One hates to have anything to do with the promulgation of a new law, especially when temperamentally in accord with the poet Carman who

But the new law is already in existence, and as all I propose to do is modestly to discover its operations, I feel less compunction in the matter. But before making the announcement it is necessary to clear the ground by calling attention to another law that is apparently producing the chaotic conditions that are causing so much alarm at the present time. Then the new law may be offered as a balm that is to cure existing evils. Having reassured the mind of the reader we may now proceed.

Somewhere in his voluminous writings Karl Marx makes the arresting statement that "all capitalistic organizations carry within themselves the elements of their own destruction." (Solomon said long before Marx, "The prosperity of fools shall destroy them.") It might be demonstrated that the destroying element is "greed" for wealth and power, but it is enough to call attention to the fact that the work of destruction is at present in progress. Every morning our newspapers are calling attention to the fact that political parties are destroying themselves through lust for power and because they are dominated by the forces of organized Greed.

Capital is at present in a parlous condition because it is suspected of greedy profiteering and the plain people are in the mood to bring it to book.

Labor, that was enabled to organize because of the work done by Capital in centralizing industry for the purpose of increasing profits, is in danger of destroying itself by its exactions, by general strikes, and by making labor conditions in the cities so remunerative and attractive that no one wants to stay on the farms to do the necessary but heavy and mussy work of food production.

There are even those who point out that the churches are destroying their usefulness by a rage for over-organization and financial stability, but that is a question that no cautious man would care to review.

Now the cities, those organized centres of humanity, appear to be passionately intent on committing suicide. In this they are receiving material aid from governments, but it seems useless for any one to offer a protest. When a delegation of farmers recently waited on Governor Smith, of New York, to protest against the adoption of daylight saving legislation, he rebuked them severely for their class selfishness. No one seems to realize that daylight saving is simply a gesture in the progress of city suicide. The few laborers to be found on the farms naturally want to take advantage of the daylight saving law, with the result that they are idle in the morning hours when the dew makes impracticable the cultivation of root crops, corn, etc., and the gathering of hay and sheaves. And besides being idle at the expense of the farmers in the morning, they are idle for their own enjoyment in the late afternoon and evening when field work can be attended to most satisfactorily. Besides, the farmer is obliged to do his own milking and chores while his highly paid hired man goes to town to enjoy the movies. The result is that farmers are forced to limit their enterprises to the amount of work that can be done by themselves and their families. In many cases it would not pay them to employ a hired man. Indeed, cases have come under my personal observation where farmers found it more practicable to sell their farms and hire out with farmers who thought they could contend with the new adverse conditions. And presently these farmers who hired out followed the general trend of the rural population and moved to the cities where they could have shorter hours and more attractive conditions.

The "New York Sun and Herald" had an editorial recently in which it spoke of the farmers going on strike. They are not going on strike, but they are limiting productions to what they can do themselves—and the result is the same. They are not doing this from desire, but through the compulsion of circumstances.

Daylight saving, however, is only one of the many methods employed to uproot humanity from the soil and enable the cities to commit suicide by starvation.

Critics of the tariff have shown how the protection of manufactures causes higher wages to prevail in the cities and withdraws men from the productions of food. Agricultural education and the farmers' movement have tended to centre the attention of the farmer on money-making—rather than on home-building—and that is disastrous. The farmer is keeping books, and as home-making cannot be expressed either by single entry or double entry, he applies the dollar test to everything with the result that in many places food crops are being discarded for profitable cash crops, such as tobacco, sugar-beets, etc.

The farmer is finding out what crops do not pay in dollars and is discarding them—thereby increasing the various shortages. In order to make him efficient in this destructive work, governments are imposing income taxes and compelling the farmer to keep books. And no one is calling attention to the basic fact that farming is above all a home-making business and that money-making is secondary. Our pioneer fathers raised all crops for their own use, with the result that they had plenty and a surplus to feed the cities of those days.

The whole tendency of the time is to make the country more like the cities—to give the farm city advantages. Cities are not content with increasing their wealth and population. They promote radial railways and manufacture automobiles to bring the farmers to the cities. They educate them to patronize the movies and follow the fashions. Every day the farms are becoming more like the cities. Farm children are given city educations and they develop city tastes. The world is mad on the building of cities. Some months ago an enthusiast sitting in the chair beside me in the lobby of a Toronto hotel showed me how the development of hydro-electric power on the Niagara River and the St. Lawrence would finally transform New York State and the Province of Ontario into one vast city from Manhattan to Port Arthur. And he added triumphantly:

"Then we could dictate to the world."

It sounded very progressive and alluring, but as I was waiting for the dining-room to open, the promptings of appetite led me to wonder how this great city of the future is to be fed.

The simple fact is that the country is getting so like the cities that it is stopping the production of food, and unless the tide turns the cities and the country will commit suicide together. But as indicated in a previous chapter there is a door of hope. Our fathers laid the foundations of a country civilization, richer and more satisfying than any city civilization the world has known. If we turn in time and build on that foundation the predictions of all the prophets will be confuted.

Now the time has come to announce the new law, the law of reversal which has been touched upon in a previous chapter. It has already begun to operate and all that remains is for the majority to fall in line with it.

And the majority will do this.

In the great crises of the past it was predicted that "a remnant will be saved."

The time has come to announce the reversal of this law and proclaim that "a majority will be saved."

If you stop to weigh recent events, you will find that there is a sound reason for this proclamation. Since the signing of the armistice there have been strikes, both authorized and "outlaw," that interfered with the rights of the majority of the people. And the people did not endure them tamely. In Winnipeg, Seattle, New Jersey, and elsewhere the people undertook to do the work that was being stopped by the strikers. In almost all these cases the volunteer workers went too far in their manifestations—forgot the need of adhering to legal methods. But they made it quite clear that the big, quaking, foolish majority is no longer in the mood to put up with the tyranny of noisy minorities. All strikes and disturbances in the transaction of business cause more trouble and suffering to the ordinary citizens than to those who are directly involved. And experience has shown that the ordinary people of Canada and the United States are not ordinary. On the battlefields of Europe the privates on many occasions showed themselves as resourceful as their officers and as ready to cope with difficult problems. Those whose affairs are being interfered with by men who depart from constitutional methods to redress their grievances are not an ignorant and oppressed mob, but men who have been accustomed all their lives to freedom and legal methods. They are not lacking in courage or initiative, and are entirely capable of calling "bluffs" of all kinds. It so happens that the "bluff" of some irresponsible agitators is the first that has been forced on their attention, and their response is the most cheering news we have had for many a day. It may mean the beginning of a better era. Most of the wrongs from which struggling humanity suffers are due to "bluffs"—some of them very respectable and imposing—and if the people start to call them we shall have a notable house-cleaning. Moreover, all these can be called without departing from the constitutional methods established by our fathers, and which our sons so heroically defended.

All this indicates that after the cities, Big Business, Labor, and even the Farmers' Movement have succumbed to the present passion for suicide, the majority will be saved.

In the days when salvation was only for the remnant, that remnant represented the minority that stood for the rights of humanity. The majority stood for autocratic or theocratic power and destroyed itself by its arrogance and greed.

The birth of Democracy changed all this. The majority now stands for the rights of man—of the plain citizen. Because there was so much to learn before Democracy could realize its possibilities we have been tyrannized over by minorities—bosses, bureaucracies, trusts, labor organizations, and other forms of absolutism. But the great mass of the people stand for individual rights and individual initiative.

The average citizen of the new world

All of them may not be drawing furrows; some of them may be engaged in non-essential occupations; but their instinct is the same. If they are left alone they will leave other people alone. And there is evidence that if they are not left alone something is going to happen. Le Bon points out that the inert mass of the population represents the soul of a nation. If this is true the outlook is all that can be wished. In the new world there is an instinct for order that expresses itself sometimes without waiting for the processes of law. This impatience is regrettable, but the attitude is admirable. It indicates that the day of the remnant is passed and that the majority is to come to its own. The future may have trouble in store for the profiteers, agitators, bureaucrats, and others who are wailing that the world is going to the devil, but the great law of reversal is in operation and

"A majority will be saved."