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.

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.

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."