Let us consider their case.
In the modern farmer, free, educated, prosperous, we have the one new thing under the sun: something for which history has no precedent. The old cities and civilizations were all fed, supported, and enriched by the slave populations that worked the land, dug the mines, and did every kind of productive work. And when the cities went down the country perished also. But thanks to the ideals of our fathers, the farmers and laborers of to-day are educated like the free citizens of the ancient cities. If we had continued true to the ideals of our fathers, we should all have self-supporting homes of our own. But we must build cities, organize for profit, and live luxuriously.
Mark what has happened. Capital was accumulated in the cities. Capital gradually organized business and established it in the great centres. When business was centralized, labor was centralized and began to organize. Now capital and labor are at each other's throats and likely to prove themselves the substance of Shelley's symbols.
"We two will sink on the wide waves of ruin
Even as a vulture and a snake outspent
Drop, twisted in inextricable fight,
Into a shoreless sea."
At the present time the farmers are the sole inheritors of the ideals of our fathers. But like the foolish men of the cities they are also organizing for profit. They have forgotten that the home was the one great ideal of the men and women who braved the perils of the ocean and conquered the wilderness. Farming is above all a home-building occupation—rather than a money-making business. But now men no longer regard the place where they live as a home. It is merely a speculation in real estate. They try to estimate everything in terms of dollars—and the money profits are so meagre that all who are able are deserting the farms and joining in the great jazz-time dollar dance of the cities. The farmers are forsaking the substance for the glitter—or are organizing for political power so that they may divert the stream of dollars toward the farms. Of course it can be shown that under modern conditions there can be no home without money. But why trouble about modern conditions? The world is very old and has developed many great men and all that we know of good without the aid of modern conditions. Few of the poets and prophets and great leaders of the past were born in the cities. "Modern conditions"—luxury, extravagance, dissipation, and parasitism—undoubtedly encompassed the destruction of all the great cities whose names move sonorously in verse. And now the farmers are lusting for the "modern conditions" that are hurrying the cities to destruction.
Now that the farmers are educated and "profess apprehension," why do they not read the great portents of our time? Can they not see that some cosmic pendulum that measures the progress of man toward his destiny has started on its backward swing? All the great symbols and allegories by which we have been taught in the past are now being reversed.
After the Deluge men built the Tower of Babel so that they might not be destroyed. And for their presumption they were scattered by a confusion of tongues.