receiving the same, he must before he leaves the room return the same to the moderator of the election. There are the usual necessary provisions in the law in relation to counting the ballots if there are duplicates in the envelope. If any ballot or envelope contains any mark or device so that the same may be identified in such a manner as to indicate who might have cast the same, it shall not be counted, but it must be kept by the moderator, and returned to the Town Clerk in a separate package. All ballots cast in violation of these provisions, or which do not conform to the foregoing regulations, are void and cannot be counted.

Any voter may alter or change his ballot while he is in the secret room by erasing any name therefrom, or by inserting in place of any name, either in writing or by a paster, the name of any other person for any office to be voted for. All persons who violate any provisions of the act, or who fail to perform any duty imposed upon them, may be punished by a fine not exceeding $1,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding five years.

Under the foregoing provisions there is as complete and thorough a protection against intimidation or bribery as under the Australian System. The advantages of both systems are that no one can tell what kind of a ballot is prepared in the secret room or enclosure. Whatever promises may be made before the voter passes into that room may be violated with impunity while he is there. The voter is unattended in that room, and he must pass through that room into that in which the ballot box is located.

The methods of nomination are as simple under the Connecticut law as can be desired. The secrecy, after passing from the preparation room into the ballot room, is better assured under the Connecticut system than under the Australian. In Connecticut, every elector is supposed to be able to read. No illiterate voter is obliged to go to election officers to tell him how his ballot should be prepared, and under the Connecticut system he has no excuse for thus informing any election officer how he desires to vote. Under the Connecticut system there is no opportunity for the loss of a ballot because of defective marking. The Connecticut law cannot be violated with impunity any more easily than the Australian. Neither

the Connecticut nor the Australian system can prevent voters being bribed to stay away from the polls. By collusion with official printers, or with election officers, or by their bribery, frauds may be perpetrated under either system.

The only reported attempt to evade the stringent provisions of the law was at one of the voting precincts in the City of Hartford, where it is said the local moderator ruled that a voter might take an envelope at some other time than when he was entering the secret room or enclosure, and might show some person outside of that room the ballot, which he could then put in the envelope and seal in the presence of such witness. Such an act is a plain violation of the provisions of the 7th and 9th sections of the law. Any ballot so placed in an envelope would be void and should not be counted, and any person performing such an act would be liable to the penalties of the law. If such an evasive trick is attempted at any future election, the next General Assembly will make haste to increase the penalties, and make the provisions of the law so plain that no wayfaring man can possibly err.

English authorities state that the corruption of voters in parliamentary elections in England is not prevented by the Australian ballot system, so much as by the stringent provisions of the Corrupt Practices Act. It will be found in this country that neither the Australian system, nor the Connecticut system alone will prevent corruption unless these acts are supplemented by statutes based upon the principles of the English Corrupt Practices Act. Such a bill was introduced and reported in the Connecticut General Assembly of 1876; but it was defeated. The Criminal Code Commission of Connecticut, of which Mr. William Hamersley is Chairman, and which is now engaged in the preparation of a criminal code, prepared some time ago a Corrupt Practices Act, to be made a part of that code, and it will be presented in due time to the General Assembly of Connecticut.

LYNDE HARRISON.

ARTICLE II.-HOW IT HAS COME ABOUT THAT THE AMERICAN FARMERS AND ESPECIALLY THOSE OF NEW ENGLAND ARE TREATED WITH DISRESPECT BY THE WRITERS IN OUR NEWSPAPERS.

THE "decline" of farming in New England has been discussed in the public press from three points of view-the economic, the political, and the social. In the last number of the NEW ENGLANDER AND YALE REVIEW, I considered the economical aspect, and showed that there is not a decline in actual production, although there is unquestionably great depression. I showed that this depression was not more severe in New England than elsewhere, and was not a local phenomenon, but part of that great agricultural depression that now prevails throughout Christendom. I should have added that the depression in the East has probably reached its lowest limit. The public lands of the West have now been given away, and good homesteads can no longer be supplied gratuitously to unlimited emigration, and no portion of the older States will feel the reaction more quickly or more surely than New England.

As shown in the preceding paper, there has been obviously a great change in the rural population as compared with that of cities, due largely to the migration of the country professional men, merchants, and mechanics to the towns, reducing the density of the population in the rural districts and making it more purely agricultural. Coincident with this change in the composition of the rural population, there has been a more rapid growth of social refinement, of business methods, and of intellectual culture in cities than in the country. This change in the relative progress of city and rural communities has been discussed by the city press as if it was an actual decline in the social status and the intellectual activity of New England farmers as a class, rather than a local phase of that widespread change in the relative progress of city and country communities. The country obviously has not kept up with the cities in these matters, and New England and the Middle States

are probably suffering more in this respect than any other region of the earth.

In other countries with a civilization like ours, the tillers of the soil are steadily rising in the social scale, and are as a whole relatively progressing faster than the city populations. In the region embracing New England and the Middle States, the reverse is true, and the cities have progressed in culture * and political influence very much faster than the country, and this difference of progress looks like a decline in the condition of the farmers. This relative or apparent decline has been greatest in New England, where it has been made much more prominent by being worked up by newspaper writers having pet political theories to advocate or religious prejudices to gratify. The same relative decline has taken place in the Middle States, more particularly in their older and eastern portions, but has not been so zealously written up.

The widespread misapprehension in the popular mind as to the nature of this decline, to which we propose to call attention, is owing largely to the fact that during the last few years there has been a great change among the writers in the city newspapers and among the authors of light fiction in their attitude towards the country population in general and towards farmers in particular. So it has come to be regarded by a large and increasing number of city people that farmers constitute a "class;" and more than that, a socially and intellectually inferior class.

Several causes have contributed to this result, which will be very differently rated as to their relative value according to the education, the place of birth, the wealth, and vocation of the observer.

Some of the causes are economic, some political, some grow out of the new methods of acquiring wealth, some from a changed sentiment incident to popular education in our city schools, but I believe the greatest to be the enormous increase in our foreign population within the last thirty or forty years. Some millions of emigrants from western Europe have come amongst us, bringing with them the sentiments and social prejudices prevailing in the Old World in respect to the tillers

of the soil.

The economic factors in the alleged "decline" have been in part discussed in my previous paper. It was shown that farmers' incomes have greatly decreased relatively to the incomes in most other kinds of business requiring capital, skill, and ability. As matters were, down to within a few years ago, there were no very rich people in the United States, and a relatively smaller proportion than now were living entirely upon their daily or monthly wages. The middle class, considered in respect to wealth, was vastly greater than in any other country, and along with this a relatively greater uniformity in the means of indulging in luxury and display. Therefore, the conditions depending purely upon wealth and upon income were vastly more uniform during the whole previous history of our country than during the last twenty-five years.

Under the stimulus of steam transportation and the enormous broadening of commerce, new lands have been opened up, new methods of cultivation devised, science has introduced new means of fertilization of the soil, and invention of new methods of harvesting and preparing the crops for market, until the old conditions of competition have been entirely changed, and actual production has increased more rapidly than the population has. Hence, although the number of persons to be fed has increased, and people as a whole are better fed, yet the price of agricultural products has greatly fallen, and the relative values of farm land as contrasted with other working capital have also fallen. The economic aspects of the vocation have changed, both as regards the capital employed, the crops produced, and the prices obtained. The capital that was employed in farming twenty-five years ago has not increased as other capital has. Profits have decreased, and that means decreased incomes to farmers, while the incomes of mechanics, and "working men" have doubled or trebled, and men in other vocations have been growing richer. This is an unfortunate condition in its social bearings, in this country, where business success is rated so high as a social factor. The man who makes money rises in the social scale. If he becomes very rich then he is great, and his views on any subject are