The daily morning journal and courier. [volume] (New Haven, Conn.) 1894-1907, 1902-12-11
RETURNED new ENGLANDER
HIS NOTES Upon CONDI-
TIONS

After an Absencs of Twenty Years-A
Retaliation of ROIiin Lynde HART.
At present the tide of New England's
younger generation sets cityward.
This movement is quite likely to be
checked to some extent within the next
generation. The city is approaching
the country, and with it's approach
there comes a counteracting influence
to the sense of isolation and to the feel
ing of deprivation of life's fuller enjoy
ment. The extension Of railroads, and
now the more rapid extension of cleo
trio lines, is bringing much of that
which the city offers within the COM
paratively easy reach of the youth
of the country. While this presents
facilities which enable the young men
and young women of the country to be-
come more readily part of that which
appeals to them, it also tends to
bring that other and less known life
into closer Familiarity, and so rObs it Of
no little of its attractiveness and
glamor. This cannot fail to WELD an
influence upon the tendency to migra-
ton. How potent the influence may
become as a restrictive force cannot be
estimated.
Twenty-Five years ago I was COM
mercial traveller, with a route which
covered the major portion of New
England. For the last 20 years have
seen but little of the region in which l
was born and brought up as the
New England phrase has it. Within
recent months I have, to some extent,
renewed my acquaintance with it.
That which impyesses me more than all
else is the growth into villages of places
which knew as hamlets; the growth
of villages into towns; and of towns in
to miniature cities with brick stores,
electric lights, street car lines and
water-Works. I note the enormous in
crease in the number of coZy cottage
homes of recent erection, well painted
and well kept. This obtains not only
1T suburan towns, but in distinctly
rural towns as well. Naturally, this
increase is more evident along the lines
i Of the railways but the number of
New England towns which can be re-
garded as remote from railways is no
very large percentage of the whole.
1lO
channels of contribution. The busy
mills and factories the dairy and the
orchard and the tobacco field, the
tourist, the sportsman and the summer
boarder, have all played their part
among these many channels. Maine,
not so very many years ago, was
pine clad wilderness with two water
way outlets, the Penobscot and the
Kennebec rivers. She produced lumber,
lime and schooners. These industries
still survive, but on greatly lessened
scale. Their place has been filled by
other interests. Even far away
Arrostook county is a producing center
with many a thrifty hamlet and home
in place of the log hut of the early set
i tier and the lumberman. Maine has
her quota of abandoned farms, but the
number of her homes has vastly in
creased, and she never was riched than
she is to-day in homes, in money, in
comforts, or in the general average of
intellectual culture. The same is
equally true of all the other New Eng
land states.
The abandoned farm" is a bugaboo
whose unsightly presence is unduly
emphasized by the newer places which
have grown up around it. Intellectual
ly decadent, New England certainly is
not. Her public schools and her public
libraries stand without a peer in num-
Der and equipment. Such institutions
as Harvard and Yale, Dartmouth and
Bowdoin, Brown, Trinity, Amherst,
. Middlebury, Williams, Smith and
Wellesley continue business at their old
sefa dc
ment that "New England is a water
shed which drains brains into all the
rest of the country" may lack the
comparative emphasis which it con-
+ tanned forty years ago, but New Eng
4 land still produces a sufficient supply
of that article to provide for her own
needs and some of her product in that
line still trickles across her borders.
Socially decadent she Is not. The
standard of daily life, of home comfort,
of hospitality, was never higher than
now. Industrially decadent she is not.
I The proof of this lies in dry statistics
There has been change in industrial
lines Old enterprises have given
place to new interests. The life of the
! farm has changed, but it has changed
: for the better. New England's aban-
doned farms are neither menace to
her prosperity nor sign of decay.
Her area is saturated with three centu-
ries of strenuous life which has sent its
myriad root1ets westward to the shores
Of the Pacific The parent stem may
bear few fruitless branches, but it is
still in full and vigorous growth,-Al-
bert Gardner Robinson in the New
York Independent.