it
were only a gift, and with little care or conscious thought of the
consequences of our use of it.

_The new hold_

We may distinguish three stages in our relation to the planet, the
collecting stage, the mining stage, and the producing stage. These
overlap and perhaps are nowhere distinct, and yet it serves a purpose to
contrast them.

At first man sweeps the earth to see what he may gather,--game, wood,
fruits, fish, fur, feathers, shells on the shore. A certain social and
moral life arises out of this relation, seen well in the woodsmen and
the fishers--in whom it best persists to the present day--strong,
dogmatic, superstitious folk. Then man begins to go beneath the surface
to see what he can find,--iron and precious stones, the gold of Ophir,
coal, and many curious treasures. This develops the exploiting
faculties, and leads men into the uttermost parts. In both these stages
the elements of waste and disregard have been heavy.

Finally, we begin to enter the productive stage, whereby we secure
supplies by controlling the conditions under which they grow, wasting
little, harming not. Farming has been very much a mining process, the
utilizing of fertility easily at hand and the moving-on to lands
unspoiled of quick potash and nitrogen. Now it begins to be really
productive and constructive, with a range of responsible and permanent
morals. We rear the domestic animals with precision. We raise crops,
when we will, almost to a nicety. We plant fish in lakes and streams to
some extent but chiefly to provide more game rather than more human
food, for in this range we are yet mostly in the collecting or hunter
stage. If the older stages were strongly expressed in the character of
the people, so will this new stage be expressed; and so is it that we
are escaping the primitive and should be coming into a new character. We
shall find our rootage in the soil.

This new character, this clearer sense of relationship with the earth,
should express itself in all the people and not exclusively in farming
people and their like. It should be a popular character--or a national
character if we would limit the discussion to one people--and not a
class character. Now, here lies a difficulty and here is a reason for
writing this book: the population of the earth is increasing, the
relative population of farmers is decreasing, people are herding in
cities, we have a city mind, and relatively fewer people are brought
into