attractiveness of the city should drain off still more the human
material from the village and from the field. The cry "back to the
land" goes through the whole world, and this means more than a camping
tour in the holidays and some magazine numbers of _Country Life in
America_ by the fireplace. Its meaning ought to be that every nation
which wants to remain healthy and strong must take care that the
obvious advantages of metropolitan life are balanced by the joys and
gains of the villager who lacks the shop windows and the exciting
turmoil.

Certainly the devices of the city inventor, the telephone and the
motor car and a thousand other gifts of the last generation, have
overcome much of the loneliness, and the persistent efforts of the
states to secure better roads and better schools in the country have
enriched and multiplied the values of rural life. Yet the most direct
aid is, after all, that which increases the efficiency of farming
itself. In this respect, too, we feel the rapid progress throughout
the country. The improvements in method which the scientific efforts
of all nations have secured are eagerly distributed to the remotest
corners. The agents of the governmental Bureau of Agriculture, the
agricultural county demonstrators, the rapidly spreading agricultural
schools, take care that the farmer's "commonsense" with its
backwardness and narrowness be replaced by an insight which results
from scientific experiment and exact calculation. Agricultural
science, based on physics and chemistry, on botany and zooelogy, has
made wonderful strides during the last few decades. It must be
confessed that the self-complaisance of the farmer and the power of
tradition have offered not a little resistance to the practical
application of the knowledge which the agricultural experiments
establish, and the blending of the well-known conservative attitude of
the farmer with a certain carelessness and deficiency in education has
kept the production of the American farm still far below the yielding
power which the present status of knowledge would allow. Other
nations, more trained in hard labour and painstaking economy and
accustomed to most careful rotation of crops, obtain a much richer
harvest from the acre, even where the nature of the soil is poor. But
the longing of the farmer for the best methods is rapidly growing,
too, and in many a state he shows a splendid eagerness to try new
ways, to develop new plans, and to p