The farmer is endeavouring

   The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself. To get his shoestrings he speculates in herds of cattle. With consummate skill he has set his trap with a hair spring to catch confort and independence, and then, as he turned away, got his own leg into it.This is the reason he is poor; and for a similar reason we are poor in respect to a thousand savage conforts, though surrounded by luxuries.... Granted that the majority are able at last either to own or hire the modern house with all its improvements. While civilization has been improving our houses,it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them.It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings. And if the civilized man's pursuits are no worthier than the savage's, if he is employed the greater part of his life in obtaining gross necessaries and conforts merely, why should he have a better dwelling than the former? But how do the poor minority fare?Perhaps it will be found that just in proportion as some have been placed in outward circumstances above the savage, others have been degraded below him.To know this I should not need to look farther than to the shanties which everywhere border our railroads, that last improvement in civilization; where I see in my daily walks human beings living in sties, and all winter with an open door, for the sake of light, without any visible,often imaginable,wood-pile, and the forms of both old and young are permanently contracted by the long habit of shrinking from cold and misery, and the development of all their limbs and faculties is checked.It certainly is fair to look at that class by whose labor the works which distinguish this generation are accomplished.Such too, to a greater or less extent, is the condition of the operatives of every denomination in England, which is the great workhose of the world, Or I could refer you to I reland, which is marked as one of the white or enlightened spots on the map. Contrast the physical condition of the Irish with that of the North American Indian, or the South Sea Islander, or any other savage race before it was degraded by contact with the civilized man. Yet I have no doubt that people's rulers are as wise as the average of civilized rulzers.Their condition only proves what squalidness may consist with civilization.I hardly need refer now to the laborers in our Southern States who produce the staple exports of this country, and are themselves a staple production of the South.But to confine myself to those who are said to be in moderate circumstances.