THE FARMERS' SOCIAL OUTLOOK. 223 



there is to be noticed the loss of Puritan character and 

 true American spirit, though in them, in the fullest meas- 

 ure, dwelt these characteristics. And they were teachers 

 to the rest of the nation, because in them rested a posi- 

 tive realization of the fact that it devolved upon them to 

 infuse their spirit into all measures for the political, 

 moral, intellectual, and industrial progress of their coun- 

 try. It was their country, their land, and they esteemed 

 their privileges and their achievements, as became an 

 independent and truly sovereign people. They honored 

 and highly valued the result of honest labor, and of rural 

 labor above all others. The " country squire " could 

 talk politics with lively interest to the best man in the 

 community, and the best man was very likely to be his 

 near neighbor, because the politics of his time were 

 to him of practical significance. He was sensible of 

 a perceptible result in his efforts to influence the fashion- 

 ing of laws and the course of law-makers. They had 

 not reached out, as now, beyond him.' 



' Since my monograph was placed in the hands of its publishers, 

 the following interesting editorial remarks upon an article of Judge 

 Nott's has appeared in the New York Evening Post : " No other 

 such body of cultivators of the soil as the New England colonists 

 were, down to our own day, has ever been seen. No other men who 

 tilled the ground with their own hands have had such an acute and 

 active intelligence, such intense preoccupation %\ith religious and 

 moral problems, such a keen sense of the superior importance of 

 spiritual things, such reverence for learning, such familiarity with 

 and appreciation of literature, and such capacity for government by 

 discussion. Puritanism, as has often been said, missed its mark 

 in England ; but it came as near realizing its ideal as human nature 

 would permit on American soil. No student of politics or sociology 

 will, in all probability, for ages to come, light on an experiment in 

 all respects so interesting and so successful as Massachusetts and 

 Connecticut were and continued to be down to the 4)utbreak of the 



