A BURDEN OF FARMERS
One interested hour was spent in the office of a captain of industry who
attended to urgent work while I read a morning paper and awaited his
leisure. As the nature of his business was largely Greek to me I could
be allowed to overhear; but I was really more interested in the methods
than in the matter of his transactions. The pressure of a button would
bring an office boy, a secretary, or a salesman to his side, according
to the needs of the moment. While he was going through his mail
telegrams were delivered to him and the telephone jingled at his elbow.
He dictated letters, talked over the telephone, and answered
telegrams--even cablegrams--without leaving his desk. He not only talked
to other business men in the city, but answered long-distance calls from
other cities and ordered long-distance calls. If his activities could
be traced in red lines on a map, they would resemble the charts of the
nervous system I saw a few days ago when going through an Institute of
Anatomy. His office was a ganglion of the modern business organism.
Listening idly to the multitude of orders that were issued I noticed
presently that something was wrong. Though orders were placed and
information received as through a sensitive system of nerves, the orders
were being held up. There were outlaw strikes on the railways--and
freight was not being moved. Stevedore unions were not only refusing to
handle certain products of the company because they were packed in bags
and were too dusty and messy for highly paid, well-dressed stevedores to
handle, but they refused to let the employees of the company handle the
stuff because they were not members of the union. That sounds absurdly
unreasonable, but it is a recorded fact.
Keeping up the simile of business as a living organism, I think this
would be regarded as symptomatic of a pathological condition of the
circulatory system--to be technical, it might be described as
arterio-sclerosis, or hardening of the arteries. A very deadly disease,
and if the cities are beginning to suffer from it, the outlook is
serious.
Now let us essay a burden of great cities.
It would be a safe thing to prophesy the downfall of New York, Boston,
Philadelphia--of all the capitals of the world. Isaiah and the old
prophets were discreet in prophesying against cities, for given enough
time their prophecies were bound to be fulfilled.
"Of Ur and Erech and Accad who shall tell?
And Calneh in the land of Shinar? Time
Hath made them but the substance of a rhyme."
To continue borrowing from Archibald Lampman, where now are
"Memphis and Shushan, Carthage, Meroë"?
They have passed and are merely
"A sound of ancientness and majesty."
The list of dead cities that were once the capitals of empires is as
long as the dusty tale of archæology. All have gone down and all must
go. As it would not be considered sporting to prophesy a sure thing we
shall leave the cities to their inevitable destiny. If one cared to
examine into the matter it would be found that a day of wrath is
approaching for them, and if there be a sure foundation for the law of
the acceleration of civilization which has been announced recently the
day is not far off. Indeed, it might be shown that all civilization is
rapidly approaching a precipice, but every one is hopeful that Dr.
Einstein or some equally profound philosopher will trammel the law of
gravity so that we shall fall over the precipice slowly and land softly.
But enough of cities. The urgent need of to-day is for some one to
prophesy against the farmers. The ultimate fate of civilization rests
with them--and they are bowing down to the old gods of politics and
power.
Let us consider their case.
In the modern farmer, free, educated, prosperous, we have the one new
thing under the sun: something for which history has no precedent. The
old cities and civilizations were all fed, supported, and enriched by
the slave populations that worked the land, dug the mines, and did every
kind of productive work. And when the cities went down the country
perished also. But thanks to the ideals of our fathers, the farmers and
laborers of to-day are educated like the free citizens of the ancient
cities. If we had continued true to the ideals of our fathers, we should
all have self-supporting homes of our own. But we must build cities,
organize for profit, and live luxuriously.
Mark what has happened. Capital was accumulated in the cities. Capital
gradually organized business and established it in the great centres.
When business was centralized, labor was centralized and began to
organize. Now capital and labor are at each other's throats and likely
to prove themselves the substance of Shelley's symbols.
"We two will sink on the wide waves of ruin
Even as a vulture and a snake outspent
Drop, twisted in inextricable fight,
Into a shoreless sea."
At the present time the farmers are the sole inheritors of the ideals
of our fathers. But like the foolish men of the cities they are also
organizing for profit. They have forgotten that the home was the one
great ideal of the men and women who braved the perils of the ocean
and conquered the wilderness. Farming is above all a home-building
occupation--rather than a money-making business. But now men no longer
regard the place where they live as a home. It is merely a speculation
in real estate. They try to estimate everything in terms of
dollars--and the money profits are so meagre that all who are able are
deserting the farms and joining in the great jazz-time dollar dance of
the cities. The farmers are forsaking the substance for the
glitter--or are organizing for political power so that they may divert
the stream of dollars toward the farms. Of course it can be shown
that under modern conditions there can be no home without money. But
why trouble about modern conditions? The world is very old and has
developed many great men and all that we know of good without the aid
of modern conditions. Few of the poets and prophets and great leaders
of the past were born in the cities. "Modern conditions"--luxury,
extravagance, dissipation, and parasitism--undoubtedly encompassed the
destruction of all the great cities whose names move sonorously in
verse. And now the farmers are lusting for the "modern conditions"
that are hurrying the cities to destruction.
Now that the farmers are educated and "profess apprehension," why do
they not read the great portents of our time? Can they not see that some
cosmic pendulum that measures the progress of man toward his destiny has
started on its backward swing? All the great symbols and allegories by
which we have been taught in the past are now being reversed.
After the Deluge men built the Tower of Babel so that they might not be
destroyed. And for their presumption they were scattered by a confusion
of tongues.
After the Great War--a man-made disaster as terrible as the Flood--we
are having all the confused tongues of ancient Babel uniting in a cry
that men must come together to make the world safe for democracy. What
was scattered is reassembling.
We are told that in the beginning man was placed in a garden--on the
land--but for his disobedience he was driven forth by cherubim with a
flaming sword.
He built himself cities as places of refuge from the savage creatures
and enemies of the country. But the cities betrayed his trust. They
became great and terrible until now those who are disillusioned of
"modern conditions" are turning toward the country as a refuge from the
cities. The procedure has been reversed and all who have vision can see
that a day will come--a day of hunger and fear--when man will be driven
back to his garden by cherubim with a flaming sword.
But this is the old-time prophecy of woes to come--and pessimism is not
popular. Let us return to everyday life and see what we can find of
hope. At the risk of an anticlimax I shall venture to deal with what
will seem but little things after your thoughts have been dealing with
what we have ignorantly regarded as great things. Let us consider one
little thing--that is the greatest thing in the world. Let us give a
thought to the home.
While visiting the great cities I have visited in homes, and in the
thing most complained of I have found the first ray of hope. There are
no longer any servants for families of moderate means. The work of the
home must be done by those who enjoy the home. Because of this there is
a fuller and freer home life. Women of education and culture who have
been compelled by the high cost of living to do their own work are doing
it better than it was ever done by servants. They are better cooks than
the cooks they had in the past, and all the members of the family are
of necessity learning lessons of helpfulness. If the death-struggle of
labor and capital should paralyze, or at least decentralize,
civilization, we have an atavistic capacity to do our own work. Our
forefathers did their own work and we look back to them proudly as being
better than we are. The cities are full of men and women who were born
on the farms and know how to do the work of farms, and when the truth of
Job's words is brought home to them--"as for bread, it cometh from the
earth"--they can go back to the earth with confidence. The true mission
of the educated, thinking farmer to-day is to use his newly acquired
power to preserve the new experiment in civilization tried by our
fathers and which made the home rather than money the unit of success.
Let them coöperate to establish their own homes and to help others to
establish self-supporting homes and we shall have a more glorious
civilization than has been. If we return to the vision and hope of
those who established the democracies of the new world, the cherubim
with the flaming sword may prove to be heralds, whose sword will be
miraculously changed into a torch lighting us to a better world. But
this change will be wrought, not by statesmen, but by men and women
worthy to be citizens of a democracy--men and women who are not ashamed
to do little things and do them well. And we are taught not to "despise
the day of little things."