eration with the immense results
of his labour, is easily attracted to remedies worse than the disease. A
fuller and more exact understanding of the means by which the wealth of
the community is created is, for the townsman, the best antidote to
mischievous agitation so far as it is not merely the result of poverty.
But the countryman, especially the proprietor of a piece of land,
however small, is protected from this infection. The atmosphere in which
Socialism of the predatory kind can grow up does not exist among a
prosperous farming community--perhaps because in the country the
question of the divorce of the worker from his raw material by
capitalism does not arise. The farm furnishes the raw material of the
farmer; yet he cannot be said to spend his life creating the alleged
"surplus value" of Marxian doctrine. For these reasons I suggest that
the orderly and safe progress of democracy demands a strong agricultural
population. It is as true now as when Aristotle said it that "where
husbandmen and men of small fortune predominate government will be
guided by law."

I have now shown that for every reason the interests of the rural
population ought no longer to be subordinated to those of the city. That
such has been the tendency in English-speaking countries will hardly be
questioned. In Great Britain the rural exodus has gone on with a
vengeance. The last census (1901) showed that seventy-seven per cent of
the population was urban, and only twenty-three per cent rural. A few
years ago there were derelict farms within easy walk of the outskirts
of London. In Ireland the rural exodus took the form of emigration,
mainly to American cities, and this has been the chief factor in the
reduction of the population in sixty years from more than eight millions
to a trifle above four. But it may be thought that in the United States
no similar tendency is in operation. Certainly those who admit the
townward drift of country life may fairly say that it does not present
so urgent a problem in the New World as in parts of the Old. Even
granting that this is so, the fact remains that the town population of
America is seriously outgrowing the rural population; for, while the
towns are growing hugely, the country stands still. Moreover, we must
not forget that, Australia apart, America is even still the most
underpopulated part of the globe. We are accustomed to think Ireland
underpopulated, owing to emigration, yet even to-day the sc