This general “handiness” was gained not without a partial loss of such acquired knowledge and skill in agriculture proper as the first immigrants brought from England. Close, careful cultivation was impossible among the stumps and girdled trees of new clearings; the amplitude of natural meadows and the superabundance of “browse” relieved settlers from the sharp necessity of providing artificially for the winter feeding of cattle; the mast of oak trees and the wealth of nuts, supplementing summer “greens,” roots, grass, and wild apples, supplied most of the requisites for finishing off pork. Under these conditions farming even at best was an entirely different thing from what it had been at home. At its worst, it was a crude process, affording a vegetative kind of existence, but nothing more. In fact, farming in the New England states hardly attained the status of a business until the nineteenth century, though in some portions it gave the farmer and his family a generous living and afforded a few luxuries. It made thousands of persons independent proprietors who could not have reached that station at home; it gave the farmers as a class a commanding influence in politics and society; “embattled,” it enabled them to wrest their country’s independence from the awkward hands of a bungling monarchy. In short, it contributed incalculably to their importance as men in history. The indications are, however, that as farmers the fourth generation of _Mayflower_ descendants were decidedly inferior to the original Pilgrims and Puritans.