be entrusted with all the thinking. A visit a few months
ago to any city seed-store would have forced upon any critical observer
how ignorant city people are of the effort required to produce even
their most familiar foods.

Healthy national ideals require a contribution from both urban and rural
experience. The first we have in quantity. It is the second we lack. It
is the business of those who conserve social welfare to respect the
conclusions of rural thinkers and to discover how rural experience may
make its largest contribution to national policy and social opinion.

RURAL VS. URBAN ENVIRONMENT

VII

RURAL VS. URBAN ENVIRONMENT

We had just finished eating lunch at one of the more quiet hotels of our
greatest city. We lingered after the meal for a chat, this being one of
the privileges of the place, untroubled by the type of waiter, hungry
for tips, who so often at the metropolitan hotels conveys unmistakably
the idea that one's departure is expected to follow directly the
presentation of his bill. The host was a man of business, famed for his
success and his interest in public affairs, and especially generous in
giving of his money and time to further movements that attempt the
betterment of rural life. He had spent his youth in the open country and
had never lost any of the vividness of his first joys. It was this
mutual interest in rural problems that had brought host and guest
together for a quiet talk.

"Will you give me your deepest impression of the city as you came into
it from the country?" asked the man of business of the student.

"I hardly can claim one impression, there are so many."

"But one must be deeper or at least more consciously so than the others.
It is that I want. I'll tell you in return my strongest impression when
recently I visited, for the first time in several years, the farm where
I was born."

"I suppose the line of thought that captured my mind when I first came
into the city tonight is what you want."

"Yes."

"I began to think not of your noise or your hurry, your poverty or your
crowds, but of your atmosphere of what I call popular materialism. Do
you understand what I mean?"

"Perhaps not."

"I mean I sensed everywhere the emphasis upon the power of money. I
suppose it is an experience forced upon the consciousness of everyone
who comes into the life of this great city from a small community. It
seems as if the city was a monument to the idea that m