nay, the very existence of society, yet, in almost every country,
politics, economics, and social reform are urban products, and the
countryman gets only the crumbs which fall from the political table. It
seems to be so in Canada and the States even, countries which we in
Europe for long regarded as mainly agricultural. It seems only
yesterday to the imagination that they were colonized, and yet we find
the Minister of Agriculture in Canada announcing a decline in the rural
population in Eastern Canada. As children sprung from the loins of
diseased parents manifest at an early age the same defects in their
constitution, so Canada and the States, though in their national
childhood, seem already threatened by the same disease from which
classic Italy perished, and whose ravages today make Great Britain seem
to the acute diagnoser of political health to be like a fruit--ruddy
without, but eaten away within and rotten at the core. One expects
disease in old age, but not in youth. We expect young countries to sow
their wild oats, to have a few revolutions before they settle down to
national housekeeping; but we are not moved by these troubles--the
result of excessive energy--as we are by symptoms of premature decay.
No nation can be regarded as unhealthy when a virile peasantry,
contented with rural employments, however discontented with other
things, exists on its soil. The disease which has attacked our great
populations here and in America is a discontent with rural life.
Nothing which has been done hitherto seems able to promote content. It
is true, indeed, that science has gone out into the fields, but the
labors of the chemist, the bacteriologist, and the mechanical engineer
are not enough to ensure health. What is required is the art of the
political thinker, the imagination which creates a social order and
adjusts it to human needs. The physician who understands the general
laws of human health is of more importance to us here than the
specialist. The genius of rural life has not yet appeared. We have no