r optimism was
too ingrained to yield to my gray mood. "We can't afford to grant too
much," said Emma. "We are in it, you see."

Leaving the village of Osage, with my mind still in a tumult of revolt,
I took the train for the Northwest, eager to see my mother and my little
sister, yet beginning to dread the changes which I must surely find in
them. Not only were my senses exceedingly alert and impressionable, my
eyes saw nothing but the loneliness and the lack of beauty in the
landscape, and the farther west I went, the lonelier became the boxlike
habitations of the plain. Here were the lands over which we had hurried
in 1881, lured by the "Government Land" of the farther west. Here, now,
a kind of pioneering behind the lines was going on. The free lands were
gone and so, at last, the price demanded by these speculators must be
paid.

This wasteful method of pioneering, this desolate business of lonely
settlement took on a new and tragic significance as I studied it.
Instructed by my new philosophy I now perceived that these plowmen,
these wives and daughters had been pushed out into these lonely ugly
shacks by the force of landlordism behind. These plodding Swedes and
Danes, these thrifty Germans, these hairy Russians had all fled from the
feudalism of their native lands and were here because they had no share
in the soil from which they sprung, and because in the settled
communities of the eastern states, the speculative demand for land had
hindered them from acquiring even a leasing right to the surface of the
earth.

I clearly perceived that our Song of Emigration had been, in effect, the
hymn of fugitives!

And yet all this did not prevent me from acknowledging the beauty of the
earth. On the contrary, social injustice intensified nature's
prodigality. I said, "Yes, the landscape is beautiful, but how much of
its beauty penetrates to the heart of the men who are in the midst of it
and battling with it? How much of consolation does the worn and weary
renter find in the beauty of cloud and tree or in the splendor of the
sunset?--Grace of flower does not feed or clothe the body, and when the
toiler is both badly clothed and badly fed, bird-song and leaf-shine
cannot bring content." Like Millet, I asked, "Why should all of a man's
waking hours be spent in an effort to feed and clothe his family? Is
there not something wrong in our social scheme when the unremitting
toiler remains poor?"

With such thoughts filli