We expect young countries to sow
their wild oats, to have a few revolutions before they settle down
to national housekeeping; but we are not moved by these troubles--the
result of excessive energy--as we are by symptoms of premature decay. No
nation can be regarded as unhealthy when a virile peasantry, contented
with rural employments, however discontented with other things, exists
on its soil. The disease which has attacked our great populations here
and in America is a discontent with rural life. Nothing which has been
done hitherto seems able to promote content. It is true, indeed, that
science has gone out into the fields, but the labors of the chemist,
the bacteriologist, and the mechanical engineer are not enough to
ensure health. What is required is the art of the political thinker, the
imagination which creates a social order and adjusts it to human needs.
The physician who understands the general laws of human health is of
more importance to us here than the specialist. The genius of rural life
has not yet appeared. We have no fundamental philosophy concerning it,
but we have treasures of political wisdom dealing with humanity as a
social organism in the city States or as great nationalities. It might
be worth while inquiring to what extent the wisdom of a Solon, an
Aristotle, a Rousseau, or an Alexander Hamilton might be applied to the
problem of the rural community. After all, men are not so completely
changed in character by their rural environment that their social needs
do not, to a large extent, coincide with the needs of the townsman. They
cannot be considered as creatures of a different species. Yet statesmen
who have devoted so much thought to the constitution of empires and the
organization of great cities, who have studied their psychology, have
almost always treated the rural problem purely as an economic problem,
as if agriculture was a business only and not a life.

Our great nations and widespread empires arose in a haphazard fashion
out of city States and scattered tribal communities. The fusion of these
into larger entities, which could act jointly for offence or defense,
so much occupied the thoughts of their rulers that everything else was
subordinated to it. As a result, the details of our modern civilizations
are all wrong. There is an intensive life at a few great political or
industrial centres, and wide areas where there is stagnation and decay.
Stagnation is most obvious in rural distri