"Let Pike rest a moment and get his breath," he said, warming to the subject, "I want to tell Mr. Robertson that the productivity of the earth is gaining every year. Here's this old earth feeding us all—laying golden eggs as it were; and we used to get those eggs by the Cæsarian operation! We uniformly exhausted the soil—uniformly! Now a man would no more think of injuring the soil, the soil that feeds him, than he would of hurting his mother. We steadily improve the soil; we improve the seed; we improve methods of culture; we improve everything."
Mrs. Allerton struck in here, "Not forgetting the methods of transportation, Mr. Robertson. There was one kind of old world folly which made great waste of labor and time; that was our constant desire to eat things out of season. There is now a truer sense of what is really good eating; no one wants to eat asparagus that is not of the best, and asparagus cut five or ten days cannot be really good. We do not carry things about unnecessarily; and the carrying we do is swift, easy and economical. For slow freight we use waterways wherever possible—you will be pleased to see the 'all-water routes' that thread the country now. And our roads—you haven't seen our roads yet! We lead the world."
"We used to be at the foot of the class as to roads, did we not?" I asked; and Mr. Pike swiftly answered:
"We did, indeed, sir. But that very need of good roads made easy to us the second step in abolishing poverty. Here was a great social need calling for labor; here were thousands of men calling for employment; and here were we keeping the supply from the demand by main strength—merely from those archaic ideas of ours.
"We had a mass of valuable data already collected, and now that the whole country teemed with new ideals of citizenship and statesmanship, it did not take very long to get the two together."
"We furnished employment for all the women, too," my sister added. "A Social Service Union was formed the country over; it was part of the new religion. Every town has one—men and women. The same spirit that used to give us crusaders and missionaries now gave plenty of enthusiastic workers."
"I don't see yet how you got up any enthusiasm about work," said I.
"It was not work for oneself," Nellie explained. "That is what used to make it so sordid; we used really to believe that we were working each for himself. This new idea was overwhelming in its simplicity—and truth; work is social service—social service is religion—that's about it."
"Not only so," Dr. Harkness added, "it made a three-fold appeal; to the old, deep-seated religious sense; to the new, vivid intellectual acceptance; and to the very widespread, wholesome appreciation of a clear advantage.
"When a thing was offered to the world that agreed with every social instinct, that appealed to common sense, that was established by the highest scientific authority, and that had the overwhelming sanction of religion—why the world took to it."