the great economy, and no clear sense of
his relation to the natural order, this possibility is doubtless
attractive. It is not so to those who have gained a clear idea of the
place of man and the conditions of his ongoing.

There is reason to expect that the modern gains in the cheapness and
speed of transportation may before long bring about a material change in
the housing of the laboring classes of our cities, so that they may be
able to dwell in somewhat rural conditions. In this way we may hope to
see these people once again brought where they may receive a fuller
share of the influences which have served so well to lift our race to
its elevated moral station. Working to the same end is the spirit which
is leading many manufacturers to place their establishments in the
country, where they can control the mode of life of the employees and
their families. Against the growth of the factory towns with their
sordid conditions, we may with pleasure set these rural workshops where
the capitalists are doing the best they can to better the mode of living
of the people who are under their charge. In this good work it may well
be possible to include a share of contact with the soil and with
domesticated animals. In this system of isolated factories we may
perhaps hope to find the way out of the perplexities which the present
condition of our industries have imposed on our civilization.

Up to our present half-century the process of winning animals and plants
to domestication, and of improving them after they had been thus won,
has been in its nature a matter of haphazard. Here and there, as men
have seen creatures which promised in captivity to afford either
pleasure or profit, they have endeavored to convert them to use. In some
cases the effort has been made with some patience and steadfastness of
purpose. If the creature yielded quickly to the needs of a new life
which it was sought to impose upon him, he became a member of man's
family. If its wilderness motives were strong, the effort to domesticate
was soon abandoned. The greater part of these efforts to win animals and
plants into alliance with our race have been made with the creatures
which were native in the wildernesses about our ancestral
dwelling-places. Occasionally from distant lands important gains have
been made, especially among the food-giving plants; but all the animals
of any importance which have been adopted by the Aryan people were
originally native