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INTELLECTUAL FERMENT

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or eaten a course dinner, long before it penetrated to even the "reading set" at Oxford University. The North American Review and, a little later, the Atlantic Monthly, periodicals of fine literary tone, could be seen in isolated farmhouses on Western prairies.

A caricature picturing a gaunt New England housewife on hands and knees to scrub, but pushing before her a stand hold. ing an open copy of Emerson to which her eyes were glued, might have been applied, with no more exaggeration, to show the strenuous struggle for culture in many a modest home in Kansas or Minnesota. The village sewing society eschewed gossip to listen to one of their number reading aloud while the others plied the needle. Each village had its lyceum, for the winter evenings, with literary programs, readings, declamations, and debates - crude and quaint enough, sometimes, but better than "refined vaudeville." Such villages, too, aspired to frequent courses of lectures, with such eastern celebrities

as Holmes and Everett on the program; and often the proceeds of the lectures were used to start a village library.2 Twice, on such lecture tours, Emerson penetrated beyond the Mississippi, greeted in barn-like "halls" by hard-handed men and women, seated on wooden benches, with eager faces agleam with keen intellectual delight.

1 Before 1862, W. D. Howells, then a young newspaper writer in a raw Western town, counted Browning and Thackeray among his favorite authors; but Walter Besant mentions in his Autobiography that these authors were not then known to his set at Cambridge University.

2 In 1859 Edward Everett lectured at St. Cloud, a new, straggling village of a hundred houses, in Minnesota. The one-room schoolhouse in which he spoke was promptly named the Everett School; and receipts from the "entertainment were appropriated for a library which was kept for years in a private home. After the Civil War, a Woman's Aid Society, which had been earning money to send dainties and medicines to sick soldiers, continued its meetings and used its money to enlarge this choice collection of books. There, as a boy, the writer made first acquaintance with Carlyle, Marcus Aurelius, standard histories of that day, such as Prescott's Philip II and Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic, and the novels of Scott, George Eliot, and Thackeray. This experience was typical. The few books, purchased by real book lovers, were not yet buried in a mass of commonplace.

558. The intellectual and moral ferment of the time overflowed in manifold attempts at Utopias set off from ordinary society. New England Transcendentalists tried a coöperative society at Brook Farm (1841), with which Emerson and Hawthorne were connected.1 Robert Owen, who had already attempted a model industrial town in Scotland, founded New Harmony in Indiana, where labor and property were to be in common. Scores of like communities were soon established in different parts of the West; and the old communistic societies of the "Shakers" spread rapidly. Said Emerson, with genial recognition of the humorous side of the upheaval, "Not a man you meet but has a draft of a new community in his pocket."

559. Peculiar among these movements was Mormonism, with its institution of polygamy. Mormonism was founded at Palmyra, New York, in 1829, by Joseph Smith, who claimed to be a prophet and to have discovered the inspired Book of Mormon. Soon the Latter-Day Saints" removed to Ohio; then to Missouri; and, driven thence by popular hatred, to Illinois, where, in 1841, they established at Nauvoo a "Holy City of ten thousand people, industrious and prosperous, ruled by Smith after the fashion of an ancient Hebrew "Judge." Three years later, a mob from surrounding towns broke up the settlement and murdered Smith. Then, under the youthful Brigham Young, the persecuted Mormons sought refuge in Utah, vaguely supposed to be a part of Mexico, but remote from any organized government and sheltered from "civilization " by the desert and the Rockies. Here their industry made the cactus sands to bloom, and they remained in peace until invaded by the rush of gold-seekers to California after '49.

560. More effective were a multitude of movements for social betterment within the existing community. Massachusetts founded the first public hospital for the insane; and Dorothy Dix spent a noble life in spreading such institutions in other States. Special schools for the deaf and the blind were instituted. States began to separate juvenile delinquents from hardened criminals; and for the criminals themselves more rational and wholesome prison life was attempted. Temperance societies

1 Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance satirized the movement, and caricatured some of the participants.

§ 561]

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began in Boston in 1824; and, in 1846, Maine adopted the first State-wide prohibition law. The Abolition movement rose and spread, and soon the agitation against slavery became the chief manifestation of this great wave of moral earnestness. The thirties, too, saw the beginning of a long agitation for Woman's Rights, including coëducation, equality with men in inheriting and owning property, and the franchise. . To these must be added the many reforms urged especially by the labor movement (§ 549).

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The legal position of woman everywhere in America was still regulated by the medieval Common law. An unmarried woman's earnings and 29 property were not hers (any more than a slave's were his), but belonged legally to her father. A married woman's property (unless protected by express legal settlement) was her husband's, and, in many degrading ways, she was herself his chattel. Statute law now began faint. reform of some of these evils.

561. Mechanical invention began now to revolutionize industry and life. From the inauguration of Washington to the War of 1812, patents for new inventions averaged less than eighty a year. From 1812 to 1820, they rose to nearly two hundred a year, and in 1830 the number was 544. Twenty years later, the thousand mark was passed, and in 1860, the number was nearly 5000.

These inventions mostly saved time or tended to make life more comfortable or more attractive. A few cases only can be mentioned from the bewildering mass. Axes, scythes, and other edged tools, formerly imported, were manufactured at home. The McCormick reaper appeared in 1831. This invention, with its improvements, soon multiplied the farmer's efficiency in the harvest field by twenty, and, with the general introduction of threshing machines, made it possible for our people to use the vast grain lands of the Northwest. Planing mills created a new industry in wood. (1835) replaced the one-shot "pistol." rival the ancient fireplace for cooking. vented in England in 1827) were the first improvement on

Colt's "Revolver" Iron stoves began to Friction matches (in

prehistoric methods of making fire. Illuminating gas for city streets improved city morals. In 1838 the English Great Western, with screw propeller and with coal to heat its boilers, established steam navigation across the Atlantic, though the bulk of ocean freight continued long to be carried in American sailing ships. The same year saw the invention of the steam

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HARVESTING IN 1831. McCormick's first successful horse-reaper. The "selfbinder" was a later feature. This photograph, based upon a reconstruction," and the following one are furnished by the International Harvester Company.

hammer and the successful application of anthracite coal to smelting iron. In 1839 a Frenchman, Daguerre, began photography with his "daguerreotypes," and still earlier another French chemist had found how to can foods. In 1842 the

1 Pittsburg was already the center of iron manufactures for the West. Now its neighborhood to both anthracite and iron made it a center of this great industry for the whole country.

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INVENTIONS REVOLUTIONIZE LIFE

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anæsthetic value of ether, an incomparable boon to suffering humanity, was discovered by Dr. Crawford W. Long of Georgia. The magnetic telegraph, invented in 1835, was made effective in 1844. Howe's sewing machine was patented in 1846; the next year saw the first rotary printing press.

Except as otherwise indicated, all these inventions were by Americans. In 1841 America had its full revenge for earlier British disdain, when a member of the English, cabinet declared in parliament, "I apprehend that a majority of the

HARVESTING TO-DAY. A Mogul Kerosene Tractor pulling two McCormick reapers and binders with mechanical shockers. The tractor is managed by the man on the front reaper. Two men take the place of six human beings in the previous cut and do many times as much work.

really new inventions [lately introduced into England] have originated abroad, especially in America."

562. The Railway deserves a fuller account.

Tramways