Go to the fields, O city laborers, till your wounds are
healed. Forget the street-cars, the skyscrapers, the slums,
the Marseillaise song.
We proclaim to the broken-hearted, still able to labor, the
glories of the ploughed land. The harvests are wonderful. And
there is a spiritual harvest appearing. A great agricultural
flowering of art and song is destined soon to appear. Where
corn and wheat are growing, men are singing the psalms of
David, not the Marseillaise.
You to whom the universe has become a blast-furnace, a
coke-oven, a cinder-strewn freight-yard, to whom the history
of all ages is a tragedy with the climax now, to whom our
democracy and our flag are but playthings of the
hypocrite,--turn to the soil, turn to the earth, your mother,
and she will comfort you. Rest, be it ever so little, from
your black broodings. Think with the farmer once more, as
your fathers did. Revere with the farmer our centuries-old
civilization, however little it meets the city's trouble.
Revere the rural customs that have their roots in the
immemorial benefits of nature.
With the farmer look again upon the Constitution as something
brought by Providence, prepared for by the ages. Go to
church, the cross-roads church, and say the Lord's Prayer
again. Help them with their temperance crusade. It is a
deeper matter than you think. Listen to the laughter of the
farmer's children. Know that not all the earth is a-weeping.
Know that so long as there is black soil deep on the prairie,
so long as grass will grow on it, we have a vast green haven.
The roots of some of our trees are still in the earth. Our
mountains need not to be moved from their places. Wherever
there is tillable land, there is a budding and blooming of
old-fashioned Americanism, which the farmer is making
splendid for us against the better day.
There is perpetual balm in Gilead, and many city workmen
shall turn to it and be healed. This by faith, and a study of
the signs, we proclaim!