Our social ideas, the expression of what the psychologists define as the social mind, are influenced too much by the thinking of urban people, too little by that of people who live in the country and small villages. There are many reasons for this undesirable social situation. One is the outstanding fact that the city has the prestige that belongs to political and commercial leadership. The urban leaders have for the most part obtained their position by their possession of the means of control of industries and of the channels of communication, or because of their skill in winning public attention. They have become successful by exercising capabilities that naturally give them social influence. They are victors in contests that are decided largely upon the basis of superior ability in manipulating men. Their advance has meant an increasing opportunity to influence the thought of their fellows. In many cases they have deliberately studied the methods of influencing public opinion and have worked to obtain control of the modern equipment necessary to direct it. One of the great engines for moving the public mind is the newspaper and this is always in the hands of urban leadership and a share of its power can usually be had by those who have the necessary "pull" or cash.

Socially the successful farmer belongs to the opposite class. His success has been obtained for the most part by his skill in handling natural law. His struggle has been largely with the obstacles that arise when one attempts to furnish a share of the food supply required by a hungry world. The farmer's experience with the means of social influence is limited and in his business there is no need of his impressing himself upon his fellows. On the other hand it is natural that he should overvalue the thinking of those who, unlike himself, have developed the art of making social and political impression. This tendency to discount his own social contribution in practice—even though in theory he may often insist upon his paramount social function—makes the farmer a good follower and a poor leader.

And yet in the nature of things there is nothing to demonstrate that socially those who have the machinery that is required for the influencing of public opinion or who have learned the art of impressing themselves upon their fellows are the most fit to direct the social mind. The struggle with Nature teaches as much that is of lasting value for a philosophy of personal or national conduct as comes from competition between people. Even if the population stimulus of urban centers brings forth men of great ability who do large things, it by no means follows that these men are wise merely because they are powerful. And even if they were justified in claiming superiority at every point over the successful men of the country, it would not be for the social good that they be given a monopoly of social prestige.

Contact with men who occupy high places in city commerce will often convince any one of a neutral and discriminating mind that these men of social power have suffered loss at some points in their developing personality as a result of the struggle that has made possible their success. The present serious discord between capital and labor is fundamentally born of the belief of some that wealth is as socially right in all important matters as it is socially powerful and the faith of others that the social problems that vex men and women would pass with the destruction of wealth's artificial social advantages. Each group confines itself to the territory of experience where everything has to do with matters of human relationship, and each group insists that only one point in that territory can have value as a position for the observing and estimating of what happens there.

The extreme representatives of each group disclose that they have been forced to a narrow view of human motives and interests by their environmental experiences. They agree in their elevation of the power of money to the supreme place socially—one defending the power as belonging of right to wealth, the other regarding the social situation as due to the unjust privileges of the few who prey upon the many.

The typical farmer is both a capitalist and a laborer and has a saner attitude toward the difficulty than one can have who belongs exclusively to either group. He is likely to accumulate his capital by slow savings, which represent in some degree real sacrifice, and he cannot have sympathy with those who refuse to credit capital with legitimate social function. He also earns his bread by the sweat of his brow and has therefore a first-hand knowledge of the burden of human toil. This gives him an understanding of the discontent of exploited labor, but also a deep contempt for those who have no interest in the work they do. His thinking in regard to the differences between capital and labor is born of experiences that are elemental in the human struggle for life and comfort and therefore cannot be safely turned aside. His sympathies swing toward one or the other of the conflicting groups according to his most recent economic experiences. If he has been robbed by some commission merchant, he joins the protest against the unjust power of capital; if he has had a hired man who has worked indifferently and with no respect for his vocation, he understands what is meant by the unreasonable and impossible demands of labor.

The unchanging element in his thinking, however, comes from his personal concern with reference to both capital and labor. In other words, he lives closer to an earlier economic experience of man, when the present great gulf between those who furnish capital and those who furnish labor for industry had not been fixed. Neither the representatives of the capital nor of the labor group, when they undertake what seem to him extreme measures, can count upon his support.

The abiding fact that denies to urban thinking the right to enjoy a monopoly of social influence is this: men cannot safely build up their social thinking from experiences gathered merely from the field of human association. Nature also has lessons to teach and lessons that do not always agree with the inferences that are naturally made when one thinks only of the experiences of men in their associations. It is socially foolish and socially unsafe to disregard, or at least to forget, the value of thinking that functions, as the farmer's does, in the effort to control Nature for a livelihood that directly contributes to human welfare. If such thinking is often prosaic and rigid, it is also close to reality and insistent upon practicality. Narrow it may be at times, as a result of lack of opportunity to have wide contact, but it is substantial and born of knowledge of the necessary limitations that Nature places upon the wishes of men and women. The farmer by his vocation is taught to be suspicious of easy solutions. He stands aloof from men who claim to have found the panacea and regards men of such abounding enthusiasm as belonging to the same group of the pathetically deluded as the believers in the machine of perpetual motion. The farmer keeps the greatest distance from day dreaming and can never have charged against him as a characteristic fault that menace of self-supporting fancy which is so insidious in its attack upon the mental wholesomeness of a multitude of people.

It becomes, therefore, as a result of a constant and clear-minded attention to the actual working of forces of Nature that seem at times friendly and at times hostile to man's purposes, difficult for the farmer to regard money, even with all its recognized power, as able to do everything, or the one thing to be desired. This does not mean, of course, that the farmer is indifferent to money. No one who knows him at all would claim that he is unconcerned in regard to finances. He is always interested in money, and, like other men, works to make it. For want of money he is often troubled. He knows how much money will do in the sphere of human association. His everyday philosophy reveals this in ways that one cannot mistake. He also knows, however, that even money has its limits and that these are seen in man's relations with Nature.

How different it is in the experience of the city-dweller! He finds that money will do nearly anything. With money he can have the fruits gathered from the ends of the earth. Without money he is helpless. His protection from disease, from vice, from countless forms of discomfort, disrespect, and exploitation depends upon his ability to pay the necessary rent for safe and pleasant surroundings. How much of suffering, both physical and mental, the want of a "safe" income brings to the urban-dweller one may discover by merely walking along the crowded streets of any city. Without the necessary money he even fears loss of a respectable funeral and burial place in case of death.

The urban wealthy keep close to more and more wonderful forms of luxury by money. The urban poor keep out of the breadline by money. The middle-class know that with a little more money they may expect to join the first class and with a little less they may be forced into the second. Money seems the one thing of power. Newspapers, street discussions, and public opinion, for the most part, encourage the belief in the omnipotence of money. Only in rare instances, as for example when there is a death in the family, does the city person from his own experience discover that money, which has so much of power among men, cannot fully usurp Nature's control over the desires of men. Having so often seen great natural obstacles overcome by bridges, tunnels, and immense buildings, the urban person's final mental assumption is that, given enough money, anything can be done. It is hardly strange that the political philosophy which is distinctively urban should be built upon the supreme value of money and the problem of its distribution.

With the present movement of the population toward urban centers, and with the increasing ability of urban people through organization and modern forms of communication to impress their ideas upon men and women far and near, it is hardly strange that we should in our better moments recoil from a materialism which seems to be creeping everywhere into men's souls and producing interpretations of the purposes of life that are false, dangerous, and sordid.

The antidote is a larger contribution to national thought and policy from rural people. Talkers and men skilful in manipulating other men have been taken too seriously. The doer, especially he who has first-hand grapple with Nature in the contest she forever forces upon men, has a word that should be spoken, a word of sanity. City people are often too far distant from the realities of the primary struggle with natural law to be entrusted with all the thinking. A visit a few months ago to any city seed-store would have forced upon any critical observer how ignorant city people are of the effort required to produce even their most familiar foods.

Healthy national ideals require a contribution from both urban and rural experience. The first we have in quantity. It is the second we lack. It is the business of those who conserve social welfare to respect the conclusions of rural thinkers and to discover how rural experience may make its largest contribution to national policy and social opinion.