peaceful 

 and civilized tiller of the soil from the nomad. There is in the very 

 plan of existence I have referred to, a degree of selfishness and reck- 



