The Affable Stranger

by Peter McArthur

The farmer is finding out what crops do not pay in dollars and is discarding them—thereby increasing the various shortages. In order to make him efficient in this destructive work, governments are imposing income taxes and compelling the farmer to keep books. And no one is calling attention to the basic fact that farming is above all a home-making business and that money-making is secondary. Our pioneer fathers raised all crops for their own use, with the result that they had plenty and a surplus to feed the cities of those days.

The whole tendency of the time is to make the country more like the cities—to give the farm city advantages. Cities are not content with increasing their wealth and population. They promote radial railways and manufacture automobiles to bring the farmers to the cities. They educate them to patronize the movies and follow the fashions. Every day the farms are becoming more like the cities. Farm children are given city educations and they develop city tastes. The world is mad on the building of cities. Some months ago an enthusiast sitting in the chair beside me in the lobby of a Toronto hotel showed me how the development of hydro-electric power on the Niagara River and the St. Lawrence would finally transform New York State and the Province of Ontario into one vast city from Manhattan to Port Arthur. And he added triumphantly:

"Then we could dictate to the world."

It sounded very progressive and alluring, but as I was waiting for the dining-room to open, the promptings of appetite led me to wonder how this great city of the future is to be fed.

The simple fact is that the country is getting so like the cities that it is stopping the production of food, and unless the tide turns the cities and the country will commit suicide together. But as indicated in a previous chapter there is a door of hope. Our fathers laid the foundations of a country civilization, richer and more satisfying than any city civilization the world has known. If we turn in time and build on that foundation the predictions of all the prophets will be confuted.

Now the time has come to announce the new law, the law of reversal which has been touched upon in a previous chapter. It has already begun to operate and all that remains is for the majority to fall in line with it.

And the majority will do this.

In the great crises of the past it was predicted that "a remnant will be saved."

The time has come to announce the reversal of this law and proclaim that "a majority will be saved."

If you stop to weigh recent events, you will find that there is a sound reason for this proclamation. Since the signing of the armistice there have been strikes, both authorized and "outlaw," that interfered with the rights of the majority of the people. And the people did not endure them tamely. In Winnipeg, Seattle, New Jersey, and elsewhere the people undertook to do the work that was being stopped by the strikers. In almost all these cases the volunteer workers went too far in their manifestations—forgot the need of adhering to legal methods. But they made it quite clear that the big, quaking, foolish majority is no longer in the mood to put up with the tyranny of noisy minorities. All strikes and disturbances in the transaction of business cause more trouble and suffering to the ordinary citizens than to those who are directly involved. And experience has shown that the ordinary people of Canada and the United States are not ordinary. On the battlefields of Europe the privates on many occasions showed themselves as resourceful as their officers and as ready to cope with difficult problems. Those whose affairs are being interfered with by men who depart from constitutional methods to redress their grievances are not an ignorant and oppressed mob, but men who have been accustomed all their lives to freedom and legal methods. They are not lacking in courage or initiative, and are entirely capable of calling "bluffs" of all kinds. It so happens that the "bluff" of some irresponsible agitators is the first that has been forced on their attention, and their response is the most cheering news we have had for many a day. It may mean the beginning of a better era. Most of the wrongs from which struggling humanity suffers are due to "bluffs"—some of them very respectable and imposing—and if the people start to call them we shall have a notable house-cleaning. Moreover, all these can be called without departing from the constitutional methods established by our fathers, and which our sons so heroically defended.