e as to the individual, and necessitates a study of social
fabrics. The soul creates tendencies and habits in the body, and the
body repeats these vibrations automatically and infects the soul
again with its old desires. Our religious hatreds created sectarian
organizations, and these react again in the national soul, which
would, I believe, willingly pass away from that mood, but finds itself
incarnated in organizations habituated to sectarian action, and its
energies are turned into these hateful channels unwillingly. So a
drunkard who now realizes that intemperance is rotting his nature is
conquered by the appetites he set up in the past, and with his soul in
rebellion he yet satisfies the craving in the body. The individualism in
our economic life reacts on the national being, and prevents concerted
action for the general good. We have yet to create harmony of purpose
in our economic life, and to bring together interests long separated and
unmindful of each other, and make them realize that their interests are
identical. It is one of the commonplaces of economics that urban
and rural interests are identical: but in truth the townsman and the
countryman have always acted as if their interests were opposed,
and they know very little of each other. I never like to let these
commonplaces of economics pass my frontiers unless they give the
countersign to the challenge for truth. People declare in the same way
that the interests of labor and capital are identical, and implore them
not to fight with one another. But the truth of that statement seems
to me to depend largely on whether capital owns labor or labor owns
capital. As an abstract proposition it is one of the economic formulae I
would leave instructions at my frontiers to have detained until further
inquiry as to its antecedents. All these statements may be true, but
to make them operative, to give them a dynamic rather than a static
character, we must convince people they are true by close argument and
still more so by realistic illustration.

To bring about a high nobility in the national soul we must make harmony
in its economic life, and the two main currents of economic energy--the
agricultural and urban--must be made to flow so that their action will
not defeat each other. Let us take the farmer first. How ought he to
wish to see life in the towns develop? Should he wish for the triumph of
labor or capital: the success of the co-operative movement, the triump