To this day in America, even in the regions which have been long settled, one finds nothing like the excellent trimness, the precise and methodical arrangement, of the little farmsteads of the Savoy among which these lectures were written. My memory often went back, last summer, from those tiny unfenced crops laid out like the squares of a chess-board in the valleys, from those rich pastures hanging like green velvet on the steep hillsides, from those carefully tended forests of black firs, from those granges with the little sticks of wood so neatly piled along their sides under the shelter of the overhanging eaves, to the straggling fences, the fallow fields, the unkempt meadows, the denuded slopes, the shaggy underbrush, the tumbled woodpiles, and the general signs of waste and disorder which may be seen in so many farming districts of the United States. I asked myself how I could venture to assure a French audience, in spite of such apparent evidences to the contrary, that the love of order was a strong factor in the American spirit. But then I began to remember that those farms of New England and New York and New Jersey were won only a few generations ago from a trackless and savage wilderness; that the breadth of their acres had naturally tempted the farmer to neglect the less fruitful for the more productive; that Nature herself had put a larger premium upon energy than upon parsimony in these first efforts to utilize her resources; and that, after all, what I wished to describe and prove was not an outward triumph of universal orderliness in material things, but an inward desire of order, the wish to have a common life well arranged and regulated, tranquil and steady. Here I began to see my way more clear. Those farms of eastern America, which would look to a foreigner so rude and ill-kept, have nourished a race of men and women in whom regularity and moral steadiness and consideration of the common welfare have been characteristic traits. Their villages and towns, with few exceptions, are well cared for physically; and socially, to use a phrase which I heard from one of my guides in Maine, they are "as calm as a clock." They have their Village Improvement Societies, their Lyceum Lecture Courses, their Public Libraries, their churches (often more than they need), and their schoolhouses, usually the finest of all their buildings. They have poured into the great cities, year after year, an infusion of strong and pure American blood which has been of the highest value, not only in filling the arteries of industry and trade and the professions with a fresh current of vigorous life, but also in promoting the rapid assimilation of the mass of foreign immigrants. They have sent out a steady flood of westward-moving population which has carried with it the ideals and institutions, the customs and the habits, of common order and social coöperation.