What tendencies may have been induced by the passing of the frontier and the resurgence of a population deprived of its former temptation to expand into new regions; what social changes were implied in the agricultural revolution which compels the daily application of science to the business of farming; what readjustments in relationships were involved in the modification of the Teutonic type with the coming upon the stage of the second and third generations of Germans; how the Germans in turn have reacted to the competition of groups having their origin in other foreign countries, like the Scandinavians, Bohemians, and Poles--all these are questions the answers to which would aid us to determine “where we are and whither we are tending.” But their discussion will have to be postponed to later issues of this magazine. THE YANKEE AND THE TEUTON IN WISCONSIN JOSEPH SCHAFER II. DISTINCTIVE TRAITS AS FARMERS The agricultural traits and peculiarities of the nineteenth century Yankees were the resultant of partly contradictory forces, some of them evolutionary, others devolutionary. In England the period of the Puritan migration to America and the half-century antecedent thereto was a time of vigorous agricultural change marked by many improvements in cultivation and in land management. The agrarian revolution introduced by the transfer of church properties to laymen was accompanied by enclosures and a widespread tendency to shift from an uneconomical crop economy to an agriculture governed by business principles. In this new system the production of farm animals--especially sheep--the fertilization of the soil, rotation of crops, and livestock improvement were main factors. Forces and interests were set in motion at this time which, a century or so later, made farming the concern of many of England’s leading minds, whose wise and persistent experimentation benefited the whole civilized world. The few thousand immigrants to the New England colonies, founders of America’s Yankeedom, were not all farmers. Some were fishermen, some were small tradesmen, others craftsmen; a few were professional men and soldiers. But a goodly proportion were land owners and peasants, and all had a more or less direct knowledge of the principles and processes which governed English agriculture. The influence of habit, always a determining factor in the transfer of civilization from an old land to a new, caused the occasional reproduction in New England of some features of English farming, especially under village conditions. The common field system in Old Salem reflected a disappearing element in English farm life, while the commons of hay, commons of pasture, commons of wood, and commons of mast, with their administrative “hay reeve,” “hog reeve,” “wood reeve,” herdsmen, and shepherds, mark a natural imitating of the ways of parish life at home.