and cannot be turned into products of sale it is therefore valueless.
The present active back-to-the-land movement has meaning to us here. It
expresses the yearning of the people for contact with the earth and for
escape from complexity and unessentials. As there is no regular way for
attaining these satisfactions, it has largely taken the form of farming,
which occupation has also been re-established in popular estimation in
the same epoch. It should not be primarily a back-to-the-farm movement,
however, and it is not to be derided. We are to recognize its meaning
and to find some way of enabling more of the people to stand on the
ground.

Aside from all this, land is needed for human habitation, where persons
may have space and may have the privilege of gathering about them the
goods that add value to life. Much land will be needed in future for
this habitation, not only because there will be more people, but also
because every person will be given an outlet. We know it is not right
that any family should be doomed to the occupancy of a very few dreary
rooms and deathly closets in the depths of great cities, seeing that all
children are born to the natural sky and to the wind and to the earth.
We do not yet see the way to allow them to have what is naturally
theirs, but we shall learn how. In that day we shall take down the
wonderful towers and cliffs in the cities, in which people work and
live, shelf on shelf, but in which they have no home. The great city
expansion in the end will be horizontal rather than perpendicular. We
shall have many knots, clustered about factories and other enterprises,
and we shall learn how to distribute the satisfactions in life rather
than merely to assemble them. Before this time comes, we shall have
passed the present insistence on so-called commercial efficiency, as if
it were the sole measure of a civilization, and higher ends shall come
to have control. All this will rest largely on the dividing of the land.

It is the common assumption that the solution of these problems lies in
facilities of transportation, and, to an extent, this is true; but this
assumption usually rests on the other assumption, that the method of the
present city vortex is the method of all time, with its violent rush
into the vortex and out of it, consuming vastly of time and energy,
preventing home leisure and destroying locality feeling, herding the
people like cattle. The question of transportation is inde