are qualified to improve them. The cities are the great
markets for talent and skill, as well as for commodities.
They would be badly off if the energy that makes them hum
were not perpetually re-enforced out of the great country
reservoirs. The country would be a worse place if the
superfluous vigor that is bred there had not the cities in
which to spend itself.

To get to some town is the natural and legitimate aspiration
of a considerable proportion of the sons and daughters of
American farmers. But as the waters that run to the sea are
carried back by the process of evaporation, so there must
be, as our cities grow greater, a return current out of them
countryward for the people for whom town life is no longer
profitable, and whose nerves and thews need nature's
medication.

There is such a current as it is. People who get rich in
town promptly provide themselves with country homes, and
spend more and more of the year in them as their years
increase and their strength declines. But for the people who
don't get rich, the combination, or the transition, is not
so easy. A due proportion of the people who are game to
stand more noise, canned food, and struggle in their lives,
and who ought to get to town, will get there.

The other process--to get back into the country the
families, and especially the children, who have had more
continuous city life than is good for them--needs a good
deal of outside assistance, and gets some, though not yet as
much as it requires.

MAKING MONEY IS A RELIGIOUS DUTY.

John D. Rockefeller Recounts His Own
Early Struggles and Shows to Young
Men the Virtues of Economy.

It may be, as sometimes has been said, that more is to be learned from the
mistakes of other men than from their successes. If that be true it is
because the reasons for their mistakes can hardly be concealed. Whether or
not successful men betray the secrets of their successes, however, usually
rests with themselves. In studying success, it is the occasional intimate
disclosure that bears value rather than the superficial record.

John D. Rockefeller has addressed to the Bible class over which his son
presides a pamphlet entitled "First Ledger of a Successful Man of
Affairs." In it he tells of the ledger he kept as a young man, in which
all his receipts and expenditures were most carefully reco