d up in the city mire in a month than can be won from the ploughed
fallow in a year. It is not until the altars of Pan are overthrown
that the worship of Mammon is triumphant, and the mischief is that when
the great god Pan is driven away he returns no more. When once
Money-hunger seizes on a nation, that primitive and wholesome
Earth-hunger--old as the primal Eden, where man's life began--is
stifled at the birth; the spade and harrow rust, and instead of swords
being beaten to ploughshares, ploughshares are beaten into swords for
the use of soldiers who are the gladiators of commercial avarice; the
wealth of the country runs into the swamp of speculation; the scripture
of Nature is cast aside for the blotted pages of the betting-book;
sport becomes not a means of recreation but of gambling; and instead of
sturdy races bred upon the soil, and drawing from the soil solid
qualities of mind and body, you have blighted and anaemic races, bred
amid the populous disease of cities, and incapable of any task that
shall demand steady energy, continuous thought, or sober powers of
reflection or of will.

CHAPTER V

HEALTH AND ECONOMICS

Enough has been said to show that I never heartily settled to a town
life, and that the obstacle to content was my own character. Mere
discontent with one's environment, however useful it may be as an
irritant to prevent stagnation and brutish acquiescence, obviously does
not carry one very far. Men may chafe for years at the conditions of
their lot without in any way attempting to amend them. I soon came to
see that I was in danger of falling into this condition of futility. I
was, therefore, forced to face the question whether my continual inward
protest against the kind of life which I led was founded on anything
more stable than an opinion or a sentiment? No man ever yet took a
positively heroic or original course for the sake of an opinion.
Opinion must become conviction before it has any potency to change the
ordering of life. I saw plainly that I must either bring my thoughts
to the point of conviction or discard them altogether.

There is a good phrase which is sometimes used about men who are
members of a party, without in any way entering into its propagandist
aims--we say that they 'do not play the game.' They may have excellent
philosophic reasons for their aloofness, or even admirable scruples;
but parties do not ask for either. Parties ask for party loyalty, and