p the drift cityward. We may remark just here that if you
live a thousand miles from nowhere and are willing to drive your Tin
Lizzie into town for "the advantages," you aren't likely to get much even
along the line of the movies, and you'll get less still if what you're
after is an A-1 school for your progeny.

Finally, the widespread impression that the farmer is a bloated and
unscrupulous profiteer has done much to disgust him with his station and
employment in life. We don't say he's the one and only when it comes to
the virtues. Maybe he hasn't sprouted any wings yet. What if he hasn't?
The cities, with their brothels, their big business, and their municipal
governments--you wouldn't have the face to say that there's anything wrong
with them, now would you? Oh, no! Of course not! The farmer pays high for
his machinery and goes clear to the bottom of his pocketbook when he has
to buy shoes or a sack of flour, but let him have a steer's hide or a
wagon load of wheat to sell, and it's somebody else's ox that's gored.
Consumers pay big prices for farm products, goodness knows, but they don't
pay them to the farmer. Not on your tintype. The middleman gets his, you
needn't question that. We beg pardon a thousand times. We mean the
middle_men_. There's no end to those human parasites.

And so farmer after farmer breaks up the old homestead and contributes his
mite to the drift cityward. What will be the result that comes out of it
all? The effect upon the farmer deserves an editorial all to itself. Here
we must limit ourselves to the effects on the future of our beloved
American nation. And even these we can now do no more than mention; we
lack space to elaborate them. One effect, if the tendency continues, will
be such a reduction in home-produced foodstuffs that we shall have to
import from other countries lying abroad a good portion of the means of
our physical sustenance, and shall face such an increase in the cost of
the same that thousands and thousands of our people will find it
increasingly harder as the years pass by to maintain their relative
economic position. Another effect will be that our civilization, which to
this point has sprawled over broad acres, will become an urban
civilization, penned in amid conditions, restraints, privations, and
perhaps also opportunities unprecedented in our past history and unknown
to the experience we have had hitherto. A final effect will be that our
most conservative class,