ave equally good milk left. In
America the drain may continue a while longer without the inevitable
consequences becoming plainly visible. But sooner or later, if the
balance of trade in this human traffic be not adjusted, the raw material
out of which urban society is made will be seriously deteriorated, and
the symptoms of National degeneracy will be properly charged against
those who neglected to foresee the evil and treat the cause. It is
enough for my present purpose if it be admitted that the people of every
state are largely bred in rural districts, and that the physical and
moral well-being of these districts must eventually influence the
quality of the whole people.

I come now to the political considerations which, I think, have not been
sufficiently taken into account. In most countries political life
depends largely for its steadiness and sanity upon a strong infusion of
rural opinion into the counsels of the nation. It is a truism that
democracy requires for success a higher level of intelligence and
character in the mass of the people than other forms of government. But
intelligence alone is not enough for the citizen of a democracy; he must
have experience as well, and the experience of a townsman is essentially
imperfect. He has generally a wider theoretical knowledge than the
rustic of the main processes by which the community lives; but the
rustic's practical knowledge of the more fundamental of them is wider
than the townsman's. He knows actually and in detail how corn is grown
and how beasts are bred, whereas the town artisan hardly knows how the
whole of any one article of commerce is made. The townsman sees and
takes part in the wonderful achievements of industrial science without
any full understanding of its methods or of the relative importance and
the interaction of the forces engaged. To this one-sided experience may
be attributed in some measure that disregard of inconvenient facts, and
that impatience of the limits of practicability, which many observers
note as a characteristic defect of popular government.

However that may be, there is one symptom in modern politics of which
the gravity is generally acknowledged, while its special connection with
the towns is an easily ascertainable fact; I mean the growth of the
cruder forms of Socialism. The town artisan or labourer, who sees
displayed before him vast masses of property in which he has no share,
and contrasts the smallness of his remun