ave been taken out of their place to wreak
vengeance on the earth by means of military devastation. In the past,
this ravage has been small in amount because the engines of destruction
were weak, but with the perfecting of the modern enginery the havoc is
awful and brutal. While we have to our credit the improvement of
agriculture and other agencies of conservation, it is yet a fact that
man has never been so destructive as now. He is able to turn the skill
of his discovery to destructive ends (a subject that we have already
approached from another point of view). The keeping of the earth is
therefore involved in the organization of society. Military power heads
toward destructiveness. Civil power heads toward conservation. The
military power may be constructive in times of peace, but its end, if it
uses the tools it invents, is devastation and the inflicting of injury.
When the civil power is subjugated to the military power, society is
headed toward calamity.

To keep and to waste are opposite processes. Not only are we able to
despoil the earth by sheer lust of ravage and by blighting the fields
with caverns of human slaughter, but we shoot away incredible supplies
of copper and petroleum and other unrenewable materials that by every
right and equity belong to our successors; and, moreover, we are to make
these successors pay for the destruction of their heritage. Day by day
we are mortgaging the future, depriving it of supplies that it may need,
burdening the shoulders of generations yet unborn.

Merely to make the earth productive and to keep it clean and to bear a
reverent regard for its products, is the special prerogative of a good
agriculture and a good citizenry founded thereon; this may seem at the
moment to be small and ineffective as against mad impersonal and
limitless havoc, but it carries the final healing; and while the land
worker will bear much of the burden on his back he will also redeem the
earth.

_The tones of industry_

One of the clearest notes of our time is the recognition of the holiness
of industry and the attempt to formulate the morals of it. We accept
this fact indirectly by the modern endeavor to give the laboring man his
due.

The handworker is more or less elemental, dealing directly with the
materials. We begin to recognize these industries in literature, in
sculpture, and in painting; but we do not yet very consciously or
effectively translate them into music.

It is