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THE American press is deeply concerned for the fate of rural New England. It is being rapidly depopulated. Scarcely any part of the civilized world, not even the clays of East Essex and North Lincolnshire, has been so heavily hit by what with doubtful accuracy is termed the "depression of agriculture" as the wintry valleys and stony uplands that have been the cradle of so much that is vigorous in American life. What in England may be What in England may be fairly called depression, since the whole country comes within the region depressed, should, in America, be spoken of simply as a shifting of the centres of production. Under this process the farmers of New England and Old England have been about equal sufferers, with this difference, how ever the Englishman, either in the shape

of owner or occupier, is almost compelled to face the difficulty. Emigration, as an alternative, could only be possible or desirable for a fraction of the strugglers. The New Englander, however, has had infinitely greater facilities and greater temptations for such a migration, and he has yielded to them so generally that the statistics of decline may well cause agitation in the minds of those who are left behind. If the State of Indiana were to develop some grave and unforeseen defect, and half of its people were to deport themselves into Colorado, no one would very much care except the remnant who were compelled to cling to the sinking ship. But the desertion of the old homesteads of New England appeals most strongly to the sentiment of all Eastern Americans, and an

American upon a topic of this kind is the most sentimental of living men.

In Massachusetts and Connecticut, in New Hampshire and Vermont, hundreds of farms that twenty years ago were considered as snug and sound financial properties proportionately to their value as farms in Kent or Essex at that time were, have been actually abandoned. Old abiding places where generations of hardy, God-fearing, intolerant, close-fisted yeomen tilled the soil with profit and content, have returned to the clutch of the forests and thickets from which they were rescued with such toil and pain two centuries ago. The proprietors have gone West, or into the manufacturing towns, and have been unable to find at any price buyers and cultivators for their abandoned acres. It is no question of inaccessibility to railroads and conveniences, for New England is as well supplied with such things as Yorkshire. Indeed, it would seem to be the railroads that have killed the country. The factories that, under Protection, have sprung up throughout the whole NorthEast, have by their high wages drawn away the farmers' families from the agricultural districts, while a perfected railway system supplies these manufacturing centres with Western produce at prices which defy local competition. It is not only that great breadths of old farming lands have been actually abandoned; but capital farms, close to towns and thriving villages, well tilled and presenting every apparent comfort and opportunity to the intelligent working farmer, are unsalable. Details come from all parts of New England, and from all classes of people, that to any one who remembers what a solid and convertible article a good farm in the Eastern States was twenty years ago seem inconceivable. Americans even of that part of the country for whose especial benefit Protection has been maintained are beginning to realize the cost of such maintenance, and to understand that others besides the unfortunate Southern farmers have got to pay the piper. Village schools-and no surer barometer of New England prosperity could be appealed to have sarunk here from a hundred scholars to twentyfive, there from sixty to eighteen, and in some cases collapsed altogether from want of support. Not long ago a Vermonter was met in a London shipping-office taking his ticket for Brisbane. He had first left his

father's farm eighteen years ago, shipped as a seaman, and finally drifted to Austra lia, where he had married and become nat uralized. On this occasion he had been over with his Australian wife to see the old folks in Vermont. His father he found still cultivating the ancestral two hundred acres, but under widely different circumstances. When the son left home in 1871 the farm would have fetched thirty-five dollars an acre any day in the open market, and yielded an abundant liv ing to the family. In 1889, however, the old man was working twice as hard as of yore, and making less than half as much, and had tried in vain to sell at fifteen dollars. His neighbors had nearly all gone West. Their farms had been sold for a song to a great New York shooting club, enclosed in a ring fence, and abandoned to game and to gamekeepers!

Nor is it only from New England tha the cry of depopulation comes; for in a single county in Northern New York four hundred farms are reported as unoccupied. This is worse than anything this country can show. The causes of this decline seem numerous and complex. Emigration to the cheap and fertile lands of the West is, of course, a leading and obvious one, and the Yankee farmer possesses in the highest degree the qualifications for a successful emigrant. Moreover, his exile is generally shared by so many of his old neighbors and kinsfolk that the transition has come easier to him than to most people. The high wages of the manufacturing towns and villages have been another serious drain on the country population; brought, as they have been, almost everywhere within sight of the glare of city life. The very enterprise and intelligence with which the New Englander is generally credited causes him to fall a ready victim to such fascinations. One of the most curious phases of the present condition of rural New England is, that depression and decay are actually more obvious in the neighborhood of flourishing towns than in the remoter districts. It might be supposed that, with such an abundance of consumers close at hand, a ready market would be found for all those smaller and perishable products that to a working farmer, with a working wife, such as is the rule in New England, are generally most profitable. The wholesale supply system, however, even to the extent of the

most perishable articles, such as milk, seems to have been developed in the NorthEastern States to an extent unknown in this country, and the local farmer is left absolutely in the cold, with the further consolation of having to pay double prices for every manufactured article he buys.

Though the winters in New England are long and the land not generally rich, still such drawbacks in a natural state of things would be far more than compensated for by the completeness of its civilization, density of population, and central position. The majority of its farms are not one whit poorer than much of the land that in Great Britain is cheerfully cultivated. They have. upon them houses and buildings, and fences of the most substantial kind, have been generally well farmed, produce good crops of oats, potatoes, and hay, and are furnished with pastures both sweet and fresh and watered by neverfailing streams. It seems incomprehensible that such estates should by the hundred be lying derelict. But the fact, unfortunately, is one beyond dispute.

In anything connected with American agriculture, however, one element should

never be lost sight of, and it counts for much. This is the universal distaste of the young American for farming. He sees in it the one career which contains no future possibilities of fame or fortune, unless, perhaps, by going West. He despises it as drudgery, and shrinks from even the very modified isolation life upon an Eastern farm implies. He turns up his nose at the homespun of his fathers, honestly believes that farming is a vulgar pursuit, and knows no peace till he has secured the broadcloth and the pittance of the city clerk. The very girls will not marry farmers if they can help it, but aim at something more "genteel." What in this New England question seems most of all to disturb many excellent patriots is that the Irish Celt, who has shrunk from all pioneering work, is beginning to creep out of the cities with his politics and his priest, and to usurp the sacred soil of the deacon and the preacher. It is to be feared that, even with desolation as the only alternative, there are many excellent and patriotic Yankees who would prefer it to this; and some have even the audacity to say so.- Saturday Review.

THE INVINCIBLE ARMADA.

[On the 21st of this month a monument on Plymouth Hoe, erected to commemorate the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, will be unveiled by the Duke of Edinburgh. This opportunity reminds us of the spirit of England's sons, which in the days of Queen Elizabeth raised their country's name to a height far beyond even that pre-eminence which it had previously achieved. Protestant England then showed of what stuff she was made. To subdue her people, and crush their religious convictions, Spain, with the sanction of Pope Sixtus V., sent out from her shores a gigantic fleet, such as the modern world had never known, of one hundred and thirty vessels, manned with the flower of her sailors and soldiers. Great was the consternation throughout this country at the tidings of the preparations for this formidable invasion, and men's minds were for a time, and very naturally so, apprehensive as to the result. But we must be free or die" was ever our national creed; and with such men as Lord Howard of Effingham, Lord Seymour, Drake, Hawkins, and Frobisher to lead them, they made ready with the thirty ships of the line-all they could muster-to try conclusions with the insolent invader. From the first, disaster befell the Armada, which had to put back to Lisbon after losing several vessels in a storm. Misled by a false rumor, that the English, on hearing of this disaster, had paid off their ships, in the belief that the invasion had been abandoned, the Spanish admiral sailed for Plymouth, in hopes to destroy the British fleet in the harbor there. But he found a warm reception awaiting him. Lord Howard, with Drake, Hawkins, and Frobisher, put out to meet him, and in a dexterous skirmishing fight captured two of the Spanish galleons, and routed the rest of the fleet. Not content with this, as the Spaniards retreated, the English harassed their rear, and, gathering numbers as they advanced up the Channel, they were strong enough to attack the Spaniards, who had sought shelter in the port of Calais, sending ships loaded with combustibles into their midst. Struck with panic, the Spanish fleet drew off in confusion, leaving twelve of their ships in the hands of the English. What was left of the diminished Armada was pursued by them as far north as Flamborough Head, where it was further shattered by a great storm. Seventeen of the Spanish ships, with 5000 men on board, were subsequently cast away upon the Western Hebrides and the coast of Ireland; and of the whole fleet only fifty-three vessels returned in a pitiable condition to Spain. A coin was struck by Queen Elizabeth, on which the Spanish fleet was rep

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resented as going to wreck in a storm, and upon it was the inscription, “ Aflavit Deus et dissipati sunt,"-words which Schiller has turned to account in the concluding lines of his poem.]

FROM FRIEDRICH SCHILLer.

BY SIR THEODORE MARTIN.

SHE comes, Spain's proud fleet comes! The ocean broad
Moans underneath her, as along she steers;
With dismal clank of chains, with a new God,
And thunders infinite thy coast she nears-
A floating armament of bastions vast,

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Who hath from thee the peerless jewel wrung,

That made thee queen of empires! Hast not thou,
Into revolt by tyrant monarchs stung,

Devised the laws, whose wisdom rules thee now,
In that GREAT CHARTER, which of monarchs makes
Subjects, and makes of simple subjects kings?

In many a stout sea-fight, whose fame awakes
An echo that along the nations rings,
Hast thou not conquered the proud right to be
Supreme, where'er thy navies sweep the sea?
To what dost owe this right? Blush, you that dwell
In yon fair land! To what but this alone-
Thy spirit, that no craven hour has known;
Thy sword, that served this dauntless spirit well?

Unhappy land! On these Colossi look,

That belch from myriad throats death-dealing flame
Look, and divine the downfall of thy fame!
The world mourns for thee of thy strength forsook,
And every free man's heart for thee is sore,
And all good souls that love the right deplore,
With pity wrung, thy downfall and thy shame!

God, the Almighty, from on high looked down,
Saw thy foe's haughty lion banners wave,
Saw gape for thee a sure and ruthless grave;
66 Shall, then, " He said, "my Albion be o'erthrown
My brood of heroes be discomfited?

The one last bulwark 'gainst oppression be Razed to the dust, and trembling Europe see The strong arm paralyzed, which tyrants dread? Never shall Freedom's Paradise," He cried, "The shield of human worth, be left forlorn !'' God, the Almighty, blew, and far and wide. The Armada drifted, by wild tempests torn!

-Blackwood's Magazine.

PROGRESS AND STAGNATION.

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LORD DERBY, in his speech at the Liverpool School of Science, was not, in our opinion, as happy as usual in his diagnosis of the conditions under which mankind are moving forward in their conquest of the world of matter. "The general experience of the world hitherto," said Lord Derby, "has been that brilliant but brief epochs of advance have been followed by long intervals of stagnation, and sometimes even of retrogression. Retrogression, he went on to say, is not likely, but "stagnation is quite possible." To this view we must oppose a direct negative. We do not believe there is any likelihood of stagnation either in the abstract, or as regards the practical application of knowledge to the arts and industries of life. Lord Derby's conclusion is based upon a false analogy. We admit that in the past there have been recurring periods of stagnation and activity, but we deny that this must be expected to be the rule of the future. And for this very good reason,the conditions are entirely different.

If we look at the history of the world, we shall see that till the beginning of the eighteenth century, the secret of progress, by which knowledge is not merely kept alive, but made to germinate, never belonged to more than a strictly limited number of people. The Egyptians and the Phonicians possessed it once, but it soon died out in them, the soil being, as it were, exhausted by the enormous crop at first produced. The seeds of progress planted in the Far East proved also incapable of development. When, however, they were transplanted to Greece, they became at once vitalized, and spread thence throughout Southern Europe and Western Asia, gathering vigor in the process. Though the Hebrews gave the civilized world its religion, it was from Greece alone that material progress came. Rome learned the lesson of civilization from Hel

las, and when the barbarians and internal corruption had destroyed the Roman power, the Greek spirit-made living again by that strangest of human movements which we call the Renaissance-once more awakened men's minds to the sense that it was their business to make themselves truly masters of the earth on which they are placed. But throughout these stages of advance the communities in which the seed of progress were grown were small in size. The Greeks, who thought and studied, were a microscopic people, and the true. Romans that is, those capable of culture -were hardly more numerous. Again, even after Italy had spread the new learning to France, Spain, Germany, and England, only a comparatively few people were in the possession of the fruits of knowledge. Not until the end of the seventeenth century, when we may estimate that there were something like ten million educated persons in existence, had the area of cultivation become large enough to prevent recurrent periods of stagnation. Up till then, there had only been, as it were, a single acre fit for tillage, and, naturally enough, it could not be made to produce a good yield every generation. Now, however, it is possible to have something like a rotation of crops, and this provides an effective preservative against periods of stagnation. Instead of ten millions of educated persons, we have, including America, nearly a hundred millions possessed of the machinery of thought, and these one hundred millions are scattered over the whole face of the globe-in America, Africa, and Australia, as well as in Europe and under a thousand different conditions, social, political, and climatic. But the result of having ten or twelve separate types of civilization, all belonging to the races which feel the impulse toward progress, is greatly to stimulate the aggregate intellect of mankind. For instance,

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