Oxford Democrat. [volume] (Paris, Me.) 1833-1933, 1903-03-31
A Returned New Englander.
HIS NOTES UPON CONDITIONS AFTER AN
ABSENCE OF TWENTY YEARS.

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 genera
ton. The city is approaching the coun-
try, and with its approach there comes a
counteracting influence TO the sense of
isolation and TO the feeling of deprivation
of life's fuller enjoyment. The extension
of railroads, and now the more rapid ex-
tension of electric lines, is bringing much
of that which the city offers within the
comparatively 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 glamour. This
cannot fail TO WELD an influence upon
the tendency to migration. How potent
the influence may become as restrictive
force cannot be estimated.
Twenty-Five years ago was CONNER
cial traveller, with a route which covered
the major portion of New England. For
the last 90 years | have seen but little of
the region in which | was born and
drought up, as the New England pharse
has it. Within recent months l have,
to some extent, renewed my acquaint-
ance with it. That which impreSses
me more than all else is the growth into
villages of places which knew as ham
let's; the growth of villages into towns;
and of towns into miniature cities with
brick stores, electric lights, street car
lines and water works. | note the enor-
nous increase in the number of coy
cottage homes of recent erection, well
painted and well kept. This obtains
not only in suburban towns, but in dis
tinctly rural towns as we'll. Naturally,
this increase is more evident along the
lines of the railways, but the number OF
New England towns which can be regard
ed as remote from railways is no very large
percentage of the whole.
To this growth there have been many
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 wilder
ness with two waterway outlets, the
Penobscot and the Kennebec rivers. She
produced lumber, lime and schOoners.
These industries still survive, but on a
greatly lessened scale. Their place has
been filled by other interests. Even far
away Aroostook county is a producing
center with many a thrifty hamlet and
home in place of the log hut of the early
settler and the lumberman. Maine has
her quota of abandoned farms, but the
number of her homes has vastly increas-
ed, and she never was richer 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 England states.
The abandoned farm is q bugaboo
whose unsightly presence is unduly en-
phasized by the newer places which have
grown up around it. Intellectually de-
cadent, New England certainly is not.
Her public schools and her public libra
ries stand without peer in number and
equipment. Such institutions as Har-
yard and Yale, Dartmouth and Bowdoin,
Brown, Trinity, Amherst, Middlebury,
Williams, Smith and Wellesley continue
business at their old stands. Oliver
Wendell Holiness comment that New
England is a watershed which drains
brains into all the rest of the country, "
may lack the comparative emphasis
which it contained 40 years ago, but New
England still produces asuficient 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.
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 bet
ter. New England's abandoned farms
are neither a menance TO her prosperity
nor a sign of decay. Her area is satnrat-
ed with three centuries of strenuous life
which has sent its myriad rootlet west
ward to the shores of the Pacific. The
parent stem may bear a few fruitless
branches, but it is still in full and vigor-
Gus growth.-Albert Gardiner Robinson
in New York Independent.