one of
the larger issues:

"The higher the moral and intellectual status of a people, the more
essential become space, leisure and soul-expression for bringing
children into the world. When evolving persons have reached
individuality, and the elements of greatness are formative within them,
they pay the price for reversion to worldliness in the extinction of
name. The race that produced Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman, that
founded our culture and gave us a name in English, is following the red
Indian _westward_ off the face of the earth.

"Trade makes the city; congestion makes for commonness and the death of
the individual. Only the younger and physical races, or the remnant of
that race of instinctive tradesmen which has failed as a spiritual
experiment, can exist in the midst of the tendencies and conditions of
metropolitan America. One of the most enthralling mysteries of life is
that children will not come to highly evolved men and women who have
turned back upon their spiritual obligations and clouded the vision
which was their birthright."

It is very clear to me that the Anglo-Saxons at least, after a
generation or two of town-life, must give up trade and emerge from the
City for the recreating part of their year, or else suffer in deeper
ways than death. The City will do for those younger-souled peoples that
have not had their taste of its cruel order and complicating pressures;
for the Mediterranean peoples already touched with decadence; for the
strong yet simple peasant vitalities of Northern Europe, but the flower
of the American entity has already remained too long in the ruck of
life.

There came a Spring at last in which there was but one elm-tree. The
rest was flat-buildings and asphalt and motor-puddled air. I was working
long in those April days, while the great elm-tree broke into life at
the window. There is a green all its own to the young elm-leaves, and
that green was all our Spring. Voices of the street came up through it,
and whispers of the wind. I remember one smoky moon, and there was a
certain dawn in which I loved, more strangely than ever, the cut-leaved
profile against the grey-red East. The spirit of it seemed to come to
me, and all that the elm-tree meant--hill-cabins and country dusks, bees
and blooms and stars, and the plain holy life of kindliness and
aspiration. In this dawn I found myself dreaming, thirsting, wasting for
all that the elm-tree knew--as if I were exiled from