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Farming tools and methods had improved little in four thousand years. The American farmer with strenuous toil Methods of scratched the soil with a clumsy wooden homemade farming bull plow. He had no other machines for horses to draw, except a rude harrow and a cart. He sowed his grain by hand, cut it with the sickle of primitive times, and threshed it out on the barn floor with the flail - older than history if he did not tread it out by cattle, as the ancient

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FARM TOOLS IN 1800. The only farm "machine" not shown is the wagon.

Egyptians did. The first threshing machine had been invented in 1785, but it had not yet come into use. cradle-scythe

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a hand tool, but a vast improvement over the old sickle was patented in 1803. The first improvements on the plow date from experiments on different shapes of mold boards by Thomas Jefferson. Soon after 1800 appeared the cast-iron wheeled plow. This was soon to work a revolution-permitting deeper and more rapid tillage; but for some years farmers refused to use it, asserting that

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the iron "poisoned" the ground. Drills, seeders, mowers, reapers, binders, were still in the future.

In the cities a small class of merchants imitated in a quiet way the luxury of the corresponding class in England, — with spacious homes, silver-laden tables, and, on occa- Home life sion, crimson-velvet attire. The great planters of and wages the South, too, lived in open-handed wastefulness, though with little real comfort. Otherwise American society was simple and frugal, with a standard of living far below that

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of to-day. Necessities of life cost more (so far as they were not produced in the home), and wages were lower. Hodcarrier and skilled mason received about half the wage (in purchasing value) paid for corresponding labor to-day and for a labor day lasting from sunrise to sunset. (These wages were fifty per cent better than before the Revolution, - so that John Jay, high-minded gentleman that he was, complains bitterly about the "exorbitant" wages demanded by artisans much as John Winthrop did in 1632 or many a like gentleman of to-day.) The unskilled laborers who toiled on the public buildings and streets of Washington from 1793 to 1800 received seventy dollars a year "and

found" — which did not include clothing. And the income of the professional classes was insignificant by later standards. John Marshall's practice, when he was at the head of the Virginia bar, brought him about $5000; but this was an unusually large amount. Says Henry Adams (I, 21):

"Many a country clergyman, eminent for piety and even for hospitality, brought up a family and laid aside some savings on a salary of five hundred dollars a year. President Dwight [of Yale] eulogizing the life of Abijah Weld, pastor of Attleborough, declared that on a salary of $250 Mr. Weld brought up eleven children, besides keeping a hospitable house and maintaining charity to the poor."

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Simplicity and

Such ministers eked out their salaries by tilling small farms with their own hands. The homes of farmers and mechanics found clean sand a substitute for carpets, and pewter or wooden dishes sufficient for tableware. Their houses had no linen on the table, nor prints on the wall, nor many books, nor any periodicals, unless perhaps a small weekly paper. No woman had ever cooked by a stove. Household lights were dim, ill-smellfrugality ing candles, molded in the home, or smoky wicks in whale-oil lamps. If a householder let his fire "go out,” he borrowed live coals from a neighbor or struck sparks into tinder with flint and steel. If man or child had to have an arm amputated, or broken bones set, the pain had to be borne without the merciful aid of anesthetics. The village shop made and sold shoes and hats. All the other clothing of the ordinary family was homemade, and from homespun cloth. The awkward shapes of coat and trousers that resulted from such tailoring long remained marked features in Yankee caricature. And says Professor McMaster, — “Many a well-to-do father of a family of to-day expends each year on coats and frocks and finery a sum sufficient a hundred years ago to have defrayed the public expenses of a flourishing village, schoolmaster, constable, and highways included." Farmer, mechanic, and "storekeeper" all had plain food in abundance, but in little variety. Breakfast, "dinner," and "supper" saw much the same combinations of salt pork,

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salt fish, potatoes and turnips, rye bread, and dried apples, with fresh meat for the town mechanic perhaps once a week. Among vegetables not yet known were cauliflower, sweet corn, lettuce, cantaloupes, rhubarb, and tomatoes; while tropical fruits, like oranges and bananas, were the rare luxuries of the rich. Even the rich could not have ice in summer. In all externals, life was to change more in the next hundred years than it had changed in the past thousand. Political standards were low, as we have seen. Says Professor McMaster very truly (With the Fathers, 71): "In all the frauds and tricks that go to make up "Practical the worst form of 'practical politics' - the men politics" who founded our State and National governments were always our equals and often our masters." To be sure there was less bribery than in more recent times. The great corporations, railways, municipal lighting companies, and so on, — which, in their scramble for special privileges, were to become the chief source of corrupting later legislatures and city councils, had not yet appeared. Public servants had infinitely less temptation to betray their trust for private gain than now; but public opinion as to the crime was far less sensitive than to-day.

For private life, drunkenness was the American vicewith victims in all classes and in almost every family. The diet created a universal craving for strong Strong drink drink. Foreigners complained, too, of a lack of cleanliness, and were shocked by the brutal fights at public gatherings, with biting off of ears and gouging out of eyes as commonplace accompaniments. Likewise, they found American society coarse and immodest in conversation (like English society of Fielding's day, two generations earlier), but not immoral in conduct.

As everywhere else in the world, barbarous legal punishments and loathsome jail life still flourished. The insane were caged, like wild beasts, in dungeons underneath the ordinary prisons; and debt brought more men to prison than any crime.

America was justly famous for its political writings in con

Dearth of literature and art

nection with the Revolution and the Constitution. Otherwise, after the death of Franklin, the country had had no man of letters; and it had little desire for literature. Painting reached a high point with Copley, Stuart, and Benjamin West; but these American artists could not earn a mechanic's living at home, and were forced to seek patronage in England. New England had developed her remarkable system of private endowed academies, for a few bright and energetic boys, as fitting schools for college; but the Boston Latin School was almost the only survivor of the Puritan attempt at public “grammar schools." Several more colleges had been organized toward 1800, but the instruction was barren, and attendance was meager. Harvard (page 315) had a faculty of a president, three professors, and four tutors. The elementary schools, even in New England, had decayed, commonly, into a two-months badly taught term in winter, for boys, and a like term, worse taught, in summer, for girls.

In the South, North Carolina and Georgia were trying, rather feebly, to redeem the pledges of their democratic constitutions (page 222). North Carolina had established fourteen academies, supported by land grants and State lotteries; and Georgia set aside large amounts of wild land and of confiscated Loyalist property to support schools and academies. That State also planned a noble "university"

which was to comprise all the public schools of all grades. Distinct instruction in law and medicine was beginning in two or three of the larger colleges; but, for many years to come, most young men who wished to become lawyers or doctors prepared themselves mainly by studying in the office of an old practitioner. Most colleges offered training in theology.

Hopeful conditions

Three hopeful conditions in 1800, not yet touched upon, explain in large measure the wonderful progress of the American people in the century that followed. These were the abundance of free land, the intellectual activity among even the agricultural classes; and the peculiar American talent for mechanical invention.

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