ot expect in the near future to see one
portion of our cities devoted entirely to business, with the homes
of the people so separated as to give light, sunshine, and air to
all, besides a piece of ground for a garden sufficient to supply the
table with vegetables?

You raise more than vegetables in your garden: you raise your
expectation of life.

Life belongs in the garden. Do you remember--the first chapters of
Genesis show us our babyhood in a garden--the garden that all
babyhood remembers, and the last chapter of the Apocalypse leaves us
with the vision of the garden in the Holy City, on either side of
the river, where the trees yield their fruits every month and bear
leaves of universal healing. Just so will it be in our holy cities
of the future--the garden will be right there "in the midst."

CHAPTER II

PRESENT CONDITIONS

Up to the Civil War and for some years after, our people were almost
wholly agricultural. National activity contented itself with
settling and developing the vast areas of the public lands, whose
virgin richness cried aloud in the wilderness for men.

The policy of the government, framed to stimulate rapid occupation
of the public lands, had attracted hordes of settlers over the
mountains from the older states, and immigration flowed in a steady
stream into the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi.

A system had grown up in the South almost patriarchal, based upon
cultivation by slave labor of enormous areas devoted exclusively to
cotton. In the North, New England had developed some few centers of
industry, drawing their support from the manufacture of the great
Southern staple. New York, Boston, and Philadelphia were growing as
outlets for foreign commerce, but as yet manufacturing flourished
but feebly and in few localities.

Such manufacturing and commercial enterprises as existed had been
laboriously built up by long years of honest working. The free lands
of the government, by giving laborers an alternative, kept up wages,
forcing employers to bid against each other for labor; and monopoly
thus being checked, individual equality was possible.

The mineral resources of Pennsylvania and Ohio were all but
unsuspected, and the calm of a people devoted to the peaceful
pursuits of agriculture rested over the country.

Railroads were few and inefficient: telegraph lines but in their
infancy. Intercourse among the people, outside of a narrow fringe on
the Atlantic coast,