conquered by the appetites he set up in the past, and with his soul in
rebellion he yet satisfies the craving in the body. The individualism
in our economic life reacts on the national being, and prevents
concerted action for the general good. We have yet to create harmony of
purpose in our economic life, and to bring together interests long
separated and unmindful of each other, and make them realize that their
interests are identical. It is one of the commonplaces of economics
that urban and rural interests are identical: but in truth the townsman
and the countryman have always acted as if their interests were opposed,
and they know very little of each other. I never like to let these
commonplaces of economics pass my frontiers unless they give the
countersign to the challenge for truth. People declare in the same way
that the interests of labor and capital are identical, and implore them
not to fight with one another. But the truth of that statement seems to
me to depend largely on whether capital owns labor or labor owns
capital. As an abstract proposition it is one of the economic formulae
I would leave instructions at my frontiers to have detained until
further inquiry as to its antecedents. All these statements may be
true, but to make them operative, to give them a dynamic rather than a
static character, we must convince people they are true by close
argument and still more so by realistic illustration.

To bring about a high nobility in the national soul we must make harmony
in its economic life, and the two main currents of economic energy--the
agricultural and urban--must be made to flow so that their action will
not defeat each other. Let us take the farmer first. How ought he to
wish to see life in the towns develop? Should he wish for the triumph of
labor or capital: the success of the co-operative movement, the triumph
of the multiple shop or the private trader, of guilds of workers or
autocrats of industry? Economic desires generally depend on the nature