I can conceive of no greater exaltation for the spirit of man than the
feeling that his race is acting nobly; and that all together are
performing a service, not only to each other, but to humanity and those
who come after them, and that their deeds will be remembered. It may
seem a grotesque juxtaposition of things essentially different in
character, to talk of national idealism and then of farming, but it is
not so. They are inseparable. The national idealism which will not go
out into the fields and deal with the fortunes of the working farmers is
false dealism. Our conception of a civilization must include, nay, must
begin with the life of the humblest, the life of the average man or
manual worker, for if we neglect them we will build in sand. The
neglected classes will wreck our civilization. The pioneers of a new
social order must think first of the average man in field or factory,
and so unite these and so inspire them that the noblest life will be
possible through their companionship. If you will not offer people the
noblest and best they will go in search of it. Unless the countryside
can offer to young men and women some satisfactory food for soul as well
as body, it will fail to attract or hold its population, and they will
go to the already overcrowded towns; and the lessening of rural
production will affect production in the cities and factories, and the
problem of the unemployed will get still keener. The problem is not
only an economic problem. It is a human one. Man does not live by cash
alone, but by every gift of fellowship and brotherly feeling society
offers him. The final urgings of men and women are towards humanity.
Their desires are for the perfecting of their own life, and as Whitman
says, where the best men and women are there the great city stands,
though it is only a village. It is one of the illusions of modern
materialistic thought to suppose that as high a quality of life is not
possible in a village as in a great city, and it ought to be one of the
aims of rural reformers to dissipate this fallacy, and to show that it