of the New England farmer to adapt himself thereto.1 The most significant because the most far-reaching feature of that environment was the lack of a market. The problem that confronted the farmer was to get a living for himself and his family, and to get as good a living as he could with the least expenditure of labor. If he had been able to devote all his attention to raising some particular product, with the proceeds of whose sale he could have purchased the services of specialized artisans and goods from abroad, he undoubtedly would have preferred to do so. It would have tremendously increased his efficiency in production, and would have lightened the labors of all the members of his family. But the lack of a market was an insuperable obstacle to specialization and consequently the family group was forced to rely upon itself and upon irregular exchange with other neighboring groups for the necessaries of existence, and to do without, in large measure, the comforts and luxuries.

Commodities Bought and Sold by a Minister-Farmer.

There is not sufficient evidence to warrant even an approximate numerical estimate of the amount of produce which the farmer did actually sell and of the commodities which he received in exchange. Occasionally, however, we come across an account book kept by an inhabitant of one of these inland towns, a farmer, a blacksmith, or a minister, which furnishes a concrete illustration of the small amount of buying and selling which took place. Such an account book is that of the Rev. Medad Rogers, the minister of New Fairfield, Connecticut, a small town on the western boundary of the state. He had

1It may be objected that the tendency to invent is an instinctive activity; that there is, psychologically speaking, an "impulse to contrivance." If this is true, inventive ingenuity must be a general human endowment, not confined to any particular nation or race. But the degree of the manifestation of this "impulse," of its successful realization, its embodiment in practical appliances among any particular people at a given period in their history, must, it seems to me, be largely dependent on the conditions of their economic environment. In the inland towns of New England there was a far greater necessity for the development of this "impulse" than in other less self-sufficient communities. Where, on the small farm, a single family had to devise means to produce the most varied articles for its own consumption, there the opportunities for the application of inventiveness and ingenuity were most numerous, and the advantages to be gained from the use of such talents were most apparent. A consideration of economic and psychological aspects of inventiveness may be found in Professor Taussig's "Inventors and Moneymakers." New York. 1915. Chapter I.

2 The population was 742 in 1810. The nearest outlet to a market was the Hudson River, from 20 to 25 miles distant.

the use of a farm of 100 acres and in addition a salary of $100, part of which was, as the accounts show, paid in kind. The accounts extend from 1784 to 1822, but the years in which they were most carefully kept are 1792 and 1793. In the one year and nine months from February 14, 1792, to November 13, 1793, his total purchases amounted to £23, 10 shillings and 11 pence. The items are as follows:

The entries of goods purchased in other years show the same predominance of necessary commodities which could not be produced on the farm. Chief among these were iron, of which in one year he bought 81 pounds besides a bundle of nail rods, and salt, with occassional purchases of molasses and rum. Other entries show purchases of 50 bricks, a pork barrel, six cider barrels, a broadcloth coat and a pair of shoes. The coat and the pencilled tea dishes were refinements of life which probably were considered necessary to the minister's social position and set him apart from the bulk of his parishioners.

The entries of sales are far less numerous. The chief items are dairy products. A rather astonishing sale of 451 pounds of cheese is among them. It went to the local storekeeper and was to be paid for half in cash and half in merchandise. All the other sales were small, such as two and one-half yards of tow cloth, seven pounds of flax, three pounds of butter, a hind quarter of beef and a barrel of cider.2

1 A sort of cloth.

2 The account book of the Rev. Mr. Rogers is preserved in the library of the New Haven County Historical Society, New Haven, Conn. A small pamphlet entitled Sundry Prices taken from Ye Account Book of Thomas Hazard, published at the Washington County (Rhode Island) Agricultural Fair Grounds, 1892, contains information of the same sort but for a somewhat earlier date. Hazard was a farmer of South Kingston, Rhode Island.

The Result of Self-sufficient Economy was a Low Standard of Living. The effect of this self-sufficiency in family and in village life was a low degree of efficiency in the production of wealth in both these economic units. The lack of a market made specialization impossible, there was practically no well defined division of labor except that existing between the sexes. Hence the gains from the adaptation of individual talents to especial tasks, and from the acquisition of skill through continuous repetition of identical movements or processes were almost entirely absent. The farmer who must also be his own tool-maker, carpenter, wheelwright, mason and general handy man could not hope to acquire any great efficiency in agriculture. He had no time to devote to careful experiments in the culture of crops or the breeding of stock, or even to read the books in which the results of scientific investigation were even then recorded. On the other hand, the mason, carpenter, doctor or lawyer who had to interrupt the pursuit of his especial avocation in order to procure food and clothing for himself and his family by means of agriculture, could not hope to develop any great degree of efficiency as an artisan or as a professional man. The result was that the bulk of the population of New England was at this time on what we should now call a low standard of living, and even this standard was supported only by arduous and unremitting toil. One large-minded observer has said: "No mode of life was ever more expensive; it was life at the expense of labor too stringent to allow the highest culture and the most proper enjoyment. Even the dress of it was more expensive than we shall ever see again.””1 The raw materials for food, clothing and shelter were at hand in abundance, but in working up these materials into consumable commodities, the people of those days were at a very great disadvantage. Only when we compare the clumsy and ineffective apparatus with which they worked, such as the old-fashioned Dutch oven and the open fireplace, the spinning wheel and the handloom, with the modern cooking appliances and the power-driven spinning frames and looms, can we appreciate to some extent how "expensive" their life really was.

The Contrary Opinion Held by Travelers.

How, then, can we explain the general impression of comfort and ease in getting a living which seems to have been made upon contemporary observers? Numerous passages might be cited from the travelers who passed through New England from the close of the

' Bushnell, Horace. The Age of Homespun, p. 393.

Revolution up to 1810, praising the beauty and ease of the life of the rural population. A quotation from Dwight is typical. In a chapter on the Mode of Living of New Englanders, he says: "The means of comfortable living are in New England so abundant, and so easily obtained as to be within the reach of every man who has health, industry, common honesty, and common sense. In another passage he uses such phrases as "comfortable subsistence," "universally easy circumstances," and "universal prosperity," in describing the life observed in his travels. Surely such expressions do not describe an especially arduous existence; far more do they remind us of the descriptions of that land flowing with milk and honey, the Promised Land of the ancient Hebrews. The apparent lack of agreement between such opinions and the conditions which we have described in this chapter may be explained by a number of considerations. In the first place, we must remember that the standards of measurement used by the writers of that time were not those of today. When they said that living in New England at that time was easy or comfortable, they did not mean absolutely so, but in comparison with conditions of life in some other country, or in New England at some former time. The conditions with which they were most familiar and which they undoubtedly used as a standard of comparison were those of frontier life in this country and of the common people of Europe in the eighteenth century.3 Judged by either of these standards, life was easy and comfortable; judged by our standards, however, it was far different.

Then, again, we must take into account the fondness of all literary travelers, and President Dwight was no exception, for sweeping generalizations and large, well-sounding, mouth-filling phrases. For the economic historian a few bits of specific information are worth far more as evidence and should be given credence when they are in conflict with the former. Considerable of this specific evidence has been given in previous sections of this chapter. Even if, however,

1 Travels, IV. 341.

2 Ibid., I. xv.

3 As a matter of fact, we find these comparisons specifically made. See Dwight, Travels, II. 254, and American Husbandry, I. 70.

See supra pp. 355-365. Such a seemingly unimportant point as the use or lack of shoes and stockings by country people has significance. There is abundant evidence that they did not feel they could afford these articles except as protection against the cold and for especial occasions, such as the Sunday religious services. See Wansey, Journal, p. 71; Harriott, Struggles through Life, II. 54; Larned, History of Windham, II. 388-389; New Hampshire Historical Society Collections. 10 vols. 1824-1893. Vol. V. (1837), pp. 226–227.

their generalizations were carefully drawn from all the evidence presented, we must inquire whether the conditions observed were typical of those prevailing over New England as a whole, or whether the observations were limited to some particularly favored regions. As a matter of fact, we know that but very few of the travelers through New England left the beaten track of the stage-coach routes from New York to Boston. They came up to New Haven along the shores of the Sound. There they had a choice of routes; they either continued along the shore to Newport and Providence, and thence across Bristol, Plymouth or Suffolk Counties to Boston, or branching off to the northeast to Hartford and then following the Connecticut Valley up to Springfield, they turned due east and reached Boston by way of Worcester. Except for the stretch between Springfield and Worcester, both of these routes passed through towns which were favored by exceptional opportunities for trade and often, as, for instance, the towns in the Connecticut Valley, by especially fertile soil as well. It is no wonder that travelers' conclusions, based on this sort of selected evidence, were so favorable.

Wealth was Equally Distributed.

Perhaps another explanation of the optimistic strain, so habitual in travelers' descriptions of economic conditions prevailing in New England at this time, is that they mistook equality in the distribution of wealth for ease in production. That the two ideas were closely connected in their minds is evident. Lambert, for instance, says of the inhabitants of the central part of Connecticut: "The generality of the people live in easy independent circumstances; and upon that footing of equality which is best calculated to promote virtue and happiness among society." Of the inhabitants of Hampshire County, Massachusetts, Dwight says: "They are also, as a body, industrious and thriving, and possess that middle state of property, which so long, and so often, has been termed golden; Few are poor, and few are rich. "2 In another place the same author remarks: "Great wealth, that is, what Europeans consider as great wealth, is not often found in these countries. But poverty is almost unknown. "3

1 Travels, II. 304.

2 Travels, II. 254.

Ibid. I. xv.