INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT. 21 5 



week in the year does not pass that the remains of human 

 beings, below the meridian of life, are not conveyed from 

 the great manufacturing centres to their early homes in 

 the rural districts ; stricken down just as they should be 

 entering on the most useful efforts of their lives. While 

 one after another is guided back to the country settle- 

 ments in the United States, others go to their sorrowing 

 relatives in the Provinces, some to Quebec, others to 

 Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, and not a few to the 

 little Island of the Gulf. Many of these leave behind 

 them children in tender years, to become, perhaps, a 

 burden upon the old grandparents ; or worse, to drift 

 into the slums of the cities, to be lost in vice. Go into a 

 careful analysis of the causes which have tempted the 

 young country people away from their rural homes in 

 Canada, to seek new ones in the Great Republic (a popu- 

 lar subject for discussion), and in the majority of cases 

 it will be found that it has not been from a desire to 

 change their political allegiance, or because of the laws 

 of their country, that they have fled from it, so much as 

 from a desire to change their occupation. The effects of 

 the false politico-economic teachings of the time had 

 reached them, and had rendered them incapable of 

 appreciating the merits of their occupation. From the 

 politician, the manufacturer, and even the college pro- 

 fessor, they were told that an agricultural people could 

 never become great, and this poisoned their minds and 

 unsettled them. They learned from these authorities 

 that it was beneath a people of spirit to cultivate pota- 

 toes, and to tend the dairy, especially with a view of 

 supplying foreign customers with the productions from 

 them ; and they took the most speedy way of casting off 

 such an occupation. 



