touch with the earth in any real way. So is it incumbent on us to
take special pains--now that we see the new time--that all the people,
or as many of them as possible, shall have contact with the earth and
that the earth righteousness shall be abundantly taught.

I hasten to say that I am not thinking of any back-to-the-farm movement
to bring about the results we seek. Necessarily, the proportion of
farmers will decrease. Not so many are needed, relatively, to produce
the requisite supplies from the earth. Agriculture makes a great
contribution to human progress by releasing men for the manufactures and
the trades. In proportion as the ratio of farmers decreases is it
important that we provide them the best of opportunities and
encouragement: they must be better and better men. And if we are to
secure our moral connection with the planet to a large extent through
them, we can see that they bear a relation to society in general that we
have overlooked.

Even the farming itself is changing radically in character. It ceases to
be an occupation to gain sustenance and becomes a business. We apply to
it the general attitudes of commerce. We must be alert to see that it
does not lose its capacity for spiritual contact.

How we may achieve a more wide-spread contact with the earth on the part
of all the people without making them farmers, I shall endeavor to
suggest as I proceed; in fact, this is my theme. Dominion means mastery;
we may make the surface of the earth much what we will; we can govern
the way in which we shall contemplate it. We are probably near something
like a stable occupancy. It is not to be expected that there will be
vast shifting of cities as the contest for the mastery of the earth
proceeds,--probably nothing like the loss of Tyre and Carthage, and of
the commercial glory of Venice. In fact, we shall have a progressive
occupancy. The greater the population, the greater will be the demands
on the planet; and, moreover, every new man will make more demands than
his father made, for he will want more to satisfy him. We are to take
from the earth much more than we have ever taken before, but it will be
taken in a new way and with better intentions. It will be seen,
therefore, that we are not here dealing narrowly with an occupation but
with something very fundamental to our life on the planet.

We are not to look for our permanent civilization to rest on any species
of robber-economy. No flurry of coal-m