The Magical Chance

by Dallas Lore Sharp

We are all conscripted. The Draft Board of industrialism allows no exemptions. The only way I see is to desert, to take to the woods, as I have done, to return individually to a simple, elemental manner of life out of the soil. But who can pay the social cost? Our social or camp psychology is better understood and more easily handled than the mind of the lone scout within us. We are gregarious by nature; we hunt in packs, we collect into crowds. Yet we are selves, separate, single, each of us a cave-man as well as cliff-dweller, a Remus as well as a Romulus. The city-building brother killed his country brother. And the murder still goes on.

Out of a commentary on the Bible I take the following observation, partly for its charm, but also because it holds a profound truth:

God’s people from the earliest time had never been builders of cities. The earliest account of city-building is that of the city of Enoch by Cain, and all the subsequent mention of city-building is in connection with the apostate families of the earth, such as Nimrod and his descendants, the Canaanites and the Egyptians. Sodom is one of the earliest mentioned cities properly so called, and the story of it is not encouraging for the people of God.

But which is the city whose story is encouraging to the people of God? Not Boston’s, nor New York’s, nor London’s, nor Vienna’s. Vienna is starving; the country is bankrupt Austria’s governmental machine is a total wreck; but the peasant goes his way, suffering little inconvenience, though the crown is not to-day worth the paper it is printed on. The peasant lives on the land, not on the bank; he gets his simple life directly out of the soil instead of a pay envelope; he has no New York, New Haven and Hartford stock, worth one hundred and eighty-six dollars yesterday, and ten dollars to-day, to-morrow, and until he starves. He has a piece of land and, impossible as it sounds on paper, lives on it, and out of it, and in it, an almost independent life, as the wage-slave and the coupon-victim cannot live.

We shall face a famine, so long as our door-yards are all lawn in front and all garbage-can behind. We have farmers enough—one to every eight of our population, I believe—who might produce sufficient raw potatoes; but Aroostook County is barely contiguous to the United States, and such a barrage of frost was laid down across its borders this last winter that, if one brought potatoes out of Aroostook between December and March, he had to bear them in his bosom.

Aroostook County is the greatest potato-patch in the world; the American imagination loves to hover over the tubered tracts of Aroostook, the richest county in the world; loves to feel that the world could be fed from Aroostook, were it not for the triple alliance of the cold and the contiguity and a railroad that runs, if not like a broken tooth, then like a foot out of joint, into these remote dreamlands of Maine.

Woe to them that go down to the railroads for help; and stay on engines and trust in empties, because they are many; and in officials, because they are very strong. Now the officials are men and not God, and their engines steel and not spirit. Why should a rational, spiritual human society trust its well-being to such paltry powers, when all the forces of nature are at its command?

I will put more trust in an acre of land than in a Continental Congress. I had rather have a hoe at my right hand than an army of bank presidents. Give me the rising and the setting sun, the four seasons, and the peasant’s portion; and you may have the portion of the president.

I said we have farmers enough to raise all we need. We have more than enough. We have more than enough bankers; more than enough automobile-makers; more than enough store-keepers; more than enough coal-miners; more than enough cooks and janitors. But we have nowhere near enough landowners and peasants. Nothing in the world would so straighten out society as to declare next year a Year of Jubilee, and give every man, not a job, but his birthright, a piece of land.

We are over-organized and almost de-individualized. But the time must again come when every man shall dig and every woman spin, and every family build its own automobile, distill its own petrol, and work out its taxes on the road. We shall always hold to the social principle of the division of labor—I plough for you; and you shoe my horse for me. But we have carried the principle, in our over-organization, to the point where a man’s whole part in the world’s work consists in putting on the left hind wheel of endless automobiles.