ve been wild in his
youth, and now in his old age was become a living representative of the
farmer reduced to a labourer.

This reduction is, however, usually a slow process, and takes two
generations to effect--not two generations of thirty years each, but at
least two successors in a farm.

Perhaps the decline of a farming family began in an accession of
unwonted prosperity. The wheat or the wool went up to a high price, and
the farmer happened to be fortunate and possessed a large quantity of
those materials. Or he had a legacy left him, or in some way or other
made money by good fortune rather than hard work. This elated his heart,
and thinking to rise still higher in life, he took another, or perhaps
two more large farms. But to stock these required more money than he
could produce, and he had to borrow a thousand or so. Then the
difficulty of attending to so large an acreage, much of it distant from
his home, made it impossible to farm in the best and most profitable
manner. By degrees the interest on the loan ate up all the profit on the
new farms. Then he attempted to restore the balance by violent high
farming. He bought manures to an unprecedented extent, invested in
costly machinery--anything to produce a double crop. All this would have
been very well if he had had time to wait till the grass grew; but
meantime the steed starved. He had to relinquish the additional farms,
and confine himself to the original one with a considerable loss both of
money and prestige. He had no energy to rise again; he relapsed into
slow, dawdling ways, perpetually regretting and dwelling on the past,
yet making no effort to retrieve it.

This is a singular and strongly marked characteristic of the
agricultural class, taken generally. They work and live and have their
being in grooves. So long as they can continue in that groove, and go
steadily forward, without much thought or trouble beyond that of
patience and perseverance, all goes well; but if any sudden jolt should
throw them out of this rut, they seem incapable of regaining it. They
say, "I have lost my way; I shall never get it again." They sit down and
regret the past, granting all their errors with the greatest candour;
but the efforts they make to regain their position are feeble in the
extreme.

So our typical unfortunate farmer folds his hands, and in point of fact
slumbers away the rest of his existence, content with the fireside and a
roof over his head, and a