ining, or gold-fever, or
rubber-collecting in the tropics, or excitement of prospecting for new
finds or even locating new lands, no ravishing of the earth or
monopolistic control of its bounties, will build a stable society. So is
much of our economic and social fabric transitory. It is not by accident
that a very distinct form of society is developing in the great farming
regions of the Mississippi Valley and in other comparable places; the
exploiting and promoting occupancy of those lands is passing and a
stable progressive development appears. We have been obsessed of the
passion to cover everything at once, to skin the earth, to pass on, even
when there was no necessity for so doing. It is a vast pity that this
should ever have been the policy of government in giving away great
tracts of land by lottery, as if our fingers would burn if we held the
lands inviolate until needed by the natural process of settlement. The
people should be kept on their lands long enough to learn how to use
them. But very well: we have run with the wind, we have staked the
lands; now we shall be real farmers and real conquerors. Not all lands
are equally good for farming, and some lands will never be good for
farming; but whether in Iowa, or New England, or old Asia, farming land
may develop character in the people.

My reader must not infer that we have arrived at a permanent
agriculture, although we begin now to see the importance of a permanent
land occupancy. Probably we have not yet evolved a satisfying husbandry
that will maintain itself century by century, without loss and without
the ransacking of the ends of the earth for fertilizer materials to make
good our deficiencies. All the more is it important that the problem be
elevated into the realm of statesmanship and of morals. Neither must he
infer that the resources of the earth are to be locked up beyond contact
and use (for the contact and use will be morally regulated). But no
system of brilliant exploitation, and no accidental scratching of the
surface of the earth, and no easy appropriation of stored materials can
suffice us in the good days to come. City, country, this class and that
class, all fall and merge before the common necessity.

It is often said that the farmer is our financial mainstay; so in the
good process of time will he be a moral mainstay, for ultimately finance
and social morals must coincide.

The gifts are to be used for service and for satisfaction,