rush
harrows, straw collars, grapevine harness, and poor shelter for animals
and crops; but were the Virginia methods any better? In these operations
there was apparently a good deal of sudden profit and mushroom
prosperity accompanied by a good deal of debt and insolvency. In this,
too, they were like the Virginians and Carolinians. There seem to have
been also a good many slaves in West Jersey, brought, as in the southern
colonies, to work on the large estates, and this also, no doubt, helped
to foster the aristocratic feeling.

The best days of the Jersey gentlemen farmers came probably when they
could no longer move from tract to tract. They settled down and enjoyed
a very plentiful, if rude, existence on the products of their land,
game, and fish, amid a fine climate--with mosquitoes enough in summer to
act as a counterirritant and prevent stagnation from too much ease and
prosperity. After the manner of colonial times, they wove their own
clothes from the wool of their own sheep and made their own implements,
furniture, and simple machinery.

There are still to be found fascinating traces of this old life in
out-of-the-way parts of southern Jersey. To run upon old houses among
the Jersey pines still stored with Latin classics and old editions of
Shakespeare, Addison, or Samuel Johnson, to come across an old mill
with its machinery, cogwheels, flywheels, and all, made of wood, to find
people who make their own oars, and the handles of their tools from
the materials furnished by their own forest, is now unfortunately a
refreshment of the spirit that is daily becoming rarer.

This condition of material and social self-sufficiency lasted in places
long after the Revolution. It was a curious little aristocracy--a very
faint and faded one, lacking the robustness of the far southern
type, and lacking indeed the real essential of an aristocracy, namely
political power. Moreover, although there were slaves in New Jersey,
there were not enough of them to exalt the Jersey gentlemen farmers into
such self-sufficient lords and masters as the Virginian and Carolinian
planters became.

To search out the remains of this stage of American history, however,
takes one up many pleasant streams flowing out of the forest tract
to the Delaware on one side or to the ocean on the other. This
topographical formation of a central ridge or watershed of forest and
swamp was a repetition of the same formation in the Delaware peninsula,
wh