nutes life is extinct. Yet
in the cities there is a slow poisoning of life going on day by day. The
lover of beauty may walk the streets of London or any big city and may
look into ten thousand faces and see none that is lovely. Is not the
return of man to a natural life on the earth a great enough idea to
inspire humanity? Is not the idea of a civilization amid the green trees
and fields under the smokeless sky alluring? Yes, but men say there is
no intellectual life working on the land. No intellectual life when man
is surrounded by mystery and miracle! When the mysterious forces which
bring to birth and life are yet undiscovered; when the earth is teeming
with life, and the dumb brown lips of the ridges are breathing mystery!
Is not the growth of a tree from a tiny cell hidden in the earth as
provocative of thought as the things men learn at the schools? Is not
thought on these things more interesting than the sophistries of the
newspapers? It is only in Nature, and by thought on the problems of
Nature, that our intellect grows to any real truth and draws near to the
Mighty Mind which laid the foundations of the world.

Our civilizations are a nightmare, a bad dream. They have no longer the
grandeur of Babylon or Nineveh. They grow meaner and meaner as they
grow more urbanized. What could be more depressing than the miles of
poverty-stricken streets around the heart of our modern cities? The
memory lies on one "heavy as frost and deep almost as life." It
is terrible to think of the children playing on the pavements; the
depletion of vitality, with artificial stimulus supplied from the
flaring drink-shops. The spirit grows heavy as if death lay on it while
it moves amid such things. And outside these places the clouds are
flying overhead snowy and spiritual as of old, the sun is shining, the
winds are blowing, the fields are green, the forests are murmuring leaf
to leaf, but the magic that God made is unknown to these poor folk. The
creation of a rural civilization is the greatest need of our time.
It may not come in our days, but we can lay the foundations of it,
preparing the way for the true prophet when he will come. The fight now
is not to bring people back to the land, but to keep those who are
on the land contented, happy, and prosperous. And we must begin by
organizing them to defend what is left to them; to take back, industry
by industry, what was stolen from them. We must organize the country
people into co