Orleans County Monitor

Yankees, as a rule, do not appreciate the advantage and blessings of a home. They are willing to abandon their birthplace, the old homestead, or the new home-built for comfort and convenience-whenever caprice, or promised success elsewhere, calls them away. Hence, they do not cultivate a love for place, and acquire a pride for the prosperity of the farm, neighborhood, or town on which, and in which, they reside. Instead of building up a home or a business where they are now located, they are eagerly looking elsewhere for a situation that shall meet their wants. The result of such instability and uneasiness is, that their business at home is neglected: the cottage that ought to be adorned, the farm that ought to be improved, the business that ought to be enlarged, is allowed to run down.

Those who have migrated from place to place and from state to state, often-times come back into the old neighborhood to spend the remainder of their lives in poverty. Some locations, it is true, are not quite as good as others, but almost any spot in New England will make a comfortable home, if a contented, industrious man locates on it and determines to make it his home. The farmer who plants himself on the old farm or a new one when he begins business for himself, with a determination to make a home of that place, will labor constantly with reference to the future. He will cultivate and improve his lands, build and arrange his buildings, for the future as well as the present; and instead of skinning his lands and patching his buildings, he will so till and so improve, that the farm will constantly increase in value. It may require years to bring the farm up to a good state of cultivation, or to build and complete a set of buildings, but the cost of these things will make them of great value to the farmer, his children, and his wife. The laborer who owns a cottage, as well as the man who owns his wide fields and spacious buildings, will improve and adorn this, if it is to be made a permanent home. What need of convenience, pleasantness, and adornment within or without, when the home is hired or temporary? Some of the happiest people that can be found are those who have come from England or Ireland, and found homes made of rude shanties and little garden patches, but all their own, in America. The day laborer that buys or builds a little home, does more for the comfort and joy of his family than he can possibly do otherwise. They rejoice in having something that they can call their own, and they lie down at night in security and peace. Vermont suffers to-day from the migratory spirit of her inhabitants. Many farms that might have been productive, are run down because they have been abused by disinterested owners, or been let to thriftless husbandmen year after year. The Green Mountain state might blossom like the rose, if her people would honor the state of their nativity by using their energies toward building up and improving their farms and homes. We love Vermont, notwithstanding the cold winters, and believe there are few places in the wide world where the people are more wise, virtuous and happy, than here; and we believe that our condition and prosperity could be improved and greatly increased if Vermonters appreciated the real blessings of their state. When they are convinced that they are as well off here, as they are likely to be elsewhere, they can then go to work and add greatly to their present privileges and present advantages. Vermonters are sometimes ridiculed because they do not push out into the world in quest of a softer climate and a better country, but we notice that our emigrants nearly all return, after a few years of wandering, and settle down contentedly here. There is chance enough here for any surplus energy that is found, and if it can be used in developing Vermont, let that be done, and the mother state will reward her sons for their labor and enterprise.