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The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924015438405 
 
THE HOLY EARTH 
 
THE BACKGROUND BOOKS 
 
 Under this general title Mr. Bailey will present 
 from time to time, in small books, his personal 
 expressions on the important and interesting 
 subjects to which he has devoted his life. 
 
THE 
 
 HOLY EARTH 
 
 BY 
 
 L. H. BAILEY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1915 
 
C07TBIOBT, 19IS, BT 
 
 CHAKLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 Published September, 1915 
 
 <H ^ 
 
 '::? 
 
 'd 
 
Contents 
 
 PAOa 
 
 FiHST, The Statement: Pages 1-16 
 
 In the beginning 5 
 
 The earth is good 7 
 
 It is kindly 10 
 
 The earth is holy 14 
 
 Second, The Consequences: Pages 17-171 
 
 The habit of destruction 18 
 
 The new hold 22 
 
 The brotherhood relation 30 
 
 The fanner's relation 32 
 
 The underlying training of a people 39 
 
 The neighbor's access to the earth 42 
 
 The subdividing of the land 48 
 
 A new map 55 
 
 The public program 61 
 
 The honest day's work 66 
 
 The group reaction 70 
 
 The spiritual contact with nature 75 
 
 The struggle for existence: war 80 
 
 The daily fare 90 
 
 The admiration of good materials 103 
 
 The keeping of the beautiful earth 115 
 
 V 
 
Contents 
 
 FAGB 
 
 The tones of industry 120 
 
 The threatened literature 124 
 
 The separate soul 130 
 
 The element of separateness in society .... 136 
 
 The democratic basis in agriculture 139 
 
 The background spaces. — ^The forest 150 
 
 A forest background for a reformatory .... 156 
 
 The background spaces. — ^The open fields . . . 164 
 
 The background spaces. — ^The ancestral sea . . . 167 
 
 VI 
 
THE HOLY EARTH 
 
THE HOLY EARTH 
 
 First, the Statement 
 
 So BOUNTIFUL hath been the earth and so se- 
 curely have we drawn from it our substance, that 
 we have taken it all for granted as if it were only 
 a gift, and with little care or conscious thought of 
 the consequences of our use of it; nor have we very 
 much considered the essential relation that we bear 
 to it as living parts in the vast creation. 
 
 It is good to think of ourselves — of this teeming, 
 tense, and aspiring human race — as a helpful and 
 contributing part in the plan of a cosmos, and as_ 
 participators in some far-reaching destiny. The 
 idea of responsibility is much asserted of late, but 
 we relate it mostly to the attitude of persons in 
 the realm of conventional conduct, which we have 
 come to regard as very exclusively the realm of 
 morals; and we have established certain formalities 
 that satisfy the conscience. But there is some 
 deeper relation than all this, which we must rec- 
 ognize and the consequences of which we must 
 practise. There is a directer and more personal ob- 
 
 1 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 ligation, than that which expends itself in loyalty 
 to the manifold organizations and social require- 
 ments of the present day. There is a more funda- 
 mental co-operation in the scheme of things than 
 that which deals with the proprieties or which cen- 
 tres about the selfishness too often expressed in the 
 salvation of one's soul. 
 
 We can be only onlookers on that part of the 
 cosmos that we call the far heavens, but it is pos- 
 sible to co-operate in the processes on the surface 
 of the sphere. This co-operation may be conscious 
 and definite, and also useful to the earth; that 
 is, it may be real. What means this contact with 
 our natural situation, this relationship to the earth 
 to which we are born, and what signify this new 
 exploration and conquest of the planet and these ac- 
 cumulating prophecies of science ? Does the moth- 
 ership of the earth have any real meaning to us? 
 
 All this does not imply a relation only with ma- 
 terial and physical things, nor any effort to sub- 
 stitute a nature religion. Our relation with the 
 planet must be raised into the realm of spirit; we 
 cannot be fully useful otherwise. We must find a 
 way to maintain the emotions in the abounding 
 commercial civilization. There are two kinds of ma- 
 terials, — ^those of the native earth and the idols of 
 one's hands. The latter are much in evidence in 
 modern life, with the conquests of engineering, 
 
 2 
 
The Contact 
 
 mechanics, architecture, and all the rest. We vis- 
 ualize them everywhere, and particularly in the 
 great centres of population. The tendency is to be 
 removed farther and farther from the everlasting 
 backgrounds. Our religion is detached. 
 
 We come out of the earth and we have a right to ^ 
 the use of the materials; and there is no danger of 
 crass materialism if we recognize the original ma- 
 terials as divine and if we understand our proper 
 relation to the creation, for then will gross selfish- 
 ness in the use of them be removed. This will 
 necessarily mean a better conception- of property 
 and of one's obligation in the use of it. We shall 
 conceive of the earth, which is the common habi- 
 tation, as inviolable. One does not act rightly to- 
 ward one's fellows if one does not know how to act 
 rightly toward the earth. J 
 
 Nor does this close regard for the mother earth 
 imply any loss of mysticism or of exaltation: quite 
 the contrary. Science but increases the mystery of 
 the unknown and enlarges the boundaries of the 
 spiritual vision. To feel that one is a usefxil and 
 co-operating part in nature is to give one kinship, 
 and to open the mind to the great resources and 
 the high enthusiasms. Here arise the fundamental 
 common relations. Here arise also the great emo- 
 tions and conceptions of sublimity and grandeur, of 
 majesty and awe, the uplift of vast desires, — when 
 
 3 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 one contemplates the earth and the universe and 
 desires to take them into the soul and to express 
 oneself in their terms; and here also the respon- 
 sible practices of life take root. 
 
 So much are we now involved in problems of 
 human groups, so persistent are the portrayals of 
 our social afflictions, and so well do we magnify our 
 woes by insisting on them, so much in sheer weari- 
 ness do we provide antidotes to soothe our feelings 
 and to cause us to forget by means of many empty 
 diversions, that we may neglect to express ourselves 
 in simple free personal joy and to separate the obli- 
 gation of the individual from the irresponsibilities 
 of the mass. 
 
In the beginning 
 
 It suits my purpose to quote the first sentence in 
 the Hebrew Scriptiu'e: In the beginning God created 
 the heaven and the earth. 
 
 This is a statement of tremendous reach, intro- 
 ducing the cosmos; for it sets forth in the fewest 
 words the elemental fact that the formation of the 
 created earth lies above and before man, and that 
 therefore it is not man's but God's. Man finds him- 
 self upon it, with many other creatures, all parts 
 in some system which, since it is beyond man and 
 superior to him, is divine. 
 
 Yet the planet was not at once complete when 
 life had appeared upon it. The whirling earth goes 
 through many vicissitudes; the conditions on its 
 fruitful surface are ever-changing; and the forms of 
 life must meet the new conditions : so does the cre- 
 ation continue, and every day sees the genesis in 
 process. All life contends, sometimes ferociously 
 but more often bloodlessly and benignly, and the 
 contention results in momentary equilibriiun, one set 
 of contestants balancing another; but every change 
 in the outward conditions destroys the equation and 
 a new status results. Of all the disturbing living 
 factors, man is the greatest. He sets mighty changes 
 
 5 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 going, destroying forests, upturning the sleeping 
 prairies, flooding the deserts, deflecting the courses 
 of the rivers, building great cities. He operates 
 consciously and increasingly with plan aforethought; 
 and therefore he carries heavy responsibility. 
 
 This responsibility is recognized in the Hebrew 
 Scripture, from which I have quoted; and I quote 
 it again because I know of no other Scripture that 
 states it so well. Man is given the image of the 
 creator, even when formed from the dust of the 
 earth, so complete is his power and so real his do- 
 minion: And God blessed them: and God said unto 
 them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the 
 earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the 
 fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and 
 over every hving thing that moveth upon the earth. 
 
 One cannot receive all these privileges without 
 bearing the obligation to react and to partake, to 
 keep, to cherish, and to co-operate. We have as- 
 sumed that there is no obligation to an inanimate 
 thing, as we consider the earth to be: but man 
 should respect the conditions in which he is placed; 
 the earth yields the living creature; man is a living 
 creature; science constantly narrows the gulf be- 
 tween the animate and the inanimate, between the 
 organized and the inorganized; evolution derives the 
 creatures from the earth; the creation is one creation. 
 I must accept all or reject all. 
 
 6 
 
The earth is good 
 
 It is good to live. We talk of death and of life- 
 lessness, but we know only of life. Even our 
 prophecies of death are prophecies of more life. 
 We know no better world: whatever else there 
 may be is of things hoped for, not of things seen. 
 The objects are here, not hidden nor far to seek: 
 And God saw everything that he had made, and, 
 behold, it was very good. 
 
 These good things are the present things and the 
 living things. The account is silent on the things 
 that were not created, the chaos, the darkness, the 
 abyss. Plato, in the "Republic," reasoned that the 
 works of the creator must be good because the 
 creator is good. This goodness is in the essence of 
 things; and we sadly need to make it a part in our 
 philosophy of life. The earth is the scene of our 
 life, and probably the very source of it. The heaven, 
 so far as human beings know, is the source only of 
 death; in fact, we have peopled it with the dead. 
 We have built our philosophy on the dead. 
 
 We seem to have overlooked the goodness of the 
 earth in the estabhshing of our affairs, and even in 
 our philosophies. It is reserved as a theme for 
 
 7 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 preachers and for poets. And yet, the goodness of 
 the planet is the basic fact in our existence. 
 
 I am not speaking of good in an abstract way, in 
 the sense in which some of us suppose the creator 
 to have expressed himself as pleased or satisfied 
 with his work. The earth is good in itself, and its 
 products are good in themselves. The earth sus- 
 tains all things. It satisfies. It matters not whether 
 this satisfaction is the result of adaptation in the 
 process of evolution; the fact remains that the 
 creation is good. 
 
 To the common man the earth propounds no sys- 
 tem of philosophy or of theology. The man makes 
 his own personal contact, deals with, the facts as 
 they are or as he conceives them to be, and is not 
 swept into any system. He has no right to assume 
 a bad or evil earth, although it is difficult to cast 
 off the hindrance of centuries of teaching. When 
 he is properly educated he will get a new resource 
 from his relationships. 
 
 It may be difficult to demonstrate this goodness. 
 In the nature of things we must assume it, although 
 we know that we could not subsist on a sphere of 
 the opposite qualities. The important considera- 
 tion is that we appreciate it, and this not in any 
 sentimental and impersonal way. To every bird 
 the air is good; and a ma n knows it is go od if he is 
 worth _bmg^ a man. To every fish the water is 
 
 8 
 
The Earth is Good 
 
 good. To every beast its food is good, and its time 
 of sleep is good. The creatures experience that 
 life is good. Every man in his heart knows that 
 there is goodness and wholeness in the rain, in 
 the wind, the soil, the sea, the glory of smirise, 
 in the trees, and in the sustenance that we derive 
 from the planet. When we grasp the significance 
 of this situation, we shall forever supplant the re- 
 ligion of fear with a religion of consent. 
 
 We are so accustomed to these essentials — to the 
 rain, the wind, the soil, the sea, the sunrise, the 
 trees, the sustenance — that we may not include 
 them in the categories of the good things, and we 
 endeavor to satisfy ourselves with many small and 
 trivial and exotic gratifications; and when these 
 gratifications fail or pall, we find ourselves helpless 
 and resourceless. The joy of sound sleep, the relish 
 of a sufficient meal of plain and wholesome food, the 
 desire to do a good day's work and the recompense 
 when at night we are tired from the doing of it, the 
 exhilaration of fresh air, the exercise of the natural 
 powers, the mastery of a situation or a problem, — 
 these and many others like them are fundamental 
 satisfactions, beyond all pampering and all toys, 
 and they are of the essence of goodness. I think 
 we should teach all children how good are the com- 
 mon necessities, and how very good are the things 
 that are made in the beginning. 
 9 
 
It is kindly 
 
 We hear much about man being at the mercy of 
 nature, and the literalist will contend that there can 
 be no holy relation under such conditions. But so 
 is man at the mercy of God. 
 
 It is a blasphemous practice that speaks of the hos- 
 tility of the earth, as if the earth were f uU of menaces 
 and cataclysms. The old fear of nature, that peo- 
 pled the earth and sky with imps and demons, and 
 that gave a future state to Satan, yet possesses the 
 minds of men, only that we may have ceased to 
 personify and to demonize our fears, although we 
 still persistently contrast what we call the evil and 
 the good. Still do we attempt to propitiate and 
 appease the adversaries. Still do we carry the ban 
 of the early philosophy that assumed materials 
 and "the flesh" to be evil, and that found a way 
 of escape only in renunciation and asceticism. 
 
 Nature cannot be antagonistic to man, seeing 
 that man is a product of nature. We should find 
 vast joy in the fellowship, something like the joy 
 of Pan. We should feel the relief when we no 
 longer apologize for the creator because of the 
 things that are made. 
 
 10 
 
It is Kindly 
 
 It is true that there are devastations of flood and 
 fire and frost, scourge of disease, and appalling con- 
 vulsions of earthquake and eruption. But man 
 prospers; and we know that the catastrophes are 
 greatly fewer than the accepted bounties. We have 
 no choice but to abide. No growth comes from 
 hostility. It would undoubtedly be a poor human 
 race if all the pathway had been plain and easy. 
 
 The contest with nature is wholesome, particu- 
 larly when pursued in sympathy and for mastery. 
 It is worthy a being created in God's image. The 
 earth is perhaps a stern earth, but it is a kindly 
 earth. 
 
 Most of our difficulty with the earth lies in the 
 effort to do what perhaps ought not to be done. 
 Not even all the land is fit to be farmed. A good 
 part of agriculture is to learn how to adapt one's 
 work to nature, to fit the crop-scheme to the cli- 
 mate and to the soil and the facilities. To live in 
 right relation with his natural conditions is one of 
 the first lessons that a wise farmer or any other 
 wise man learns. We are at pains to stress the im- 
 portance of conduct; very well: conduct toward the 
 earth is an essential part of it. 
 
 Nor need we be afraid of any fact that makes one 
 fact more or less in the sum of contacts between the 
 earth and the earth-born children. All "higher crit- 
 icism" adds to the faith rather than subtracts from 
 11 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 it, and strengthens the bond between. The earth 
 and its products are very real. 
 
 Our outlook lias been drawn very largely from the 
 abstract. Not being yet prepared to understand the 
 conditions of nature, man considered the earth to 
 be inhospitable, and he looked to the supernatural 
 for relief; and relief was heaven. Our pictures of 
 heaven are of the opposites of daily experience, — of 
 release, of peace, of joy uninterrupted. The hunt- 
 ing-grounds are happy and the satisfaction has no 
 end. The habit of thought has been set by this con- 
 ception, and it colors our dealings with the human 
 questions and to much extent it controls our prac- 
 tice. 
 
 But we begin to imderstand that the best dealing 
 with problems on earth is to found it on the facts of 
 earth. This is the contribution of natural science, 
 however abstract, to human welfare. Heaven is to 
 be a real consequence of life on earth; and we do 
 not lessen the hope of heaven by increasing our affec- 
 tion for the earth, but rather do we strengthen it. 
 Men now forget the old images of heaven, that they 
 are mere sojourners and wanderers lingering for de- 
 liverance, pilgrims in a strange land. Waiting for 
 this rescue, with posture and formula and phrase, 
 we have overlooked the essential goodness and 
 quickness of the earth and the immanence of God. 
 
 This feeling that we are pilgrims in a vale of tears 
 12 
 
It is Kindly 
 
 has been enhanced by the wide-spread belief in the 
 sudden ending of the world, by collision or some 
 other impending disaster, and in the common appre- 
 hension of doom; and lately by speculations as to 
 the aridation and death of the planet, to which all 
 of us have given more or less credence. But most 
 of these notions are now considered to be fantastic, 
 and we are increasingly confident that the earth is 
 not growing old in a human sense, that its atmosphere 
 and its water are held by the attraction of its mass, 
 and that the sphere is at all events so permanent 
 as to make little difference in our philosophy and 
 no difference in our good behavior. 
 
 I am again impressed with the first record in 
 Genesis in which some mighty prophet-poet began 
 his account with the creation of the physical uni- 
 verse. 
 
 So do we forget the old-time importance given to 
 mere personal salvation, which was permission to 
 live in heaven, and we think more of our present 
 situation, which is the situation of obligation and 
 of service; and he who loses his life shall save it. 
 
 We begin to foresee the vast religion of a better 
 social order. 
 
The earth is holy 
 
 Verily, then, the earth is divine, because man did 
 not make it. We are here, part in the creation. We 
 cannot escape. We are under obligation to take 
 part and to do our best, living with each other and 
 with all the creatures. We may not know the full 
 plan, but that does not alter the relation. When 
 once we set ourselves to the pleasure of our domin- 
 ion, reverently and hopefully, and assume all its re- 
 sponsibilities, we shall have a new hold on life. 
 
 We shall put our dominion into the realm of 
 morals. It is now in the realm of trade. This will 
 be very personal morals, but it will also be national 
 and racial morals. More iniquity follows the im- 
 proper and greedy division of the resources and 
 privileges of the earth than any other form of sin- 
 fulness. 
 
 If God created the earth, so is the earth hal- 
 lowed; and if it is hallowed, so must we deal with 
 it devotedly and with care that we do not despoil 
 it, and mindful of our relations to all beings that 
 live on it. We are to consider it religiously: Put 
 off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon 
 thou standest is holy ground. 
 14 
 
The Earth is Holy 
 
 The sacredness to us of the earth is intrinsic and 
 inherent. It Ues in our necessary relationship and 
 in the duty imposed upon us to have dominion, and 
 to exercise ourselves even against our own interests. 
 We may not waste that which is not ours. To live 
 in sincere relations with the company of created 
 things and with conscious regard for the support 
 of all men now and yet to come, must be of the 
 essence of righteousness. 
 
 This is a larger and more original relation than 
 the modern attitude of appreciation and admiration 
 of nature. In the days of the patriarchs and proph- 
 ets, nature and man shared in the condemnation 
 and likewise in the redemption. The ground was 
 cursed for Adam's sin. Paul wrote that the whole 
 creation groaneth and travaileth in pain, and that 
 it waiteth for the revealing. Isaiah proclaimed the 
 redemption of the wilderness and the solitary place 
 with the redemption of man, when they shall re- 
 joice and blossom as the rose, and when the glowing 
 sand shall become a pool and the thirsty ground 
 springs of water. 
 
 The usual objects have their moral significance. 
 An oak-tree is to us a moral object because it lives its 
 life regularly and fulfils its destiny. In the wind 
 and in the stars, in forest and by the shore, there is 
 spiritual refreshment: And the spirit of God moved 
 upon the face of the waters. 
 15 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 I do not mean all this, for our modern world, in 
 any vague or abstract way. If the earth is holy, 
 then the things that grow out of the earth are also 
 holy. They do not belong to man to do with them 
 as he will. Dominion does not carry personal own- 
 ership. There are many generations of folk yet to 
 come after us, who will have equal right with us to 
 the products of the globe. It would seem that a 
 divine obligation rests on every soul. Are we to 
 make righteous use of the vast accumulation of 
 knowledge of the planet? If so, we must have a 
 new formulation. The partition of the earth among 
 the millions who live on it is necessarily a question 
 of morals; and a society that is founded on an 
 unmoral partition and use cannot itself be righteous 
 and whole. 
 
 16 
 
Second, the Consequences 
 
 I HAVE now stated my purpose; and the remainder 
 of the little book will make some simple applications 
 of it and draw some inferences therefrom. There is 
 nothing here that need alarm the timid, albeit we 
 enter a disputed field, a field of opinion rather than 
 of demonstration; and if the reader goes with me, 
 I trust that we may have a pleasant journey. 
 
 It is to be a journey of recognition, not of pro- 
 test. It is needful that we do not forget. 
 
 We are not to enter into a course of reasoning 
 with those whom we meet on the way, or to pause 
 to debate the definitions and analyses made in 
 books, or to deny any of the satisfactions of tradi- 
 tion. We shall be ready for impressions; and pos- 
 sibly we shall be able to find some of the old truths 
 in unfrequented places. 
 
 17 
 
The habit of destruction 
 
 The first observation that must be apparent to 
 all men is that our dominion has been mostly de- 
 structive. 
 
 We have been greatly engaged in digging up the 
 stored resources, and in destroying vast products of 
 the earth for some small kernel that we can apply 
 to our necessities or add to our enjoyments. We 
 excavate the best of the coal and cast away the re- 
 mainder; blast the minerals and metals from under- 
 neath the crust, and leave the earth raw and sore; 
 we box the pines for turpentine and abandon the 
 growths of limitless years to fire and devastation; 
 sweep the forests with the besom of destruction; 
 pull the fish from the rivers and ponds without 
 making any adequate provision for renewal; extermi- 
 nate whole races of animals; choke the streams with 
 refuse and dross; rob the land of its available stores, 
 denuding the surface, exposing great areas to erosion. 
 
 Nor do we exercise the care and thrift of good 
 housekeepers. We do not clean up our work or 
 leave the earth in order. The remnants and ac- 
 cumulation of mining-camps are left to ruin and 
 decay; the deserted phosphate excavations are 
 ragged, barren, and unfilled; vast areas of forested 
 18 
 
The Habit of Destruction 
 
 lands are left in brush and waste, unthoughtful of 
 the future, unmindful of the years that must be 
 consumed to reduce the refuse to mould and to 
 cover the surface respectably, uncharitable to those 
 who must clear away the wastes and put the place 
 in order; and so thoughtless are we with these 
 natural resources that even the establishments that 
 manufacture them — the mills, the factories of many 
 Icinds — are likely to be offensive objects in the 
 landscape, unclean, unkempt, displaying the uncon- 
 cern of the owners to the obligation that the use of 
 the materials imposes and to the sensibilities of the 
 community for the way in which they handle them. 
 The burden of proof seems always to have been 
 rested on those who partake little in the benefits, 
 although we know that these non-partakers have 
 been real owners of the resources; and yet so unde- 
 veloped has been the public conscience in these 
 matters that the blame — if blame there be — can- 
 not be laid on one group more than on the other. 
 Strange it is, however, that we should not have 
 insisted at least that those who appropriate the ac- 
 cumulations of the earth should complete their 
 work, cleaning up the remainders, leaving the areas 
 wholesome, inoffensive, and safe. How many and 
 many are the years required to grow a forest and 
 to fill the pockets of the rocks, and how satisfying 
 are the landscapes, and yet how desperately soon 
 19 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 may men reduce it all to ruin and to emptiness, 
 and how slatternly may they violate the scenery ! 
 
 All this habit of destructiveness is uneconomic in 
 the best sense, unsocial, unmoral. 
 
 Society now begins to demand a constructive pro- 
 cess. With care and with regard for other men, we 
 must produce the food and the other supphes in 
 regularity and sufficiency; and we must clean up 
 after our work, that the earth may not be depleted, 
 scarred, or repulsive. 
 
 Yet there is even a more defenseless devastation 
 than all this. It is the organized destructiveness 
 of those who would make military domination the 
 major premise in the constitution of society, accom- 
 panying desolation with viciousness and violence, 
 ravaging the holy earth, disrespecting the works of 
 the creator, looking toward extirpation, confessing 
 thereby that they do not know how to live in co- 
 operation with their fellows; in such situations, every 
 new implement of destruction adds to the guilt. 
 
 In times past we were moved by religious fanati- 
 cism, even to the point of waging wars. To-day we 
 are moved by impulses of trade, and we find our- 
 sdves plunged into a war of commercial frenzy; and 
 as it has behind it vaster resources and more com- 
 mand of natural forces, so is it the most ferocious 
 and wasteful that the race has experienced, exceed- 
 ing in its havoc the cataclysms of earthquake and 
 20 
 
The Habit of Destruction 
 
 volcano. Certainly we have not yet learned how 
 to withstand the prosperity and the privileges that 
 we have gained by the discoveries of science; and 
 certainly the morals of commerce has not given us 
 freedom or mastery. Rivahy that leads to arms is 
 a natural fruit of unrestrained rivalry in trade. 
 
 Man has dominion, but he has no commission to 
 devastate: And the Lord God took the man, and put 
 him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. 
 
 Verily, so bountiful hath been the earth and so 
 securely have we drawn from it our substance, that 
 we have taken it all for granted as if it were only a 
 gift, and with little care or conscious thought of the 
 consequences of our use of it. 
 
 21 
 
The new hold 
 
 We may distinguish three stages in our relation to 
 the planet, — the collecting stage, the mining stage, 
 and the producing stage. These overlap and per- 
 haps are nowhere distinct, and yet it serves a pur- 
 pose to contrast them. 
 
 At first man sweeps the earth to see what he may 
 gather, — game, wood, fruits, fish, fur, feathers, shells 
 on the shore. A certain social and moral life arises 
 out of this relation, seen well in the woodsmen and 
 the fishers — ^in whom it best persists to the present 
 day — strong, dogmatic, superstitious folk. Then 
 man begins to go beneath the surface to see what he 
 can find, — ^iron and precious stones, the gold of 
 Ophir, coal, and many curious treasures. This de- 
 velops the exploiting faculties, and leads men into 
 the uttermost parts. In both these stages the ele- 
 ments of waste and disregard have been heavy. 
 
 Finally, we begin to enter the productive stage, 
 whereby we secure supplies by controlling the con- 
 ditions under which they grow, wasting little, harm- 
 ing not. Farming has been very much a mining 
 process, the utilizing of fertility easily at hand and 
 22 
 
The New Hold 
 
 the moving-on to lands unspoiled of quick potash 
 and nitrogen. Now it begins to be really produc- 
 tive and constructive, with a range of responsible 
 and permanent morals. We rear the domestic 
 animals with precision. We raise crops, when we 
 will, almost to a nicety. We plant fish in lakes and 
 streams to some extent but chiefly to provide more 
 game rather than more human food, for in this range 
 we are yet mostly in the collecting or hunter stage. 
 If the older stages were strongly expressed in the 
 character of the people, so will this new stage be 
 expressed; and so is it that we are escaping the 
 primitive and should be coming into a new char- 
 acter. We shall find our rootage in the soil. 
 
 This new character, this clearer sense of relation- 
 ship with the earth, should express itself in all the 
 people and not exclusively in farming people and 
 their like. It should be a popular character — or a 
 national character if we would limit the discussion 
 to one people — and not a class character. Now, 
 here lies a diflBculty and here is a reason for writing 
 this book: the population of the earth is increasing, 
 the relative population of farmers is decreasing, 
 people are herding in cities, we have a city mind, 
 and relatively fewer people are brought into touch 
 with the earth in any real way. So is it incumbent 
 on us to take special pains — now that we see the new 
 time — that all the people, or as many of them as 
 23 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 possible, shall have contact with the earth and that 
 the earth righteousness shall be abimdantly taught. 
 
 I hasten to say that I am not thinking of any 
 back-to-the-farm movement to bring about the 
 results we seek. Necessarily, the proportion of 
 farmers will decrease. Not so many are needed 
 relatively, for a man's power to produce has been 
 multiplied. Agriculture makes a great contribution 
 to human progress by releasing men for the manu- 
 factures and the trades. In proportion as the ratio 
 of farmers decreases is it important that we provide 
 them the best of opportunities and encouragement: 
 they must be better and better men. And if we 
 are to secure our moral connection with the planet 
 to a large extent through them, we can see that 
 they bear a relation to society in general that we 
 have overlooked. 
 
 Even the farming itself is changing radically in 
 tiaracter. It ceases to be an occupation to gain 
 sustenance and becomes a business. We apply to 
 it the general attitudes of commerce. We must be 
 alert to see that it does not lose its capacity for 
 spiritual contact. 
 
 How we may achieve a more wide-spread contact 
 with the earth on the part of all the people with- 
 out making them farmers, I shall endeavor to sug- 
 gest as I proceed; in fact, this is my theme. Do- 
 minion means mastery; we may make the surface 
 24 . 
 
The New Hold 
 
 of the earth much what we will; we can govern the 
 way in which we shall contemplate it. We are 
 probably near something like a stable occupancy. 
 It is not to be expected that there will be vast shift- 
 ing of cities as the contest for the mastery of the 
 earth proceeds, — ^probably nothing like the loss of 
 Tyre and Carthage, and of the commercial glory of 
 Venice. In fact, we shall have a progressive occu- 
 pancy. The greater the population, the greater will 
 be the demands on the planet; and, moreover, 
 every new man will make more demands than his 
 father made, for he will want more to satisfy him. 
 We are to take from the earth much more than we 
 have ever taken before, but it will be taken in a 
 new way and with better intentions. It will be seen, 
 therefore, that we are not here dealing narrowly 
 with an occupation but with something very fun- 
 damental to our hfe on the planet. 
 
 We are not to look for our permanent civilization 
 to rest on any species of robber-economy. No 
 flurry of coal-mining, or gold-fever, or rubber-col- 
 lecting in the tropics, or excitement of prospecting 
 for new finds or even locating new lands, no ravish- 
 ing of the earth or monopolistic control of its boun- 
 ties, will build a stable society. So is much of our 
 economic and social fabric transitory. It is not by 
 accident that a very distinct form of society is de- 
 veloping in the great farming regions of the Missis- 
 25 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 sippi Valley and in other comparable places; the 
 exploiting and promoting occupancy of those lands 
 is passing and a stable progressive development 
 appears. We have been obsessed of the passion to 
 cover everything at once, to skin the earth, to pass 
 on, even when there was no necessity for so doing. 
 It is a vast pity that this should ever have been the 
 policy of government in giving away great tracts 
 of land by lottery, as if our fingers would burn if 
 we held the lands inviolate until needed by the 
 natural process of settlement. The people should 
 be kept on their lands long enough to learn how to 
 use them. But very well: we have run with the 
 wind, we have staked the lands; now we shall be 
 real farmers and real conquerors. Not all lands 
 are equally good for farming, and some lands will 
 never be good for farming; but whether in Iowa, or 
 New England, or old Asia, farming land may de- 
 velop character in the people. 
 
 My reader must not infer that we have arrived 
 at a permanent agriculture, although we begin now 
 to see the importance of a permanent land occu- 
 pancy. Probably we have not yet evolved a satis- 
 fying husbandry that will maintain itself century by 
 century, without loss and without the ransacking 
 of the ends of the earth for fertilizer materials to 
 make good our deficiencies. All the more is it im- 
 portant that the problem be elevated into the realm 
 26 
 
The New Hold 
 
 of statesmanship and of morals. Neither must he 
 infer that the resources of the earth are to be locked 
 up beyond contact and use (for the contact and use 
 will be morally regulated). But no system of bril- 
 liant exploitation, and no accidental scratching of 
 the surface of the earth, and no easy appropriation 
 of stored materials can suffice us in the good days 
 to come. City, country, this class and that class, 
 all fall and merge before the common necessity. 
 
 It is often said that the farmer is our financial 
 mainstay; so in the good process of time wiU he be 
 a moral mainstay, for ultimately finance and social 
 morals must coincide. 
 
 The gifts are to be used for service and for 
 satisfaction, and not for wealth. Very great wealth 
 introduces too many intermediaries, too great in- 
 directness, too much that is extrinsic, too frequent 
 hindrances and superficialities. It builds a wall 
 about the man, and too often does he receive his 
 impressions of the needs of the world from satellites 
 and sycophants. It is significant that great wealth, 
 if it contributes much to social service, usually ac- 
 complishes the result by endowing others to work. 
 The gift of the products of the earth was " for meat " : 
 nothing was said about riches. 
 
 Yet the very appropriation or use of natural re- 
 sources may be the means of directing the mind of 
 the people back to the native situations. We have 
 27 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 the opportunity to make the forthcoming develop- 
 ment of water-power, for example, such an agency 
 for wholesome training. Whenever we can appro- 
 priate without despoliation or loss, or without a 
 damaging monopoly, we tie the people to the back- 
 grounds. 
 
 In the background is the countryman; and how 
 is the countryman to make use of the rain and the 
 abounding soil, and the varied wonder of plant and 
 animal amidst which he lives, that he may arrive at 
 kinship? We are teaching him how to bring some 
 of these things under the dominion of his hands, how 
 to measure and to weigh and to judge. This will 
 give him the essential physical mastery. But be- 
 yond this, how shall he take them into himself, how 
 shall he make them to be of his spirit, how shall he 
 complete his dominion? How shall he become the 
 man that his natural position requires of bim ? This 
 will come slowly, ah, yes ! — slowly. The people — 
 the great striving self-absorbed throng of the peo- 
 ple — they do not know what we mean when we 
 talk like this, they hear only so many fine words. 
 The naturist knows that the time will come slowly, 
 — not yet are we ready for fulfilment; he knows 
 that we cannot regulate the cosmos, or even the 
 natural history of the people, by enactments. 
 Slowly: by removing handicaps here and there; 
 by selection of the folk in a natural process, to elim- 
 28 
 
The New Hold 
 
 inate the unresponsive; by teaching, by suggestion; 
 by a public recognition of the problem, even though 
 not one of us sees the end of it. 
 
 I hope my reader now sees where I am leading 
 him. He sees that I am not thinking merely of 
 instructing the young in the names and habits of 
 birds and flowers and other pleasant knowledge, al- 
 though this works strongly toward the desired end; 
 nor of any movement merely to have gardens, or 
 to own farms, although this is desirable provided 
 one is qualified to own a farm; nor of rhapsodies on 
 the beauties of nature. Nor am I thinking of any 
 new plan or any novel kind of institution or any 
 new agency; rather shall we do better to escape 
 some of the excessive institutionalism and organiza- 
 tion. We are so accustomed to think in terms of 
 organized politics and education and religion and 
 philanthropies that when we detach ourselves we 
 are said to lack definiteness. It is the personal satis- 
 faction in the earth to which we are born, and the 
 quickened responsibility, the whole relation, broadly 
 developed, of the man and of all men, — ^it is this 
 attitude that we are to discuss. 
 
 The years pass and they grow into centuries. 
 We see more clearly. We are to take a new hold. 
 
 29 
 
The brotherhood relation 
 
 A constructive and careful handling of the re- 
 sources of the earth is impossible except on a basis 
 of large co-operation and of association for mutual 
 welfare. The great inventions and discoveries of 
 recent time have extensive social significance. 
 
 Yet we have other relations than with the physical 
 and static materials. We are parts in a living sen- 
 sitive creation. The theme of evolution has over- 
 turned 6ur attitude toward this creation. The living 
 creation is not exclusively man-centred: it is bio- 
 centric. We perceive the essential continuity in 
 nature, arising from within rather than from with- 
 out, the forms of life proceeding upwardly and on- 
 wardly in something very like a mighty plan of 
 sequence, man being one part in the process. We 
 have genetic relation with all living things, and our 
 aristocracy is the aristocracy of nature. We can 
 claim no gross superiority and no isolated self- 
 importance. The creation, and not man, is the 
 norm. Even now do we begin to guide our prac- 
 tises and our speech by our studies of what we still 
 call the lower creation. We gain a good perspective 
 on ourselves. 
 
 30 
 
The Brotherhood Relation 
 
 If we are parts in the evolution, and if the uni- 
 verse, or even the earth, is not made merely as a 
 footstool, or as a theatre for man, so do we lose 
 our cosmic selfishness and we find our place in the 
 plan of things. We are emancipated from igno- 
 rance and superstition and small philosophies. The 
 present wide-spread growth of the feeling of brother- 
 hood would have been impossible in a self-centred 
 creation: the way has been prepared by the discus- 
 sion of evolution, which is the major biological con- 
 tribution to human welfare and progress. This is 
 the philosophy of the oneness in nature and the 
 unity in living things. 
 
 31 
 
The farmer's relation 
 
 The surface of the earth is particularly within 
 the care of the farmer. He keeps it for his own 
 sustenance and gain, but his gain is also the gain 
 of all the rest of us. At the best, he accumulates 
 little to himself. The successful farmer is the one 
 who produces more than he needs for his support; 
 and the overplus he does not keep; and, moreover, 
 his own needs are easily satisfied. It is of the utmost 
 consequence that the man next the earth shall lead 
 a fair and simple life; for in riotous living he might 
 halt many good supplies that now go to his fellows. 
 
 It is a public duty so to train the farmer that he 
 shall appreciate his guardianship. He is engaged 
 in a quasi-public business. He really does not 
 even own his land. He does not take his land 
 with him, but only the personal development that 
 he gains from it. He cannot annihilate his land, as 
 another might destroy all his belongings. He is the 
 agent or the representative of society to guard and 
 to subdue the surface of the earth; and he is the 
 agent of the divinity that made it. He must exer- 
 cise his dominion with due regard to all these obli- 
 gations. He is a trustee. The productiveness of 
 32 
 
The Farmer's Relation 
 
 the earth must increase from generation to genera- 
 tion: this also is his obligation. He must handle 
 all his materials, remembering man and remember- 
 ing God. A man cannot be a good farmer unless 
 he is a religious man. 
 
 If the farmer is engaged in a quasi-public busi- 
 ness, shall we undertake to regulate him ? This re- 
 lationship carries a vast significance to the social 
 order, and it must color our attitude toward the 
 man on the land. We are now in that epoch of 
 social development when we desire to regulate by 
 law everything that is regulatable and the other 
 things besides. It is recently proposed that the 
 Congress shall pass a law regulating the cropping 
 scheme of the farmer for the protection of soil fer- 
 tility. This follows the precedent of the regulation, 
 by enactment, of trusts and public utilities. It is 
 fortunate that such a law cannot be passed, and 
 could not be enforced if it were passed; but this and 
 related proposals are crude expressions of the grow- 
 ing feeling that the farmer owes an obligation to 
 society, and that this obligation must be enforced 
 and the tiller of the soil be held to accoimt. 
 
 We shall produce a much better and safer man 
 when we make him self-controlling by developing 
 his sense of responsibiUty than when we regulate 
 him by exterior enactments. 
 
 In the realm of control of the farming occupation 
 33 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 we shall invoke other than legal means, and perhaps 
 these means will be suggestive for other situations. 
 These means may be somewhat indefinite in the 
 law-book sense, but they may attain to a better 
 human result. We shall reach the question by 
 surer ways than the crudities of legislation. We 
 shall reach the man, in this field, rather than his 
 business. We have begun it by accepting it as one 
 part of our duty to the race to provide liberally at 
 public expense for the special education of the man 
 on the land. This is the reason, even if we have 
 not formulated it to ourselves, why society is willing 
 to go farther in the education of the farming peo- 
 ple than in the popular education of other ranges 
 of the people. This, of course, is the fundamental 
 way; and if there are any governments that at- 
 tempt to safeguard this range directly by laws 
 rather than by education, then they have not ar- 
 rived at a long view of the situation. 
 
 We invoke regidatory law for the control of the 
 corporate activities; but we must not forget the 
 other kinds of activities contributing to the making 
 of society, nor attempt to apply to them the same 
 methods of correction. 
 
 Into this secular and more or less technical educa- 
 tion we are now to introduce the element of moral 
 obligation, that the man may understand his peculiar 
 contribution and responsibility to society; but this 
 34 
 
The Farmer's Relation 
 
 result cannot be attained until the farmer and every 
 one of us recognize the holiness of the earth. 
 
 The farmer and every one of us: every citizen 
 should be put right toward the planet, should be 
 quicked to his relationship to his natural back- 
 ground. The whole body of public sentiment should 
 be sympathetic with the man who works and ad- 
 ministers the land for us; and this requires under- 
 standing. We have heard much about the "mar- 
 ginal man," but the first concern of society should 
 be for the bottom man. 
 
 If this philosophy should really be translated into 
 action, the farmer would nowhere be a peasant, 
 forming merely a caste, and that a low one, among 
 his fellows. He would be an independent co-op- 
 erating citizen partaking fully of the fruits of his 
 labor, enjoying the social rewards of his essential 
 position, being sustained and protected by a body 
 of responsive public opinion. The farmer cannot 
 keep the earth for us without an enlightened and 
 very active support from every other person, and 
 without adequate safeguards from exploitation and 
 from unessential commercial pressure. 
 
 This social support requires a ready response on 
 the part of the farmer; and he must also be devel- 
 oped into his position by a kind of training that will 
 make him quickly and naturally responsive to it. 
 The social fascination of the town will always be 
 35 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 greater than that of the open country. The move- 
 ments are more rapid, more picturesque, have more 
 color and more vivacity. It is not to be expected 
 that we can overcome this fascination and safe- 
 guard the country boy and girl merely by intro- 
 ducing more showy or active enterprises into the 
 open country. We must develop a new background 
 for the country youth, establish new standards, and 
 arouse a new point of view. The farmer will not 
 need all the things that the city man thinks the 
 farmer needs. We must stimulate his moral re- 
 sponse, his appreciation of the worthiness of the 
 things in which he lives, and increase his knowledge 
 of all the objects and affairs amongst which he 
 moves. The backbone of the rural question is at 
 the bottom a moral problem. 
 
 We do not yet know whether the race can perma- 
 nently endure urban life, or whether it must be 
 constantly renewed from the vitalities in the rear. 
 We know that the farms and the back spaces have 
 been the mother of the race. We know that the 
 exigencies and frugalities of life in these backgrounds 
 beget men and women to be serious and steady and 
 to know the value of every hom* and of every coin 
 that they earn; and whenever they are properly 
 trained, these folk recognize the holiness of the earth. 
 
 For some years I have had the satisfaction to 
 speak to rural folk in many places on the holy earth 
 and to make some of the necessary applications. 
 36 
 
The Farmer's Relation 
 
 Everywhere I have met the heartiest assent from 
 these people. Specially do they respond to the sug- 
 gestion that if the earth is hallowed, so are the na- 
 tive products of the earth hallowed; and they like 
 to have the mystery — which is the essential senti- 
 ment — of these things brought home to them with 
 frequency. I will here let my reader have a letter 
 that one of these persons wrote me, and I print it 
 without change. On inquiry, the writer of it told 
 me that he is a farmer, has never followed any other 
 occupation, was brought up "in the woods," and 
 has had practically no education. I did not ask 
 him, but I judge from the narrative style that he 
 has been a reader or a hearer of the Old Testament; 
 and here is the letter: 
 
 As you say, too many people confound farming, with 
 that sordid, selfish, money-getting game, called "business," 
 whereas, the farmer's position is administrative, being in a 
 way a dispenser of the "Mysteries of God," for they are mys- 
 teries. Every apple is a mystery, and every potato is a 
 mystery, and every ear of com is a mystery, and every pound 
 of butter is a mystery, and when a " farmer " is not able to 
 understand these things he is out of place. 
 
 The farmer uses the soil and the rains and the snows and 
 the frosts and the winds and the sun; these are also the im- 
 plements of the Almighty, the only tools He uses, and while 
 you were talking that day, it brought to mind the recollec- 
 tion of an account I once read of an occurrence which took 
 place in the vicinity of Carlsruhe, in Germany, about thirty 
 years ago, and I want to tell you about it. An old man and 
 37 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 his two sons, who were laborers on a large farm there, went 
 out one morning to mow peas, with scythes, as was the method 
 in use at that time, and soon after they began work, they 
 noticed a large active man coming along a pathway which 
 bordered the field on one side, and when he came to where 
 they were, he spoke to them, very pleasantly, and asked them 
 some questions about their work and taking the scythe from 
 the hands of the older man he mowed some with it and finally 
 returned it and went his way. After a time when the owner 
 of the farm came out to oversee the work they told him of the 
 occurrence, and asked him if he could tell who the stranger 
 might be, and he told them that he was Prince Bismarck, 
 the Chancellor of the empire, who was staying at his country 
 home at Carlsnihe, and was out for his morning walk, and 
 they were astonished, and the old man was filled with a great"' 
 pride, and he felt himself elevated above all his fellows, and 
 he wouldn't have sold his scythe for half the money in Ger- 
 many, and his descendants to this day boast of the fact that 
 their father and Bismarck mowed with the same scythe. 
 Now if it was sufficient to stimulate the pride of this old 
 laborer, if it was sufficient to create for him a private aris- 
 tocracy, if it was sufficient to convert that old rusty scythe 
 into a priceless heirloom to be treasured up and transmitted 
 from father to son, if it was sufficient for all these things 
 that he had once held a momentarily unimportant associa- 
 tion with the man of "blood and iron," how much more incon- 
 ceivably and immeasurably high and exalted is the station 
 of the farmer who is, in a measure, a fellow craftsman of the 
 God of Nature, of the great First Cause of all things, and 
 people don't know it. No wonder the boys leave the farm 1 
 
 38 
 
The underlying training of a people 
 
 This, then, is the landsman's obligation, and his 
 joyful privilege. But it must not be supposed that 
 he alone bears the responsibility to maintain the 
 holiness of the divine earth. It is the obligation 
 also of all of us, since every one is bom to the earth 
 and Uves upon it, and since every one must react to 
 it to the extent of his place and capabilities. This 
 being so, then it is a primary need that we shall 
 place at the use of the people a kind of education 
 that shall quicken these attachments. 
 
 Certainly all means of education are useful, and 
 every means should be developed to its best; and 
 it is not to be expected that all the people shall pur- 
 sue a single means: but to the nation and to the 
 race a fundamental training must be provided. 
 
 We are now in the time of developing a technical 
 education in agriculture, to the end that we may 
 produce our land supplies. Already this education 
 is assuming broad aspects, and we begin to see that 
 it has very important bearing on public policies. 
 It is a new form of exercise in natural science, — the 
 old education in this great realm having become so 
 39 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 specialized and departmentalized as to lose much of 
 its value as a means of popular training. 
 
 It is a happy augury that in North America so 
 many public men and administrators have taken 
 the large view of education by means of agriculture, 
 desiring, while training farmers of those who would 
 be farmers, to make it a means of bringing the un- 
 derstanding of the people back to the land. The 
 Americans are making a very remarkable contribu- 
 tion here, in a spirit of real statesmanship. In the 
 long run, this procedure will produce a spirit in the 
 people that will have far-reaching importance in the 
 development of national character, and in a relation 
 to the backgrounds of which very few of us yet have 
 vision. 
 
 It will be fortunate if we can escape the formal- 
 izing and professionalizing of this education, that 
 has cast such a blight on most of the older means 
 of training the yoimg, and if we can keep it demo- 
 cratic and free in spirit. 
 
 We shall need to do the same in all the subjects 
 that he at the foundations, — in all the other crafts; 
 all these crafts are of the earth. They support the 
 physical man and the social fabric, and make the 
 conditions out of which all the highest achieve- 
 ments may come. 
 
 Every person in a democracy has a right to be 
 educated by these means; and a people living in a 
 40 
 
The Underlying Training of a People 
 
 democracy must of necessity understand the sig- 
 nificance of such education. This education should 
 result or function politically. It is not sufficient to 
 train technically in the trades and crafts and arts 
 to the end of securing greater economic efl5ciency, — 
 this may be accomplished in a despotism and re- 
 sult in no self-action on the part of the people. 
 Every democracy must reach far beyond what is 
 commonly known as economic efficiency, and do 
 everything it can to enable those in the backgrounds 
 to maintain their standing and their pride and to 
 partake in the making of political affairs. 
 
 41 
 
The neighbor's access to tJie earth 
 
 When one really feels the response to the native 
 earth, one feels also the obligation and the impulse 
 to share it with the neighbor. 
 
 The earth is not selfish. It is open and free to 
 all. It invites everywhere. The naturist is not 
 selfish, — ^he shares all his joys and discoveries, even 
 to the extent of publishing them. The farmer is 
 not selfish with his occupation, — ^he freely aids every 
 one or any one to engage in his occupation, even if 
 that one becomes his competitor. But occupations 
 that are some degrees removed from the earth may 
 display selfishness; trade and, to a large extent, 
 manufacture are selfish, and they lock themselves 
 in. Even the exploiting of the resources of the earth 
 may be selfish, in the taking of the timber and the 
 coal, the water-powers and the minerals, for all this 
 is likely to develop to a species of plunder. The 
 naturist desires to protect the plants and the animals 
 and the situations for those less fortunate and for 
 those who come after. There are lumbermrai and 
 miners with the finest sense of obligation. There 
 are other men who would take the last nugget and 
 destroy the last bole. 
 
 42 
 
The Neighbor's Access to the Earth 
 
 We are to recognize the essential integrity of the 
 farming occupation, when developed constructively, 
 as contrasted with the vast system of improbity and 
 dishonor that arises from depredation and from the 
 taking of booty. 
 
 The best kind of community interest attaches to 
 the proper use and partitioning of the earth, a com- 
 munism that is dissociated from propaganda and 
 programs. The freedom of the earth is not the 
 freedom of license: there is always the thought of 
 the others that are dependent on it. It is the free- 
 dom of utilization for needs and natural desires, 
 without regard to one's place among one's fellows, 
 or even to one's condition of degradation or state 
 of sinfulness. AU men are the same when they 
 come back to the meadows, to the hills, and to the 
 deep woods: He maketh his sun to rise on the evil 
 and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the 
 unjust. 
 
 The lesson of the growing abounding earth is of 
 liberality for all, and never exploitation or very ex- 
 clusive opportiuiities for the few. Even if the weaker 
 anywhere perish in the contest for food, they are 
 nevertheless given the opportunity to contest on 
 terms equal to their abilities; and at all events, 
 we come, in the human sphere, to the domination 
 of sweet reason rather than to competition in sheer 
 force. When, by means of reasonable education, 
 43 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 this simple relation is understood by mankind and 
 begins to express itself spontaneously, we shall find 
 our voliuninous complex of laws to regulate selfish- 
 ness gradually disappearing and passing into the 
 limbo. 
 
 It is now easy to understand the sinfulness of vast 
 private estates that shut up expanses of the sur- 
 face of the earth from the reach and enjoyment of 
 others that are born similarly to the privileges of 
 the planet. There is no warrant in nature for 
 guarantee deeds to such estates. It is true, of 
 course, that land-estates should not be equal, for 
 capacities for use are not equal, and abilities and 
 deserts are not equal. It is legitimate to reward 
 those who otherwise render great service, and this 
 reward may lie in unusual privileges. The present 
 emoluments in the way of incomes bear little re- 
 lation to service or even to merit. 
 
 We have not yet escaped the idea that vested 
 rights — and particularly personal realty— are in- 
 violable. Certainly these rights must be protected 
 by law, otherwise there can be no stability and regu- 
 larity in affairs; but there is no inalienable right in 
 the ownership of the surface of the earth. Readjust- 
 ments must come, and even now they are coming 
 slowly, and here and there in the interest of the 
 neighbor; and in the end there will be no private 
 monopoly of public or natural resources. 
 44 
 
The Neighbor's Access to the Earth 
 
 The cure for these ills does not lie, however, in 
 the ownership of all the land by "the government," 
 at least not in our time and perhaps never. It is 
 well for a person to have his own plot for his life- 
 time, with the right to use it as he will so long as 
 he does not ofiFend, or does not despoil it for those 
 who follow: it steadies him, and it identifies him 
 with a definite program in life. 
 
 We usually speak as if all good results in the dis- 
 tribution of the natural bounty will ensue if "the 
 government" or "the state" owns the resources; 
 but government ownership of resources and direction 
 of industries may not mean freedom or escape for 
 the people. It depends entirely on the kind of 
 government, — not on its name or description, but 
 on the extent to which the people have been trained 
 to partake on their own initiative. The govern- 
 ment may be an autocracy or only another form of 
 monopoly. 
 
 The aristocracy of land has much to its credit. 
 Great gains in human accomplishment have come 
 out of it; but this does not justify it for the future. 
 The aristocracy of land is a very dangerous power 
 in human affairs. It is all the more dangerous when 
 associated with aristocracy of birth and of factitious 
 social position, which usually accompany it. A 
 people may be ever so free in its advantages and 
 in its theoretical political organization, and yet 
 45 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 suffer overwhelming bondage if its land is tied up 
 in an aristocratic system, and particularly if that 
 system is connected into a social aristocracy. And 
 whenever rigid aristocracy in land connects itself 
 with the close control of politics, the subjection be- 
 comes final and complete. 
 
 What lies within a nation or a people may lie in 
 enlarged form between the nations or the peoples. 
 Neighborliness is international. Contest for land 
 and sea is at the basis of wars. Recognizing the 
 right of any people to its own life, we must equally 
 recognize its right to a sufficient part of the surface 
 of the earth. We must learn how to subdivide it 
 on the basis of neighborliness, friendship, and con- 
 ference; if we cannot learn this, then we cannot 
 be neighbors but only enemies. The proposal now 
 before Congress to cede to Canada the Alaskan 
 Panhandle, or a part of it, is an evidence of this 
 growth of international morals, extended to the 
 very basis on which nations have been the least 
 ready to co-operate. 
 
 If we may fraternalize territory, so shall we fra- 
 ternalize commerce. No people may rightly be 
 denied the privilege to trade with all other peoples. 
 All kinds of useful interchange are civilizers and 
 peacemakers; and if we carry ourselves to others 
 when we carry our produce and our wares, so do 
 any of us need that others shall bring their produce 
 46 
 
The Neighbor's Access to the Earth 
 
 and their wares to us. It would be a sorry people 
 that purchased no supplies from without. Every 
 people, small or large, has right of access to the 
 sea, for the sea belongs to mankind. It follows 
 that no people has a right to deprive any other 
 people of the shore, if that people desires the con- 
 tact. 
 
 We now begin to understand the awful sin of 
 partitioning the earth by force. 
 
 47 
 
The subdividing of the land 
 
 The question then arises whether lands and other 
 natural resources shall now be divided and redis- 
 tributed in order that the share-and-share of the 
 earth's patrimony shall be morally just. Undoubt- 
 edly the logic of the situation makes for many per- 
 sonal points of very close contact with the mother 
 earth, and contact is usually most definite and best 
 when it results from what we understand as owner- 
 ship. This, in practice, suggests many small par- 
 cels of land — for those who would have their con- 
 tact by means of land, which is the directest means 
 —under personal fee. But due provision must al- 
 ways be made, as I have already indicated, for the 
 man who makes unusual contribution to the wel- 
 fare of his fellows, that he may be allowed to extend 
 his service and attain his own full development; and 
 moreover, an established order may not be over- 
 turned suddenly and completely without much 
 damage, not only to personal interests but to so- 
 ciety. Every person should have the right and the 
 privilege to a personal use of some part of the 
 earth; and naturally the extent of his privilege 
 must be determined by his use of it. 
 48 
 
The Subdividing of the Land 
 
 It is urged that lands can be most economically 
 administered in very large units and under cor- 
 porate management; but the economic results are 
 not the most important results to be secured, al- 
 though at present they are the most stressed. The 
 ultimate good in the use of land is the development 
 of the people; it may be better that more persons 
 have contact with it than that it shall be executively 
 more effectively administered. The morals of land 
 management is more important than the economics 
 of land management; and of course my reader is 
 aware that by morals I mean the results that arise 
 from a right use of the earth rather than the formal 
 attitudes toward standardized or conventional codes 
 of conduct. 
 
 If the moral and the economic ends can be secured 
 simultaneously, as eventually they will be secured, 
 the perfect results will come to pass; but any line 
 of development founded on accountant economics 
 alone will fail. 
 
 Here I must pause for an explanation in self- 
 defense, for my reader may think I advise the "little 
 farm well tilled" that has so much captured the 
 public mind. So far from giving such advice, I am 
 not thinking exclusively of farming when I speak of 
 the partitioning of the land. One may have land 
 merely to live on. Another may have a wood to 
 wander in. One may have a spot on which to make 
 49 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 a garden. Another may have a shore, and another 
 a retreat in the mountains or in some far space. 
 Much of the earth can never be farmed or mined 
 or used for timber, and yet these supposed waste 
 places may be very real assets to the race: we shall 
 learn this in time. I am glad to see these outlying 
 places set aside as public reserves; and yet we must 
 not so organize and tie up the far spaces as to pre- 
 vent persons of little means from securing small 
 parcels. These persons should have land that they 
 can handle and manipulate, in which they may dig, 
 on which they may plant trees and build cabins, 
 and which they may feel is theirs to keep and to 
 master, and which they are not obliged to "im- 
 prove." In the parks and reserves the land may 
 be available only to look at, or as a retreat in which 
 one may secure permission to camp. The regula- 
 tions are necessary for these places, but these 
 places are not sufficient. 
 
 If it were possible for every person to own a tree 
 and to care for it, the good results would be beyond 
 estimation. 
 
 Now, farming is a means of support; and in this 
 case, the economic possibilities of a particular piece 
 of land are of primary consequence. Of course, the 
 most complete permanent contact with the earth 
 is by means of farming, when one makes a living 
 from the land; this should produce better results 
 50 
 
The Subdividing of the Land 
 
 than hunting or sport; but one must learn how to 
 make this connection. It is possible to hoe potatoes 
 and to hear the birds sing at the same time, although 
 our teaching has not much developed this complete- 
 ness in the minds of the people. 
 
 I hope, therefore, that the farmer's piece of land 
 will be economically good (that it may make him 
 a living and produce a surplus for some of the rest 
 of us), and that the farmer may be responsive to 
 his situation. The size of the farm that is to sup- 
 port a family, and the kinds of crops that shall be 
 grown and even the yields that shall be secured to 
 the acre, are technical problems of agriculture. In 
 this New World, with expensive labor and still with 
 cheap land, we cannot yet afford to produce the high 
 yields of some of the Old World places, — it may be 
 better to till more land with less yield to the acre. 
 But all this is aside from my present purpose; and 
 this purpose is to suggest the very real importance 
 of making it possible for an increasing proportion 
 of the people to have close touch with the earth in 
 their own rights and in their own names. 
 
 We recognize different grades or kinds of land 
 occupancy, some of it being proprietorship and 
 some of it tenancy and some of it mere share- 
 holding. Thus far have we spoken of the parti- 
 tioning of the land mostly in its large social and 
 political relations; but to society also belongs the 
 51 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 fertility of the land, and all efforts to conserve this 
 fertility are public questions in the best sense. In 
 America we think of tenant occupancy of land as 
 dangerous because it does not safeguard fertility; 
 in fact, it may waste fertility. This is because the 
 practice in tenancy does not recognize the public 
 interest in fertility, and the contract or agreement is 
 made merely between the landowner and the ten- 
 ant, and is largely an arrangement for skinning 
 the land. It is only when the land itself is a party 
 in the contract (when posterity is considered) that 
 tenancy is safe. Then the tenant is obliged to fer- 
 tilize the land, to practise certain rotations, and 
 otherwise to conserve fertility, returning to the land 
 the manurial value of products that are sold. When 
 such contracts are made and enforced, tenancy 
 farming does not deplete the land more than other 
 farming, as the experience in some countries dem- 
 onstrates. It is hardly to be expected, however, 
 that tenant occupancy will give the man as close 
 moral contact with the earth and its materials as 
 will ownership; yet a well-developed tenancy is 
 better than absentee farming by persons who live 
 in town and run the farm by temporary hired help. 
 The tenancy in the United States is partly a pre- 
 liminary stage to ownership: if we can fulfil the 
 moral obligation to society in the conserving of 
 fertility and other natural resources, tenancy may 
 be considered as a means to an end. Persons 
 52 
 
The Subdividing of the Land 
 
 who work the land should have the privilege of 
 owning it. 
 
 It may be urged by those who contend that land 
 should be held by society, that this regulation of 
 tenancy provides a means of administering all farm 
 lands by government in the interest of mainte- 
 nance of fertility. Leaving aside the primary de- 
 sirability, as I see it, of reserving individual initia- 
 tive, it is to be said that this kind of regulation of 
 the tenant is possible only with a hve-stock hus- 
 bandry; nor do we yet have suiBcient knowledge 
 to enable us to project a legal system for all kinds 
 of agriculture; nor again is it applicable to widely 
 differing conditions and regions. A keener sense 
 of responsibility will enable owner and tenant to 
 work out better methods in all cases, but it is now 
 impossible to incorporate complete control methods 
 into successful legislative regulations. The in- 
 creasing competition will make it ever more difficult 
 for the careless man to make a good living by farm- 
 ing, and he will be driven from the business; or if he 
 is not driven out, society will take away his privilege. 
 
 Yet we are not to think of society as founded 
 wholly on small separate tracts, or "family farms," 
 occupied by persons who live merely in content- 
 ment; this would mean that all landsmen would be 
 essentially laborers. We need to hold on the land 
 many persons who possess large powers of organiza- 
 tion, who are managers, who can handle affairs in 
 53 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 a bold way: it would be fatal to the best social and 
 spiritual results if such persons could find no ade- 
 quate opportunities on the land and were forced 
 into other occupations. Undoubtedly we shall find 
 ourselves with very unlike land units, encouraged 
 and determined by the differing conditions and op- 
 portunities in different regions; and thereby shall 
 we also avoid the great danger of making our fun- 
 damental occupation to produce a uniform and 
 narrow class spirit. 
 
 We need the great example of persons who live 
 separately on their lands, who desire to abide, who 
 are serious in the business, and who have sufficient 
 proprietary rights to enable them to handle the nat- 
 ural resources responsibly. There is a type of well- 
 intentioned writers that would have the farmers 
 live in centres in order that they may have what 
 are called "social" advantages, betaking themselves 
 every morning to the fields when the dew is on the 
 grass and the birds sing, hastening back every eve- 
 ning (probably when the clock points to five) to en- 
 gage in the delightful delirium of card-parties and 
 moving-picture shows (of course gathering the 
 golden harvest in the meantime). Other writers 
 are to have the farms so small that the residences 
 will be as close as on a village street, and a trolley- 
 car will run through, and I suppose the band will 
 play! 
 
 54 
 
A new map 
 
 If, then, we are to give the people access to the 
 holy earth, it means not only a new assent on the 
 part of society but a new way of partitioning the 
 surface. This is true whether we consider the sub- 
 ject wholly from the view-point of making natural 
 resources utilizable or from the added desire to let 
 the people out to those resources. 
 
 The organization of any affair or enterprise de- 
 termines to a great extent the character of the re- 
 sult; and the organization rests directly on the sub- 
 division into parts. The dividing of a business into 
 separate responsibilities of different departments 
 and sub-departments makes for easy access and for 
 what we now know as efficiency; the dividing of a 
 nation into states or provinces and counties and 
 many lesser units makes political life possible; the 
 setting off of a man's farm into fields, with lanes 
 and roads connecting, makes a working enterprise. 
 The more accurately these subdivisions follow nat- 
 ural and living necessities, the greater will be the 
 values and the satisfactions that result from the 
 undertaking. 
 
 Here is the open country, behind the great cities 
 55 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 and the highly specialized industries. There are 
 hills in it, great and small. There are forests here, 
 none there; sands that nobody wants; fertile lands 
 that everybody wants; shores inviting trade; min- 
 eral wealth; healing waters; power in streams; fish 
 in ponds and lakes; building stone; swamps abound- 
 ing in life; wild corners that stimulate desire; scen- 
 eries that take the soul into the far places. These 
 are the fundamental reserves and the backgrounds. 
 The first responsibility of any society is to protect 
 tliem, husband them, bring them into use, and at 
 the same time to teach the people what they mean. 
 To bring them into use, and, at the same time, 
 to protect them from rapacious citizens who have 
 small social conscience, it is necessary to have good 
 access. It is necessary to have roads. These roads 
 should be laid where the resources exist, direct, 
 purposeful. In a flat and uniform country, road 
 systems may well be rectangular, following section- 
 lines and intermediate lines; but the rectangularity 
 is not the essential merit, — it is only a serviceable 
 way of subdividing the resources. To find one's 
 direction, north or south, is convenient, but it may 
 clearly be subordinated to the utilization and pro- 
 tection of the supphes. The section-hne division 
 may accomplish this or it may not, and it is likely 
 to place roads in wrong locations and to render the 
 country monotonous and uninteresting. 
 56 
 
A New Map 
 
 But in the broken country, in the country of 
 tumbled hills and crooked falling streams, of slopes 
 that would better be left in the wild, and of lands 
 that are good and fruitful for the plow, the roads 
 may go the easy grades; but they ought also to go 
 in such a plan as to open up the country to the best 
 development, to divide its resources in the surest 
 way for the greatest number of persons, and to re- 
 duce profitless human toil to the minimimi, — and 
 this is just what they may not do. They may go 
 up over bare and barren hills merely to pass a few 
 homesteads where no homesteads ought to be, roads 
 that are always expensive and never good, that 
 accomplish practically nothing for society. They 
 leave good little valleys at one side, or enter them 
 over almost impossible slopes. There are resources 
 of physical wealth and of wonderful scenery that 
 they do not touch, that would be of much value if 
 they were accessible. The farming country is often 
 not divided in such a way as to render it either most 
 readily accessible or to make it the most useful as 
 an asset for the people. 
 
 To connect villages and cities by stone roads is 
 good. But what are we to do with all the back 
 country, to make it contribute its needful part to 
 feed the people in the days that are to come, and to 
 open it to the persons who ought to go? We can- 
 not accomplish this to the greatest purpose by the 
 57 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 present road systems, even if the roads themselves 
 are all made good. 
 
 When the traveler goes to a strange country, he 
 is interested in the pubHc buildings, the cities, and 
 some of the visible externals; but if he wants to 
 understand the country, he must have a detailed 
 map of its roads. The automobile maps are of no 
 value for this purpose, for they show how one may 
 pass over the country, not how the country is de- 
 veloped. As the last nerve-fibre and the last capil- 
 lary are essential to the end of the finger and to 
 the entire body, so the ultimate roads are essential 
 to the myriad farms and to the national hfe. It is 
 difficult in any country to get these maps, accu- 
 rately and in detail; but they are the essential guide- 
 books. 
 
 We undertake great conquests of engineering, 
 over mountains and across rivers and through the 
 morasses; but at the last we shall call on the en- 
 gineer for the greatest conquest of all, — how to 
 divide the surface of the earth so that it shall yield 
 us its best and mean to us the most, on the easiest 
 grades, in the most practicable way, that we may 
 utilize every piece of land to fullest advantage. 
 
 This means a new division and perhaps a redis- 
 tribution of lands in such a way that the farmer 
 will have his due proportion of hill and of valley, 
 rather than that one shall have all valley and an- 
 58 
 
A New Map 
 
 other all hard-scrabble on the hill or all waste land 
 in some remote place. It means that there will be 
 on each holding the proper relation of tilled land 
 and pasture land and forest land, and that the out- 
 lets for the farmer and his products will be the readi- 
 est and the simplest that it is possible to make. 
 It means that some roads will be abandoned en- 
 tirely, as not worth the cost, and society will make 
 a way for farmers living on impossible farms to 
 move to other lands; and that there will be no 
 "back roads," for they will be the marks of an un- 
 developed society. It means that we shall cease 
 the pretense to bring all lands into farming, whether 
 they are useful for farming or not; and that in the 
 back country beyond the last farms there shall be 
 trails that lead far away. 
 
 In the farm region itself, much of the old division 
 will pass away, being uneconomical and non-social. 
 The abandonment of farms is in some cases a be- 
 ginning of the process, but it is blind an'd undirected. 
 Our educational effort is at present directed toward 
 making the farmer prosperous on his existing farm, 
 rather than to help him to secure a farm of proper 
 resources and with proper access. As time goes on, 
 we must reassemble many of the land divisions, if 
 each man is to have adequate opportunity to make 
 the most effective application of his knowledge, the 
 best use of himself, and the greatest possible contri- 
 59 
 
 C'/ 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 bution to society. It would be well if some of the 
 farms could be dispossessed of their owners, so that 
 areas might be recombined on a better basis. 
 
 This is no Utopian or socialistic scheme, nor does 
 it imply a forcible interference with vested rights. 
 It is a plain statement of the necessities of the situa- 
 tion. Of course it cannot come about quickly or 
 as a result of direct legislation; but there are vari- 
 ous movements that may start it, — it is, in fact, 
 already started. All the burning rural problems re- 
 late themselves in the end to the division of the 
 land. In America, we do not suffer from the hold- 
 ing of the land in a few famihes or in an aristocratic 
 class; that great danger we have escaped, but we 
 have not yet learned how to give the land meaning 
 to the greatest number of people. This is a question 
 for the best political program, for we look for the day 
 when statesmanship shall be expressed in the de- 
 tails of common politics. 
 
 We now hear much about the good-roads ques- 
 tion, as if it were a problem only of highway con- 
 struction: it is really a question of a new map. 
 
 60 
 
The public program 
 
 It would be a great gain if many persons could 
 look forward to the ownership of a bit of the earth, 
 to share in the partition, to partake in the brother- 
 hood. Some day we shall make it easy rather than 
 difficult for this to be brought about. 
 
 Society, in its collective interest, also has neces- 
 sities in the land. There is necessity of land to be 
 owned by cities and other assemblages for water 
 reservoirs, and all the rights thereto; for school 
 grounds, playgrounds, reformatory institutions, 
 hospitals, drill grounds, sewage-disposal areas, irri- 
 gation developments, drainage reclamations; for 
 the public control of banks and borders of streams 
 and ponds, for the shores of all vast bodies of water, 
 for pleasure parks, recreation, breathing spaces in 
 the great congestions, highways and other lines of 
 communication; for the sites of pubUc buildings, 
 colleges and experiment stations, bird and beast 
 refuges, fish and game reservations, cemeteries. 
 There are also the rights of many semi-public 
 agencies that need land, — of churches, of fraternal 
 organizations, of incorporated seminaries and schools, 
 of water-power and oil and coal developments, of 
 61 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 manufacturing establishments, of extensive quarries, 
 and of commercial enterprises of very many kinds. 
 There is also the obligation of the general govern- 
 ment that it shall have reserves against future 
 needs, and that it shall protect the latent resources 
 from exploitation and from waste. Great areas 
 must be reserved for forests, as well as for other 
 crops, and, in the nature of the case, these forest 
 spaces in the future must be mostly in public owner- 
 ship. 
 
 Great remainders should be held by the people 
 to be sold in small parcels to those who desire to 
 get out to the backgrounds but who do not want 
 to be farmers, where they may spend a vacation 
 or renew themselves in the soil or under the trees, 
 or by the green pastures or along the everlasting 
 streams. It is a false assumption which supposes 
 that if land cannot be turned into products of sale 
 it is therefore valueless. The present active back- 
 to-the-land movement has meaning to us here. It 
 expresses the yearning of the people for contact 
 with the earth and for escape from complexity and 
 unessentials. As there is no regular way for at- 
 taining these satisfactions, it has largely taken the 
 form of farming, which occupation has also been 
 re-established in popular estimation in the same 
 epoch. It should not be primarily a back-to-the- 
 farm movement, however, and it is not to be derided. 
 62 
 
The Public Program 
 
 We are to recognize its meaning and to find some 
 way of enabling more of the people to stand on the 
 ground. 
 
 Aside from all this, land is needed for human 
 habitation, where persons may have space and may 
 have the privilege of gathering about them the 
 goods that add value to life. Much land will be 
 needed in future for this habitation, not only be- 
 cause there will be more people, but also because 
 every person will be given an outlet. We know it ! 
 is not right that any family should be doomed to 
 the occupancy of a very few dreary rooms and 
 deathly closets in the depths of great cities, seeing 
 that all children are born to the natural sky and to 
 the wind and to the earth. We do not yet see the 
 way to allow them to have what is naturally theirs, 
 but we shall learn how. In that day we shall take 
 down the wonderful towers and cliffs in the cities, 
 in which people work and live, shelf on shelf, but in 
 which they have no home. The great city expansion 
 in the end will be horizontal rather than perpendic- 
 ular. We shall have many knots, clustered about 
 factories and other enterprises, and we shall learn 
 how to distribute the satisfactions in life rather 
 than merely to assemble them. Before this time 
 comes, we shall have passed the present insistence 
 on so-called commercial efficiency, as if it were the 
 sole measure of a civilization, and higher ends shall 
 63 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 come to have control. All this will rest largely on 
 the dividing of the land. 
 
 It is the common assumption that the solution 
 of these problems lies in facihties of transportation, 
 and, to an extent, this is true; but this assumption 
 usually rests on the other assumption, that the 
 method of the present city vortex is the method of 
 all time, with its violent rush into the vortex and 
 out of it, consuming vastly of time and energy, pre- 
 venting home leisure and destroying locahty feel- 
 ing, herding the people like cattle. The question of 
 transportation is indeed a major problem, but it 
 must be met in part by a different philosophy of 
 hiunan effort, settling the people in many small or 
 moderate assemblages rather than in a few mighty 
 congestions. It will be better to move the materials 
 than to move the people. 
 
 The great cities will grow larger; that is, they 
 will cover more land. The smaller cities, the vil- 
 lages, the country towns will take on greatly in- 
 creased importance. We shall learn how to secure 
 the best satisfactions when we live in villages as 
 well as when we live in cities. We begin to plan 
 our cities and to a small extent our villages. We 
 now begin to plan the layout of the farms, that they 
 may accomplish the best results. But the cities and 
 the towns depend on the country that lies beyond; 
 and the coimtry beyond depends on the city and 
 64 
 
The Public Program 
 
 the town. The problem is broadly one problem, — 
 the problem of so dividing and subdi^'iding the sur- 
 face of the earth that there shall be the least con- 
 flict between all these interests, that public reserva- 
 tions shall not be placed where it is better to have 
 farms, that farming developments may not inter- 
 fere with public utilities, that institutions may be 
 so placed and with such area as to develop their 
 highest usefulness, that the people desiring outlet 
 and contact with the earth In their own right may 
 be accorded that essential privilege. We have not 
 yet begun to approach the subject in a fundamental 
 way, and yet it is the primary problem of the occu- 
 pancy of the planet. 
 
 To the growing movement for city planning should 
 be added an equal movement for country planning; 
 and these should not proceed separately, but both 
 together. No other public program is now more 
 needed. 
 
 65 
 
The honest day's work 
 
 There is still another application of this problem 
 of the land background. It is the influence that 
 productive ownership exerts on the day's work. 
 
 Yesterday for some time I observed eight working 
 men engaged in removing parts of a structure and 
 loading the pieces on a freight-car. At no time were 
 more than two of the men making any pretension 
 of working at once, most of the time they were all 
 visiting or watching passers-by, and in the whole 
 period the eight men did not accomplish what one 
 good honest man should have performed. I won- 
 dered whether they had sufficient exercise to keep 
 them in good health. They apparently were con- 
 cerned about their "rights"; if the employer had 
 rights they were undiscoverable. 
 
 We know the integrity and effectiveness of the 
 body of workmen; yet any reader who has formed 
 a habit of observing men on day work and public 
 work will recognize my account. Day men usually 
 work in gangs, frequently too many of them to allow 
 any one to labor effectively, and the whole process is 
 likely to be mechanical, impersonal, often shiftless 
 and pervaded with the highly developed skill of put- 
 ting in the time and reducing the time to the mini- 
 66 
 
The Honest Day's Work 
 
 mum and of beginning to quit well in advance of the 
 quitting time. The process of securing labor has 
 become involved, tied up, and the labor is not ren- 
 dered in a sufficient spirit of service. About the only- 
 free labor yet remaining to us is the month labor on 
 the farm, even though it may be difficult to secure 
 and be comprised largely of ineffective remainders. 
 
 Over against all this is the importance of setting 
 men at work singly and for themselves; this can 
 be accomplished only when they own their property 
 or have some real personal share in the production. 
 The gang-spirit of labor runs into the politics of the 
 group and constitutes the norm. If we are to have 
 self-acting men they must be removed from close 
 control, in labor as well as elsewhere. If it is neces- 
 sary that any great proportion of the laboring men 
 shall be controlled, then is it equally important that 
 other men in sufficient numbers shall constitute the 
 requisite counterbalance and corrective. It is 
 doubtful whether any kind of profit-sharing in 
 closely controlled industries can ever be as effec- 
 tive in training responsible men for a democracy, 
 other things being equal, as an occupation or series 
 of occupations in which the worker is responsible 
 for his own results rather than to an overseer, al- 
 though the profit-sharing may for the time being 
 develop the greater technical efficiency. 
 
 The influence of ownership on the performance 
 67 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 of the man is often well illustrated when the farm 
 laborer or tenant becomes the proprietor. Some of 
 my readers will have had experience in the difficult 
 and doubtful process of trying to "run a farm" at 
 long range by means of ordinary hired help: the 
 residence is uninhabitable; the tools are old and 
 out of date, and some of them cannot be found; the 
 well water is not good; the poultry is of the wrong 
 breed, and the hens will not sit; the horses are not 
 adapted to the work; the wagons must be painted 
 and the harnesses replaced; the absolutely essential 
 supplies are interminable; there must be more day 
 labor. Now let this hired man come into the own- 
 ership of the farm: presto! the house can be re- 
 paired at almost no cost; the tools are good for some 
 years yet; the harnesses can easily be mended; the 
 absolutely essential suppUes dwindle exceedingly; 
 and the outside labor reduces itself to minor terms. 
 Work with machinery, in factories, may proceed 
 more rapidly because the operator must keep up 
 with the machine; and there are also definite stand- 
 ards or measures of performance. Yet even here 
 it is not to be expected that the work will be much 
 more than time-service. In fact, the very move- 
 ment among labor is greatly to emphasize time- 
 service, and often quite independently of justice. 
 There must necessarily be a reaction from this atti- 
 tude if we are to hope for the best human product. 
 68 
 
The Honest Day's Work 
 
 The best human prodtict results from the bearing 
 of responsibility; in a controlled labor body the re- 
 sponsibility is shifted to the organization or to the 
 boss. Assuredly the consolidating of labor is much 
 to be desired if it is for the common benefit and for 
 protection, and if it leaves the laborer free with 
 his own product. Every person has the inalienable 
 right to express himself, so long as it does not vio- 
 late similar rights of his fellows, and to put forth his 
 best production; if a man can best express himself 
 in manual labor, no organization should suppress him 
 or deny him that privilege. It is a sad case, and a 
 denial of fundamental liberties, if a man is not al- 
 lowed to work or to produce as much as he desires. 
 Good development does not come from repression. 
 
 Society recognizes its obligation to the laboring 
 man of whatever kind and the necessity of safe- 
 guarding him both in his own interest and because 
 he stands at the very foundations; the laboring man 
 bears an obligation to respond liberally with ser- 
 vice and good-will. 
 
 Is it desirable to have an important part of the 
 labor of a people founded on ownership? Is it 
 worth while to have an example in a large class of 
 the population of manual work that is free-spirited, 
 and not dominated by class interest and time- 
 service? Is it essential to social progress that a 
 day's work shall be full measure? 
 69 
 
The group reaction 
 
 One of the interesting phenomena of human as- 
 sociation is the arising of a certain standard or 
 norm of moral action within the various groups 
 that compose it. These standards may not be in- 
 herently righteous, but they become so thoroughly 
 established as to be enacted into law or even to 
 be more powerful than law. So is it, as we have 
 seen, with the idea of inalienable rights in natural 
 property that may be held even out of all propor- 
 tion to any proper use that the owners may be able 
 to make of it; and so is it with the idea of invio- 
 lable natural privileges to those who control facili- 
 ties that depend on public patronage for their com- 
 mercial success. The man himself may hold one 
 kind of personal morals, but the group of which he 
 is a part may hold a very different kind. It is our 
 problem, in dealing with the resources of the earth, 
 to develop in the group the highest expression of 
 duty that is to be found in individuals. 
 
 The restraint of the group, or the correction of 
 
 the group action, is applied from the outside in the 
 
 form of public opinion and in attack by other 
 
 groups. The correction does not often arise from 
 
 70 
 
The Group Reaction 
 
 within. The establishing of many kinds of public- 
 service bodies illustrates this fact. It is the check 
 of society on group-selfishness. 
 
 These remarks apply to the man who stands at 
 the foundation of society, next the earth, as well 
 as to others, although he has not organized to 
 propagate the action of his class. The spoliation 
 of land, the insufficient regard for it, the trifling 
 with it, is much more than an economic deficiency. 
 Society will demand either through the pressure of 
 public opinion, or by regularized action, that the 
 producing power of the land shall be safeguarded 
 and increased, as I have indicated in an earlier 
 part of the discussion. It will be better if it comes 
 as the result of education, and thereby develops 
 the voluntary feeling of obligation and responsibil- 
 ity. At the same time, it is equally the responsi- 
 bility of every other person to make it possible for 
 the farmer to prosecute his business under the ex- 
 pression of the highest standards. 
 
 There is just now abroad amongst us a teaching 
 to the effect that the farmer cannot afford to put 
 much additional effort into his crop production, in- 
 asmuch as the profit in an acre may not depend 
 on the increase in yield, and therefore he does not 
 carry an obligation to augment his acre-yields. 
 This is a weakening philosophy. 
 
 Undoubtedly there is a point beyond which he 
 71 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 may not go with profit in the effort to secure a 
 heavy yield, for it may cost him too much to pro- 
 duce the maximum; so it may not be profitable for 
 a transportation company to maintain the highest 
 possible speed. With this economic question I have 
 nothing to do; but it is the farmer's moral responsi- 
 bility to society to increase his production, and the 
 stimulation reacts powerfully upon himself. It is a 
 man's natural responsibility to do his best: it is 
 specially important that the man at the bottom put 
 forth his best efforts. To increase his yields is one 
 of the ways in which he- expresses himself as a man 
 and applies his knowledge. This incentive taken 
 away, agriculture loses one of its best endeavors, 
 the occupation remains stationary or even deterio- 
 rates, and society loses a moral support at the very 
 point where it is most needed. 
 
 If the economic conditions are such that the 
 farmer cannot afford to increase his production, 
 then the remedy is to be found without rather 
 than by the repression of the producer. We are ex- 
 pending vast effort to educate the farmer in the 
 ways of better production, but we do not make it 
 possible for him to apply this education to the best 
 advantage. 
 
 The real farmer, the one whom we so much de- 
 light to honor, has a strong moral regard for his 
 land, for his animals, and his crops. These are es- 
 72 
 
The Group Reaction 
 
 tablished men, with highly developed obligations, 
 feeling their responsibility to the farm on which 
 they live. No nation can long persist that does 
 not have this kind of citizenry in the background. 
 
 I have spoken of one phase of the group reaction, 
 as suggested in the attitude of the farmer. It may 
 be interesting to recall, again, the fact that the pur- 
 pose of farming is changing. The farmer is now 
 adopting the outlook and the moral conduct of com- 
 merce. His business is no longer to produc'e the 
 supplies for his family and to share the small over- 
 plus with society. He grows or makes a certain 
 line of produce that he sells for cash, and then he 
 purchases his other supplies in the general market. 
 The days of homespun are gone. The farmer is as 
 much a buyer as a seller. Commercial methods 
 and standards are invading the remotest communi- 
 ties. This will have far-reaching results. Perhaps a 
 fundamental shift in the moral basis of the agricul- 
 tural occupations is slowly under way. 
 
 The measuring of farming in terms of yields and 
 incomes introduces a dangerous standard. It is 
 commonly assumed that State moneys for agricul- 
 ture-education may be used only for "practical" — 
 that is, for doUars-and-cents — results, and the em- 
 phasis is widely placed very exclusively on more 
 alfalfa, more corn, more hogs, more fruit, on the 
 two-blades-of-grass morals; and yet the highest 
 73 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 good that can accrue to a State for the expenditure 
 of its money is the raising up of a population less 
 responsive to cash than to some other stimuli. The 
 good physical support is indeed essential, but it is 
 only the beginning of a process. I am conscious of 
 a peculiar hardness in some of the agriculture- 
 enterprise, with little real uplook; I hope that we 
 may soon pass this cruder phase. 
 
 Undoubtedly we are in the beginning of an epoch 
 in rural affairs. We are at a formative period. We 
 begin to consider the rural problem increasingly in 
 terms of social groups. The attitudes that these 
 groups assume, the way in which they react to their 
 problems, will be determined in the broader as- 
 pects for some time to come by the character of 
 the young leadership that is now taking the field. 
 
 74 
 
The spiritual contact with nature 
 
 A useful contact with the earth places man not 
 as superior to nature but as a superior intelligence 
 working in natiu-e as a conscious and therefore as 
 a responsible part in a plan of evolution, which is 
 a continuing creation. It distinguishes the ele- 
 mental virtues as against the acquired, factitious, 
 and pampered virtues. These strong and simple 
 traits may be brought out easily and naturally if 
 we incorporate into our schemes of education the 
 solid experiences of tramping, camping, scouting, 
 farming, handcraft, and other activities that are 
 not mere refinements of subjective processes. 
 
 Lack of training in the realities drives us to find 
 satisfaction in all sorts of make-believes and in 
 play-lives. The " movies " and many other develop- 
 ments of our time make an appeal wholly beyond 
 their merits, and they challenge the methods and 
 intentions of education. 
 
 There are more fundamental satisfactions than 
 "thrills." There is more heart-ease in frugality 
 than in surfeit. There is no real relish except when 
 the appetite is keen. We are now provided with 
 all sorts of things that nobody ever should want. 
 75 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 The good spiritual reaction to nature is not a 
 form of dogmatism or impressionism. It results 
 normally from objective experience, when the per- 
 son is ready for it and has good digestion. It should 
 be the natural emotion of the man who knows his 
 objects and does not merely dream about them. 
 There is no hallucination in it. The remedy for 
 some of the erratic "futurism" and for forms of 
 illusion is to put the man hard against the facts: 
 he might be set to studying bugs or soils or placed 
 between the handles of a plow until such time as 
 objects begin to take their natural shape and mean- 
 ing in his mind. 
 
 It is not within my purview here to consider the 
 abstract righteous relation of man to the creation, 
 nor to examine the major emotions that result from a 
 contemplation of nature. It is only a very few of 
 the simpler and more practical considerations that 
 I may suggest. 
 
 The training in solid experience naturally em- 
 phasizes the righteousness of plain and simple eat- 
 >, ing and drinking, and of frugality and control in 
 C, pleasures. Many of the adventitious pleasures are 
 in the highest degree pernicious and are indications 
 of weakness. 
 
 Considering the almost universal opinion that 
 nature exhibits the merciless and relentless struggle 
 of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, it is 
 76 
 
 ■J 
 
The Spiritual Contact with Nature 
 
 significant that one of the most productive ways of 
 training a youth in sensitiveness and in regard for 
 other creatures is by means of the nature contact. 
 Even if the person is taught that the strong and 
 ferocious survive and conquer, he nevertheless soon 
 comes to have the tenderest regard for every living 
 thing if he has the naturist in him. He discards 
 the idea that we lose virility when we cease to kill, 
 and relegates the notion to the limbo of deceits. 
 This only means that unconsciously he has experi- 
 enced the truth in nature, and in practice has dis- 
 carded the erroneous philosophy contained in books 
 even though he may still give these philosophies 
 his mental assent. 
 
 It is exactly among the naturists that the old in- 
 stinct to kill begins to lose its force and that an 
 instinct of helpfulness and real brotherhood soon 
 takes its place. From another source, the instinct 
 to kill dies out among the moralists and other people. 
 And yet it is passing strange how this old survival 
 - — or is it a reversion ?— holds its place amongst us, 
 even in the higher levels. The punishment of a life 
 for a life is itself a survival. Entertainment even 
 yet plays upon this old memory of killing, as in 
 books of adventure, in fiction, in playgames of 
 children, and worst of all on the stage where this 
 strange anachronism, even in plays that are not 
 historic, is still portrayed in pernicious features and 
 77 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 in a way that would rouse any community and 
 violate law if it were enacted in real life. 
 
 It is difficult to explain these survivals when we 
 pretend to be so much shocked by the struggle for 
 existence. We must accept the struggle, but we 
 ought to try to understand it. The actual suffer- 
 ing among the creatures as the result of this struggle 
 is probably small, and the bloody and ferocious con- 
 test that we like to picture to ourselves is relatively 
 insignificant. There is a righteous element in the 
 struggle; or, more truthfully, the struggle itself is 
 right. Every living and sentient thing persists by 
 its merit and by its right. It persists within its 
 sphere, and usually not in the sphere of some other 
 creature. The weeding-out process is probably re- 
 lated in some way with adaptability, but only re- 
 motely with physical strength. It is a process of 
 applying the test. The test is applied continuously, 
 and not in some violent upheaval. 
 
 If one looks for a moral significance in the struggle 
 for existence, one finds it in the fact that it is a pro- 
 cess of adjustment rather than a contest in ambition. 
 
 The elimination of the unessentials and of the 
 survivals of a lower order of creation that have no 
 proper place in human society, is the daily neces- 
 sity of the race. The human struggle should not 
 be on the plane of the struggle in the lower crea- 
 tion, by the simple fact that the human plane is 
 78 
 
The Spiritual Contact with Nature 
 
 unlike; and those who contend that we should draw 
 our methods of contest from wild nature would 
 therefore put us back on the plane of the creatures 
 we are supposed to have passed. If there is one 
 struggle of the creeping things, if there is one strug- 
 gle of the fish of the sea and another of the beasts of 
 the field, and still another of the fowls of the air, 
 then surely there must be still another for those who 
 have dominion. 
 
 79 
 
The struggle for existence: war 
 
 We may consider even further, although briefly, 
 the nature of the struggle for existence in its spiritual 
 relation. It would be violence to assume a holy 
 earth and a holy production from the earth, if the 
 contest between the creatures seems to violate all 
 that we know as Tightness. 
 
 The notion of the contentious and sanguinary 
 struggle for existence finds its most pronounced 
 popular expression in the existence of human war. 
 It is a wide-spread opinion that war is necessary in 
 the nature of things, and, in fact, it has been not 
 only justified but glorified on this basis. We may 
 here examine this contention briefly, and we may 
 ask whether, in the case of human beings, there are 
 other sufficient means of personal and social devel- 
 opment than by mortal combat with one's fellows. 
 We may ask whether the principle of enmity or the 
 principle of fellow feeling is the more important and 
 controlling. 
 
 We are not to deny or even to overlook the great 
 results that have come from war. Virile races have 
 forced themselves to the front and have impressed 
 80 
 
The Struggle for Existence: War 
 
 their stamp on society; the peoples have been mixed 
 and also assorted; lethargic folk have been galva- 
 nized into activity; iron has been put into men's 
 sinews; heroic deeds have arisen; old combinations 
 and intrigues have been broken up (although new 
 ones take their place). A kind of national pm-ifi- 
 cation may result from a great war. The state of 
 human affairs has been brought to its present con- 
 dition largely as the issue of wars. 
 
 On the other hand, we are not to overlook the 
 damagiug results, the destruction, the anguish, the 
 check to all productive enterprise, the hatred and 
 revenge, the hypocrisy and deceit, the despicable 
 foreign spy system, the loss of standards, the de- 
 moralization, the lessening respect and regard for 
 the rights of the other, the breeding of human 
 parasites that fatten at the fringes of disaster, the 
 levying of tribute, the setting up of unnatural 
 boundaries, the thwarting of national and racial 
 developments which, so far as we can see, gave 
 every promise of great results. We naturally extol 
 the nations that have survived; we do not know 
 how many superior stocks may have been sacrificed 
 to military conquest, or how many racial possibilities 
 may have been suppressed in their beginnings. 
 
 Vast changes in mental attitudes may result from 
 a great war, and the course of civilization may be 
 deflected; and while we adjust ourselves to these 
 81 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 changes, no one may say at the time that they are 
 just or even that they are temporarily best. We 
 are never able at the moment to measure the effects 
 of the unholy conquest of peoples who should not 
 have been conquered; these results work themselves 
 out in tribulation and perhaps in loss of eifort and 
 of racial standards through many weary centuries. 
 Force, or even " success, " cannot justify theft. 
 
 But even assuming the great changes that have 
 arisen from war, this is not a justification of war; 
 it only states a fact, it only provides a measure of 
 the condition of society at any epoch. It is prob- 
 able that war wiU still exert a mighty even if a less- 
 ening influence; it may still be necessary to resort 
 to arms to win for a people its natural opportunity 
 and to free a race from bondage; and if any people 
 has a right to its own existence, it has an equal 
 right and indeed a duty to defend itself. But this 
 again only indicates the wretched state of develop- 
 ment in which we live. Undoubtedly, also, a cer- 
 tain amount of military training is very useful, but 
 there should be other ways, in a democracy, to se- 
 cure something of this needful training. 
 
 The struggle for existence, as expressed in human 
 combat, does not necessarily residt in the survival 
 of the most desirable, so far as we are able to define 
 desirability. We are confusing very unlike situa- 
 tions in our easy application of the struggle for ex- 
 82 
 
The Struggle for Existence: War 
 
 istence to war. The struggle is not now between 
 individuals to decide the fitter; it is between vast 
 bodies hurling death by wholesale. We pick the 
 physically fit and send them to the battle-line; and 
 these fit are slain. This is not the situation in 
 nature from which we draw our illustrations. More- 
 over, the final test of fitness in natiu-e is adaptation, 
 not power. Adaptation and adjustment mean 
 peace, not war. Physical force has been immensely 
 magnified in the human sphere; we even speak of the 
 great nations as "powers," a terminology that 
 some day we shall regret. The military method of 
 civilization finds no justification in the biological 
 struggle for existence. 
 
 The final conquest of a man is of himself, and 
 he shall then be greater than when he takes a city. 
 The final conquest of a society is of itself, and it 
 shall then be greater than when it conquers its 
 neighboring society. 
 
 Man now begins to measure himself against na- 
 ture also, and he begins to see that herein shall lie 
 his greatest conquests beyond himself; in fact, by 
 this means shall he conquer himself, — ^by great feats 
 of engineering, by completer utilization of the pos- 
 sibilities of the planet, by vast discoveries in the 
 unknown, and by the final enlargement of the soul; 
 and in these fields shall be the heroes. The most 
 virile and upstanding qualities can find expression 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 in the conquest of the earth. In the contest with 
 the planet every man may feel himself grow. 
 
 What we have done in times past shows the way 
 by which we have come; it does not provide a program 
 of procedure for days that are coming; or if it does, 
 then we deny the effective evolution of the race. We 
 have passed witchcraft, religious persecution, the in- 
 quisition, subjugation of women^ the enslavement of 
 our fellows except alone enslavement in war. 
 
 Here I come particularly to a consideration of the 
 struggle for existence. Before I enter on this sub- 
 ject, I must pause to say that I would not of my- 
 self foimd an argument either for war or against it 
 on the analogies of the struggle for existence. Man 
 has responsibilities quite apart from the conditions 
 that obtain in the lower creation. Man is a moral 
 agent; animals and plants are not moral agents. 
 But the argument for war is so often founded on 
 this struggle in nature, that the question must be 
 considered. 
 
 It has been persistently repeated for years that in 
 nature the weakest perish and that the victory is 
 with the strong, meaning by that the physically 
 powerful. This is a false analogy and a false bi- 
 ology. It leads men far .astray. It is the result 
 of a misconception of the teaching of evolution. 
 
 Our minds dwell on the capture and the carnage 
 in nature, — the hawk swooping on its prey, the cat 
 84 
 
The Struggle for Existence: War 
 
 stealthily watching for the mouse, wolves himting in 
 packs, ferocious beasts lying in wait, sharks that 
 follow ships, serpents with venomous fangs, the vast 
 range of parasitism; and with the poet we say that 
 nature is "red in tooth and claw." Of course, we 
 are not to deny the struggle of might against might, 
 which is mostly between individuals, and of which 
 we are all aware; but the weak and the fragile and 
 the small are the organisms that have persisted. 
 There are thousands of little and soft things still 
 abundant in the world that have outlived the fear- 
 some ravenous monsters of ages past; there were 
 Goliaths in those days, but the Davids have out- 
 lived them, and Gath is not peopled by giants. 
 The big and strong have not triumphed. 
 
 The struggle in nature is not a combat, as we 
 commonly understand that word, and it is not war- 
 fare. The earth is not strewn with corpses. 
 
 I was impressed in reading Roosevelt's "African 
 Game Trails" with the great extent of small and 
 defenseless and fragile animal life that abounds in 
 the midst of the terrible beasts, — little, uncoura- 
 geous things that hide in the crevices, myriads that 
 fly in the air, those that ride on the rhinos, that 
 swim and hide in the pools, and bats that hang in 
 the acacia-trees. He travelled in the region of the 
 lion, in the region that "holds the mightiest crea- 
 tures that tread *te earth or swim in its rivers; it 
 85 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 also holds distant kinsfolk of these same creatures, 
 no bigger than woodchucks, which dwell in crannies 
 of the rocks, and in the tree tops. There are ante- 
 lope smaller than hares and antelope larger than 
 oxen. There are creatures which are the embodi- 
 ment of grace; and others whose huge ungainliness 
 is like that of a shape in a nightmare. The plains 
 are alive with droves of strange and beautiful ani- 
 mals whose like is not known elsewhere." The lion 
 is mighty; he is the king of beasts; but he keeps 
 his place and he has no kingdom. He has not mas- 
 tered the earth. No beast has ever overcome the 
 earth; and the natural world has never been con- 
 quered by muscular force. 
 
 Nature is not in a state of perpetual enmity, one 
 part with another. 
 
 My friend went to a far country. He told me 
 that he was most impressed with the ferocity, chiefly 
 of wild men. It came my time to go to that coun- 
 try. I saw that men had been savage, — men are 
 the most ferocious of animals, and the ferocity has 
 never reached its high point of refined fury until 
 to-day. (Of course, savages fight and slay; this is 
 because they are savages.) But I saw also that these 
 savage men are passing away. I saw animals that 
 had never tasted blood, that had no means of de- 
 fense against a rapacious captor, and yet they were 
 multiplying. Every stone that I upturned dis- 
 86 
 
The Struggle for Existence: War 
 
 closed some tender organism; every bush that I dis- 
 turbed revealed some timid atom of animal life; 
 every spot where I walked bore some delicate plant, 
 and I recalled the remark of Sir J. William Dawson 
 "that frail and delicate plants may be more ancient 
 than the mountains or plains on which they live"; 
 and if I went on the sea, I saw the medusse, as frail 
 as a poet's dream, with the very sunshine streaming 
 through them, yet holding their own in the mighty 
 upheaval of the oceans; and I reflected on the 
 myriads of microscopic things that for untold ages 
 had cast the very rock on which much of the ocean 
 rests. The minor things and the weak things are 
 the most numerous, and they have played the 
 greatest part in the polity of nature. So I came 
 away from that far country impressed with the 
 power of the little feeble things. I had a new under- 
 standing of the worth of creatiu-es so unobtrusive 
 and so silent that the multitude does not know them. 
 I saw protective colorings; I saw fleet wings and 
 swift feet; I saw the ability to hide and to conceal; 
 I saw habits of adaptation; I saw marvellous powers 
 of reproduction. You have seen them in every 
 field; you have met them on your casual walks, 
 until you accept them as the natural order of things. 
 And you know that the beasts of prey have not 
 prevailed. The whole contrivance of nature is to 
 protect the weak. 
 
 87 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 We have wrongly visualized the "struggle." We 
 have given it an intensely human application. We 
 need to go back to Darwin who gave significance to 
 the phrase "struggle for existence." "I use this 
 term," he said, "in a large and metaphorical sense, 
 including dependence of one being on another, and 
 including (which is more important) not only the 
 life of the individual, but success in leaving prog- 
 eny." The dependence of one being on another, 
 success in leaving progeny, — ^how accurate and how 
 far-seeing was Darwin ! 
 
 I hope that I speak to naturists and to farmers. 
 They know how diverse are the forms of life; and 
 they know that somehow these forms live together 
 and that only rarely do whole races perish by sub- 
 jugation. They know that the beasts do not set 
 forth to conquer, but only to gain subsistence and 
 to protect themselves. The beasts and birds do not 
 pursue indiscriminately. A hen-hawk does not at- 
 tack crows or butterflies. Even a vicious bull does 
 not attack fowls or rabbits or sheep. The great 
 issues are the issues of live and let-live. There are 
 whole nations of plants, more unlike than nations 
 of humankind, living together in mutual interde- 
 pendence. There are nations of quiet and might- 
 less animals that live in the very regions of the 
 mighty and the stout. And we are glad it is so. 
 
 Consider the mockery of invoking the struggle 
 88 
 
The Struggle for Existence: War 
 
 for existence as justification for a battle on a June 
 morning, when all nature is vibrant with life and com- 
 petition is severe, and when, if ever, we are to look 
 for strife. But the very earth breathes peace. The 
 fulness of every field and wood is in complete ad- 
 justment. The teeming multitudes of animal and 
 plant have found a way to live together, and we 
 look abroad on a vast harmony, verdurous, prolific, 
 abounding. Into this concord, project your holo- 
 caust ! 
 
 89 
 
The daily fare 
 
 Some pages back, I said something about the es- 
 sential simplicity in habit of life that results from the 
 nature contact, and I illustrated the remark by call- 
 ing attention to the righteousness of simple eating 
 and drinking. Of course, the eating must be sub- 
 stantial, but the adventitious appetites accomplish 
 nothing and they may be^lTot only intemperate 
 and damaging to health but even unmoral. Yet 
 it is not alone the simplicity of the daily fare that 
 interests me here, but the necessity that it shall 
 be as direct as possible from the ground or the sea, 
 and that it shall be undisguised and shall have 
 meaning beyond the satisfying of the appetite. 
 
 I was interested in Tusser's "Christmas hus- 
 bandly fare," notwithstanding some suggestion of 
 gluttony in It and of oversupply. There are certain 
 vigor and good relish about it, and lack of osten- 
 tation, that seem to suggest a lesson. 
 
 It was more than three centuries ago that native 
 Thomas Tusser, musician, chorister, and farmer, 
 gave to the world his incomparable "Five Hun- 
 dred Points of Good Husbandry." He covered the 
 farm year and the farm work as completely as 
 90 
 
The Daily Fare 
 
 Vergil had covered it more than fifteen centuries 
 before; and he left us sketches of the countryside 
 of his day, and the ways of the good plain folk, and 
 quaint bits of philosophy and counsel. He cele- 
 brated the Christmas festival with much conviction, 
 and in the homely way of the home folks, deriving 
 his satisfactions from the things that the land pro- 
 duces. His sketches are wholesome reading in these 
 days of foods transported from the ends of the earth, 
 and compounded by impersonal devices and con- 
 densed into packages that go into every house alike. 
 Thomas Tusser would celebrate with "things 
 handsome to have, as they ought to be had." His 
 board would not be scant of provisions, for he seems 
 not to have advised the simple life in the way of 
 things good to eat; but he chose good raw mate- 
 rials, and we can imagine that the "good husband 
 and huswife" gave these materials their best com- 
 pliments and prepared them with diligence and 
 skill. Not once does he suggest that these mate- 
 rials be secured from the market, or that any im- 
 ported labor be employed in the preparation of 
 them. 
 
 "Good bread and good drink, a good fire in the hall, 
 Brawn, pudding, and souse, and good mustard withal." 
 
 Here is the whole philosophy of the contented 
 festival, — the fruit of one's labor, the common gen- 
 91 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 uine materials, and the cheer of the family fireside. 
 The day is to be given over to the spirit of the cele- 
 bration; every common object will glow with a new 
 consecration, and everything wiU be good, — even 
 the mustard will be good withal. What a contempt 
 old Tusser would have had for all the imported and 
 fabricated condiments and trivialities that now come 
 to our tables in packages suggestive of medicines 
 and drugs ! And how ridiculously would they have 
 stood themselves beside the brawn, pudding, and 
 souse! A few plain accessories, every one stout 
 and genuine, and in good quantity, must accom- 
 pany the substantialities that one takes with a free 
 hand directly from the land that he manages. 
 
 It surprises us that he had such a bountiful list 
 from which to draw, and yet the kinds are not more 
 than might be secured from any good land property, 
 if one set about securing them: 
 
 "Beef, mutton, and pork, shred pies of the best. 
 Pig, veal, goose, and capon, and turkey well drest, 
 Cheese, apples, and nuts, joly carols to hear. 
 As then in the country, is counted good cheer." 
 
 In these days we should draw less heavily on the 
 meats, for in the three centuries we have gained 
 greatly in the vegetable foods. Tusser did not have 
 the potato. But nevertheless, these materials are 
 of the very bone of the land. They grow up with 
 92 
 
The DaUy Fare 
 
 the year and out of the conditions, and they have 
 all the days in them, the sunshine, the rain, the 
 dew of morning, the wind, the cold foggy nights, and 
 the work of laborious hands. Every one of them 
 means something to the person who raises them, 
 and there is no impersonality in them. John's 
 father drained the land when yet he was a boy; 
 the hedges were set; long ago the place was laid 
 out in Its rotations; the old trees in the fields are a 
 part of it; every stall in the stables and every win- 
 dow-seat in the old house hold memories; and John 
 has grown up with these memories, and with these 
 fields, and with the footpaths that lead out over 
 brooks and amongst the herds of cattle. It is a 
 part of his religion to keep the land well; and these 
 supplies at Christmas time are taken with a deep 
 reverence for the goodness that is in them, and with 
 a pride in having produced them. 
 
 And Thomas Tusser, good husbandman, rejoiced 
 that these bounties cost no cash: 
 
 "What cost to good husband, is any of this? 
 Good household provision only it is. 
 Of other the like, I do leave out a many 
 That costeth a husbandman never a penny." 
 
 To farm well; to provide well; to produce it one- 
 self; to be independent of trade, so far as this is 
 possible in the furnishing of the table, — these are 
 93 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 good elements in living. And in this day we are 
 rapidly losing all this; many persons already have 
 lost it; many have never known the satisfaction 
 of it. Most of us must live from the box and the 
 bottle and the tin-can; we are even feeding our 
 cattle from the factory and the bag. The farmer 
 now raises a few prime products to sell, and then 
 he buys his foods in the markets under label and 
 tag; and he knows not who produced the materials, 
 and he soon comes not to care. No thought of the 
 seasons, and of the men and women who labored, 
 of the place, of the kind of soil, of the special con- 
 tribution of the native earth, come with the trade- 
 mark or the brand. And so we all live mechani- 
 cally, from shop to table, without contact, and 
 irreverently. 
 
 May we not once in the year remember the earth 
 in the food that we eat ? May we not in some way, 
 even though we live in town, so organize our Christ- 
 mas festival that the thought of the goodness of the 
 land and its bounty shall be a conscious part of our 
 celebration? May we not for once reduce to the 
 very minimum the supply of manufactured and 
 sophisticated things, and come somewhere near, at 
 least in spirit, to a "Christmas husbandly fare?" 
 
 Yet, Thomas Tusser would not confine his hus- 
 bandly fare to the Christmas time. In another 
 poem, he gives us "The farmer's daily diet," in which 
 94 
 
The DaUy Fare 
 
 the sturdy products are still much the same, secured 
 and prepared by those who partake. All this may 
 be little applicable literally in our present living, 
 and yet I think it is easily possible, as certainly it 
 is very desirable, to develop a new attitude toward 
 the table fare, avoiding much unnecessary and in- 
 significant household labor and lending an attitude 
 of good morality to the daily sustenance. 
 
 Much of our eating and feasting is a vicious 
 waste of time, and also of human energy that might 
 be put to good uses. One can scarcely conceive 
 how such indirect and uncomfortable and expensive 
 methods could have come into use. Perhaps they 
 originated with persons of quality in an aristocratic 
 society, when an abundance of servants must be 
 trained to serve and when distinctions in eating 
 were a part of the distinction in rank. But to 
 have introduced these laborious and unintelligent 
 methods into hotels, where persons tarry for com- 
 fort and into homes that do not need to maintain 
 an extrinsic appearance, is a vain and ludicrous 
 imitation. The numbers of courses, with more ser- 
 vice than food, that one often meets at the table 
 d'hote of the frequented hotels abroad, are most 
 exasperating to one who values time and has a 
 serious purpose in travel and a rightful care for the 
 bodily apparatus. Here is the performance — it was 
 nothing more than a performance, consisting in re- 
 95 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 peated changing of all the dishes, the removing of 
 every fragment of edibles, and in passing very small 
 separate parcels of food — ^that it was my lot to en- 
 dure on an otherwise happy day in a hotel that 
 had little else to distinguish it: 
 
 Course 1. Dry bread (no butter). 
 
 Removal. 
 Course 2. Soup (nothing else). 
 
 Removal. 
 Course 3. Fish (very economical), with a potato on the side. 
 
 Removal. 
 Course 4. Veal, macaroni. 
 
 Removal. 
 Course 5. Spoonful of green beans (nothing else). 
 
 Removal. 
 Course 6. Beef and salad (fragmentary). 
 
 Removal. 
 Course 7. Charlotte Russe, bit of cake. 
 
 Removal. 
 Course 8. Fruit (slight). 
 
 Removal. 
 Course 9. Morsel of cheese, one cracker. 
 
 Removal. 
 Course 10. Coffee. 
 
 Relief. 
 
 The traveler knows that this species of time- 
 wasting is not unusual; certainly the food is not 
 unusual and does not merit such considerate at- 
 tention, although it may profit by the magnifica- 
 tion. All this contributes nothing to human effi- 
 ciency — quite the reverse — and certainly nothing to 
 96 
 
The Daily Fare 
 
 the rightful gusto in the enjoyment of one's sub- 
 sistence. It is a ceremony. Such laborious use- 
 lessness is quite immoral. 
 
 I am afraid that our food habits very well rep- 
 resent how far we have moved away from the essen- 
 tials and how much we have misled oiu-selves as 
 to the standards of excellence. I looked in a cook- 
 book to learn how to serve potatoes : I found twenty- 
 three recipes, every one of which was apparently 
 designed to disguise the fact that they were pota- 
 toes; and yet there is really nothing in a potato 
 to be ashamed of. Of course, this kind of decep- 
 tion is not peculiar to cookery. It is of the same 
 piece as the stamping of the metal building cover- 
 ings in forms to represent brick and stone, although 
 everybody knows that they are not brick and stone, 
 rather than to make a design that shall express 
 metal and thereby frankly tell the truth; of the same 
 kind also as the casting of cement blocks to rep- 
 resent undressed rock, although every one is aware 
 of the deception, rather than to develop a form that 
 will express cement blocks as brick expresses brick; 
 of the same order as the inflating of good whole- 
 some water by carbonic gas; and all the other de- 
 ceits in materials on which our common affairs are 
 built. It is, of course, legitimate to present our 
 foods in many forms that we may secure variety 
 even with scant and common materials; but dan- 
 97 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 ger may lie in any untruthfulness with which we 
 use the raw materials of life. 
 
 So cookery has come to be a process of conceal- 
 ment. Not only does it conceal the materials, but 
 it also conceals the names of them in a ridiculous 
 nomenclature. Apparently, the higher the art of 
 cookery, the greater is the merit of complete con- 
 cealment. I think that one reason why persons en- 
 joy the simple cooking of farmers and sailors and 
 other elemental folk, is because of its comparative 
 lack of disguise, although they may not be aware of 
 this merit of it. We have so successfully disguised 
 our viands through so many years that it is not 
 "good form" to make inquiries: we may not smell 
 the food, although the odor should be one of the 
 best and most rightful satisfactions, as it is in fruits 
 and flowers. We may smell a parsnip or a potato 
 when it grows in the field, but not when it is 
 cooked. 
 
 We add the extrinsic and meaningless odors of 
 spices and flavorings, forgetting that odor no less 
 than music hath occasions; each of the materials 
 has its own odor that the discriminating cook 
 will try to bring out in its best expression. Were 
 we to be deprived of all these exotic seasonings, un- 
 doubtedly cookery would be the gainer in the end; 
 nor could we so readily disguise materials that In 
 themselves are not fit to eat. There is a reason 
 98 
 
The DaUy Fare 
 
 why "all foods taste alike," as we often hear it 
 said of the cooking in public places. 
 
 Moreover, we want everything that is out of 
 season, necessitating great attention to the arts of 
 preserving and requiring still further fabrication; 
 and by this desire we also lessen the meaning of the 
 seasons when they come in their natural sequence, 
 bringing their treasure of materials that are adapted 
 to the time and to the place. We can understand, 
 then, why it so happens that we neglect the cookery 
 of the common foods, as seeming to be not quite 
 worth the whUe, and expend ourselves with so much 
 effort on the accessories and the frills. I have been 
 interested to observe some of the instruction in cook- 
 ing, — how it often begins with little desserts, and 
 fudge, and a variety of dib-dabs. This is much 
 like the instruction in manual training that begins 
 with formal and meaningless model work or triviali- 
 ties and neglects the issues of life. It is much like 
 some of the teaching in agriculture not so many years 
 ago, before we attacked very effectively the serious 
 problems of wheat and alfalfa and forests and mar- 
 kets. Mastery does not lie in these pieces of play 
 work, nor does the best intellectual interest on the 
 part of the student reside in them. 
 
 Result is that one finds the greatest difficulty in 
 securing a really good baked potato, a well-cooked 
 steak, or a wholesome dish of apple-sauce that is 
 99 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 not strained and flavored beyond recognition. It is 
 nearly impossible .for one to secure an egg fried hard 
 and yet very tender and that has not been "turned" 
 or scorched on the edges, — this is quite the test of 
 the skUl of the good cook. The notion that a hard- 
 fried egg is dangerously indigestible is probably a 
 fable of poor cookery. One can secure many sophis- 
 ticated and disguised egg dishes, but I think skill 
 in plainly Qooking eggs is almost an unknown art, 
 or perhaps a little-practised art. 
 
 Now, it is on these simple and essential things 
 that I would start my instruction in cookery; and 
 this not only for the gain to good eating but also 
 for the advantage of vigor and good morals. I am 
 afraid that our cooking does not set a good example 
 before the young three times every day in the year; 
 and how eager are the young and how amenable to 
 suggestion at these three blessed epochs everyday 
 in the year ! 
 
 Of course, some unsympathetic reader will say 
 that I am drawing a long bow; yet it is only a 
 short way from deception in cookery to the decep- 
 tion in what we call adulteration of food. Un- 
 doubtedly our cookery has prepared the public 
 mind for the adulteration. I do not mean to enter 
 the discussion of food adulteration, but I will leave 
 with my reader a statement issued by a food chemist 
 but a few years ago, letting him ponder on what 
 100 
 
The Daily Fare 
 
 had become a staggering infidelity in the use of 
 the good raw materials and hoping that he wUI try 
 to trace the causes: 
 
 "Some of the more common forms of food adulterations 
 are as follows: 
 
 "Hamburg steak prepared at the market is very often 
 found to contain sodium sulphite. Bologna sausage and simi- 
 lar meats sold in this State have, until very recently, usually 
 contained from 1 to 30 per cent of added cereal and the water 
 that the cereal would take up. 
 
 "Prepared flours, like 'pancake flour,' very often contain 
 little if any buckwheat flour and are made up of the cheap- 
 est cereals. Wheat flour is bleached with nitric oxide to make 
 it more pleasing to the eye at the expense of its nutritive value. 
 
 "The high-priced, fancy French peas are colored green 
 with sulphate of copper. 
 
 "Bottled ketchup usually contains benzoate of soda as a 
 preservative. This is necessary because the ketchup is so 
 often made from the refuse of the tomato-canning factories 
 and cooking is not sufiicient to check the fermentation already 
 started. 
 
 "Japanese tea is colored with a cyanide of potassium and 
 iron. 
 
 "Prepared mustard usually contains a large amount of 
 added starch and is colored yellow with tumeric. 
 
 "Coffee, especially ground coffee, has recently been adul- 
 terated to a considerable extent with roasted peas. 
 
 "So-called non-alcoholic bottled beverages often contain 
 alcohol or a habit-forming drug and are usually given an 
 attractive color by adding an aniline dye. 
 
 "Candy is commonly colored with aniline dyes and often 
 is coated with paraffine to prevent evaporation of moistm-e. 
 A large amount of the cheaper candies contain substance like 
 glue and soapstone. 
 
 101 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 "The higher-priced molasses usually contain added sul- 
 phites. 
 
 "Flavoring extracts are rarely made from pure products, 
 and most always contain artificial coloring. 
 
 "Strawberry and raspberry jams and jellies are rarely made 
 from anything but apple jelly with a few berry seeds and 
 coloring matter added. The cheap apple jelly is often imi- 
 tated by a mixture of glucose, starch, aniline dye, and fla- 
 voring. 
 
 "It is almost impossible to purchase lard that does not 
 contain some added tallow. 
 
 "The bakeries in the large cities have been the dumping- 
 ground for all kinds of decomposed food products, like de- 
 cayed eggs. 
 
 "Cheap ice-cream of the sodarfountain variety is often 
 made of gelatin, glue, and starch. 
 
 "Cottonseed-oil worth twenty cents a quart is commonly 
 sold for olive-oil worth one dollar a quart. 
 
 "Saccharine, one pound of which has the sweetening power 
 of a barrel of sugar, is often used in place of sugar in all 
 forms of prepared sweetened products. Saccharine is a poison 
 and has no food value." 
 
 It is our habit to attach aU the blame to the 
 adulterators, and it is difficult to excuse them; but 
 we usually find that there are contributory causes 
 and certainly there must be reasons. Has our daily 
 fare been honest? 
 
 102 
 
The admiration of good materials 
 
 Not even yet am I done with this plain problem 
 of the daily fare. The very fact that it is daily — 
 thrice daily — and that it enters so much into the 
 thought and effort of every one of us, makes it a 
 subject of the deepest concern from every point of 
 view. The aspect of the case that I am now to re- 
 assert is the effect of much of our food preparation 
 in removing us from a knowledge of the good raw 
 materials that come out of the abounding earth. 
 
 Let us stop to admire an apple. I see a com- 
 mittee of the old worthies in some fruit-show going 
 slowly and discriminatingly among the plates of 
 fruits, discussing the shapes and colors and sizes, 
 catching the fragrance, debating the origins and 
 the histories, and testing them with the utmost 
 precaution and deliberation; and I follow to hear 
 their judgment. 
 
 This kind of apple is very perfect In spherical 
 form, deeply cut at the stem, well ridged at the 
 shallow crater, beautifully splashed and streaked 
 with carmine-red on a yellowish green under-color, 
 finely flecked with dots, slightly russet on the shaded 
 side, apparently a good keeper; its texture is fine- 
 grained and uniform, flavor mildly subacid, the qual- 
 ;03 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 ity good to very good; if the tree is hardy and produc- 
 tive, this variety is to be recommended to the ama- 
 teur for further trial ! The next sample is somewhat 
 elongated in form, rather below the average in 
 color, the stem very long and well set and indi- 
 cating a fruit that does not readily drop in wind- 
 storms, the textm-e exceedingly melting but the 
 flavor slightly lacking in character and therefore 
 rendering it of doubtful value for further test. An- 
 other sample lacks decidedly in quality, as judged 
 by the specimens on the table, and the exhibitor is 
 respectfully recommended to withdraw it from fu- 
 ture exhibitions; another kind has a very pronoimced 
 aromatic odor, which will commend it to persons 
 desiring to grow a choice collection of interesting 
 fruits; still another is of good size, very firm and 
 solid, of uniform red color, slightly oblate and there- 
 fore lending itself to easy packing, quality fair to 
 good, and if the tree bears such uniform samples as 
 those shown on the table it apparently gives prom- 
 ise of some usefulness as a market sort. My older 
 friends, if they have something of the feeling of the 
 pomologist, can construct the remainder of the 
 picture. 
 
 In physical perfectness of form and texture and 
 
 color, there is nothing in all the world that exceeds 
 
 a well-grown fruit. Let It lie in the palm of your 
 
 hand. Close your fingers slowly about it. Feel its 
 
 104 
 
The Admiration of Good Materials 
 
 firm or soft and modelled sm-face. Put it against 
 your cheek, and inhale its fragrance. Trace its 
 neutral under-colors, and follow its stripes and mark 
 its dots. If an apple, trace the eye that lies in a 
 moulded basin. Note its stem, how it stands firmly 
 in its cavity, and let your imagination run back to 
 the tree from which, when finally mature, it parted 
 freely. This apple is not only the product of your 
 labor, but it holds the essence of the year and it is 
 in itself a thing of exquisite beauty. There is no 
 other rondure and no other fragrance like this. 
 
 I am convinced that we need much to cultivate 
 this appreciation of the physical perfectness of the 
 fruits that we grow. We cannot afford to lose this 
 note from our lives, for this may contribute a good 
 part of our satisfaction of being in the world. The 
 discriminating appreciation that one applies to a 
 picture or a piece of sculpture may be equally ap- 
 plied to any fruit that grows on the commonest 
 tree or bush in our field or to any animal that stands 
 on a green pasture. It is no doubt a mark of a 
 well-tempered mind that it can understand the sig- 
 nificance of the forms in fruits and plants and ani- 
 mals and apply it in the work of the day. 
 
 I sometimes think that the rise of the culinary 
 
 arts is banishing this fine old appreciation of fruits 
 
 in their natural forms. There are so many ways 
 
 of canning and preserving and evaporating and ex- 
 
 105 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 tractiiig the juices, so many disguises and so much 
 fabrication, that the fruit is lost in the process. 
 The tin-can and the bottle seem to have put an 
 insuperable barrier between us and nature, and it 
 is difficult for us to get back to a good munch of 
 real apples under a tree or by the fireside. The 
 difficulty is all the greater in our congested city life 
 where orchards and trees are only a vacant mem- 
 ory or stories told to the young, and where the 
 space in the larder is so small that apples must be 
 purchased by the quart. The eating of good apples 
 out of hand seems to be almost a lost art. Only 
 the most indestructible kinds, along with leather- 
 skinned oranges and withered bananas, seem to be 
 purchasable in the market. The discriminating 
 apple-eater in the Old World sends to a grower for 
 samples of the kinds that he grows; and after the 
 inquirer has tested them in the family, and dis- 
 cussed them, he orders his winter supply. The 
 American leaves the matter to the cook and she 
 orders plain apples; and she gets them. 
 
 I wonder whether in time the perfection of fabri- 
 cation will not reach such a point that some fruits 
 will be known to the great public only by the pic- 
 ture on the package or on the bottle. Every process 
 that removes us one step farther from the earth 
 is a distinct loss to the people, and yet we are rap- 
 idly coming Into the habit of taking all things at 
 106 
 
The Admiration of Good Materials 
 
 second hand. My objection to the wine of the 
 grape is not so much a question of abstinence as 
 of the fact that I find no particular satisfaction in 
 the shape and texture of a bottle. 
 
 If one has a sensitive appreciation of the beauty 
 in form and color and modelling of the common 
 fruits, he will find his interest gradually extending 
 to other products. Some time ago I visited Hood 
 River Valley in company with a rugged potato- 
 grower from the Rocky Mountains. We were 
 amazed at the wonderful scenery, and captivated 
 by the beauty of the fruits. In one orchard the 
 owner showed us with much satisfaction a brace of 
 apples of perfect form and glowing colors. When 
 the grower had properly expounded the marvels of 
 Hood River apples, which he said were the finest 
 in the world, my friend thrust his hand into his 
 pocket and pulled out a potato, and said to the 
 man: "Why is not that just as handsome as a 
 Hood River apple?" And sure enough it was. 
 For twenty-five years this grower had been raising 
 and selecting the old Peachblow potato, until he 
 had a form much more perfect than the old Peach- 
 blow ever was, with a uniform delicate pink skin, 
 smooth surface, comely shape, and medium size, and 
 with eyes very small and scarcely sunken; and my 
 Hood River friend admitted that a potato as well 
 as an apple may be handsome and satisfying to the 
 107 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 hand and to the eye, and well worth carrymg in one's 
 pocket. But this was a high-bred potato, and not 
 one of the common lot. 
 
 This episode of the potato allows me another op- 
 portmiity to enforce my contention that we lose 
 the fruit or the vegetable in the processes of cook- 
 ery. The customary practice of "mashing" po- 
 tatoes talces all the individuality out of the product, 
 and the result is mostly so much starch. There is an 
 important dietary side to this. Cut a thin slice across 
 a potato and hold it to the light. Note the interior 
 undifferentiated mass, and then the thick band of 
 rind surrounding it. The potato flavor and a large 
 part of the nutriment lie in this exterior. We slice 
 this part away and fry, boil, or otherwise fuss up 
 the remainder. When we mash it, we go still far- 
 ther and break down the potato texture; and in the 
 modern method we squeeze and strain it till we 
 eliminate every part of the potato, leaving only a 
 pasty mass, which, in my estimation, is not fit to 
 eat. The potato should be cooked with the rind on, 
 if it is a good potato, and if it is necessary to re- 
 move the outer skin the process shoxild be per- 
 formed after the cooking. The most toothsome part 
 of the potato is the thick rind and adjacent part, and 
 this I always eat when at home. We have so sophis- 
 ticated the potato in the modern disguised cookery 
 that we often practically ruin it as an article of 
 108 
 
The Admiration of Good Materials 
 
 food, and we have bred a race of people that sees 
 nothing to admire in a good and well-grown potato 
 tuber. 
 
 I now wish to take an excursion from the potato 
 to the pumpkin. In all the range of vegetable prod- 
 ucts, I doubt whether there is a more perfect ex- 
 ample of pleasing form, fine modelling, attractive 
 texture and color, and more bracing odor, than in 
 a well-grown and ripe field pumpkin. Place a pump- 
 kin on your table; run your fingers down its smooth 
 grooves; trace the furrows to the poles; take note 
 of its form; absorb its rich color; get the tang of 
 its fragrance. The roughness and ruggedness of its 
 leaves, the sharp-angled stem strongly set, make a 
 foil that a sculptor cannot improve. Then wonder 
 how this marvellous thing was born out of your 
 garden soil through the medium of one small strand 
 ^of a succulent stem. 
 
 We all recognize the appeal of a bouquet of flow- 
 ers, but we are unaware that we may have a bou- 
 quet of fruits. We have given little attention to 
 arranging them, or any study of the kinds that con- 
 sort well together, nor have we receptacles in which 
 effectively to display them. Yet, apples and oranges 
 and plums and grapes and nuts, and good melons 
 and cucumbers and peppers and carrots and onions, 
 may be arranged into the most artistic and satisfying 
 combinations. 
 
 109 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 I would fall short of my obligation if I were to 
 stop with the fruit of the tree and say nothing about 
 the tree or the plant itself. In our haste for lawn 
 trees of new kinds and from the uttermost parts, 
 we forget that a fruit-tree is ornamental and that 
 it provides acceptable shade. A full-grown apple- 
 tree or pear-tree is one of the most individual and 
 picturesque of trees. The foliage is good, the blos- 
 soms as handsome as those of fancy imported things, 
 the fruits always interesting, and the tree is reli- 
 able. Nothing is more interesting than an orange 
 tree, in the regions where it grows, with its shining 
 and evergreen leaves and its continuing flowers and 
 fruits. The practice of planting apples and pears 
 and sweet cherries, and other fruit and nut trees, 
 for shade and adornment is much to be commended 
 in certain places. 
 
 But the point I wish specially to urge in this con- 
 nection is the value of many kinds of fruit-trees in 
 real landscape work. We think of these trees as 
 single or separate specimens, but they may be used 
 with good result in mass planting, when it is de- 
 sired to produce a given effect in a large area or 
 in one division of a property. I do not know that 
 any one has worked out full plans for the combin- 
 ing of fruit-trees, nuts, and berry-bearing plants into 
 good treatments, but it is much to be desired that 
 this shall be done. Any of you can picture a sweep 
 110 
 
The Admiration of Good Materials 
 
 of countryside planted to these things that would 
 be not only novel and striking, but at the same 
 time conformable to the best traditions of artistic 
 rendering. 
 
 I think it should be a fundamental purpose in 
 our educational plans to acquaint the people with 
 the common resources of the region, and particu- 
 larly with those materials on which we subsist. If 
 this is accepted, then we cannot deprive our parks, 
 highways, and school grounds of the trees that bear 
 the staple fruits. It is worth while to have an 
 intellectual interest in a fruit-tree. I know a fruit- 
 grower who secures many prizes for his apples and 
 his pears; when he secures a blue ribbon, he ties 
 it on the tree that bore the fruit. 
 
 The admiration of a good domestic animal Is 
 much to be desired. It develops a most responsible 
 attitude in the man or the woman. I have observed 
 a peculiar charm In the breeders of these wonderful 
 animals, a certain poise and masterfulness and 
 breadth of sympathy. To admire a good horse 
 and to know just why he admires him Is a great re- 
 source to any man, as also to feel the responsibility 
 for the care and health of any flock or herd. Fowls, 
 pigs, sheep on their pastures, cows, mules, all per- 
 fect of their kind, all sensitive, all of them marvel- 
 lous in their forms and powers, — verily these are 
 good to know. 
 
 Ill 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 If the raw materials grow out of the holy earth, 
 then a man should have pride m producing them, 
 and also in handling them. As a man thinketh of 
 his materials, so doth he profit in the use of them. 
 He builds them into himself. There is a wide-spread 
 feeling that in some way these materials reflect 
 themselves in a man's bearing. One type of man 
 grows out of the handling of rocks, another out of 
 the handling of fishes, another out of the growing 
 of the products from the good earth. All irrever- 
 ence in the handling of these materials that come 
 out of the earth's bounty, and all waste and poor 
 workmanship, make for a low spiritual expression. 
 
 The farmer specially should be proud of his ma- 
 terials, he is so close to the sources and so hard 
 against the backgrounds. Moreover, he cannot 
 conceal his materials. He cannot lock up his farm 
 or disguise his crops. He lives on his farm, and 
 visibly with his products. The architect does not 
 live in the houses and temples he builds. The en- 
 gineer does not live on his bridge. The miner does 
 not live in his mine. Even the sailor has his home 
 away from his ship. But the farmer cannot sep- 
 arate himself from his works. Every bushel of 
 buckwheat and every barrel of apples and every 
 bale of cotton bears his name; the beef that he takes 
 to market, the sheep that he herds on his pastures, 
 the horse that he drives, — these are his products 
 112 
 
The Admiration of Good Materials 
 
 and they carry his name. He should have the same 
 pride in these — ^his productions — as another who 
 builds a machine, or another who writes a book 
 about them. The admiration of a field of hay, of 
 a cow producing milk, of a shapely and fragrant 
 head of cabbage, is a great force for good. 
 
 It would mean much if we could celebrate the raw 
 materials and the products. Particularly is it good 
 to celebrate the yearly bounty. The Puritans rec- 
 ognized their immediate dependence on the products 
 of the ground, and their celebration was connected 
 with religion. I should be sorry if our celebrations 
 were to be wholly secular. 
 
 We have been much given to the display of 
 fabricated materials, — of the products of looms, 
 lathes, foundries, and many factories of skill. We 
 also exhibit the agricultural produce, but largely In 
 a crass and rude way to display bulk and to win 
 prizes. We now begin to arrange our exhibitions 
 for color effect, comparison, and educational influ- 
 ence. But we do not justly understand the nat- 
 ural products when we confine them to formal ex- 
 hibitions. They must be incorporated into many 
 celebrations, expressing therein the earth's bounty 
 and our appreciation of it. The usual and com- 
 mon products, domesticated and wild, should be 
 gathered in these occasions, and not for competi- 
 tion or for prize awards or even for display, but 
 113 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 for their intrinsic qualities. An apple day or an 
 apple sabbath would teach the people to express 
 their gratitude for apples. The moral obligation 
 to grow good apples, to handle them honestly, to 
 treat the soil and the trees fairly and reverently, 
 could be developed as a living practical philosophy 
 into the working-days of an apple-growing people. 
 The technical knowledge we now possess requires 
 the moral support of a stimulated public apprecia- 
 tion to make it a thoroughly effective force. 
 
 Many of the products and crops lend themselves 
 well to this kind of admiration, and all of them 
 should awaken gratitude and reverence. Sermons 
 and teaching may issue from them. Nor is it nec- 
 essary that this gratitude be expressed only in col- 
 lected materials, or that all preaching and all teach- 
 ing shall be indoors. The best understanding of our 
 relations to the earth will be possible when we 
 learn how to apply our devotions in the open places. 
 
 114 
 
The keeping of the beautiful earth 
 
 The proper care-taking of the earth lies not alone 
 in maintaining its fertility or in safeguarding its 
 products. The lines of beauty that appeal to the 
 eye and the charm that satisfies the five senses are 
 in our keeping. 
 
 The natural landscape is always interesting and it 
 is satisfying. The physical universe is the source of 
 art. We know no other form and color than that 
 which we see in nature or derive from it. If art is 
 true to its theme, it is one expression of morals. 
 If it is a moral obligation to express the art-sense 
 in painting and sculpture and literature and uiusic, 
 so is it an equal obligation to express it in good 
 landscape. 
 
 Of the first importance is it that the race keep 
 its artistic backgrounds, and not alone for the few 
 who may travel far and near and who may pause 
 deliberately, but also for those more numerous folk 
 who must remain with the daily toil and catch the 
 far look only as they labor. To put the best ex- 
 pression of any landscape into the consciousness of 
 one's day's work is more to be desired than much 
 riches. When we complete our conquest, there will 
 be no unseemly landscapes. 
 115 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 The abundance of violated landscapes is proof 
 that we have not yet mastered. The farmer does 
 not have full command of his situation until the 
 landscape is a part of his farming. Farms may be 
 units in well-developed and pleasing landscapes, 
 beautiful in their combinations with other farms 
 and appropriate to their setting as well as attrac- 
 tive in themselves. 
 
 No one has a moral right to contribute unsightly 
 factory premises or a forbidding commercial estab- 
 lishment to any community. The lines of utility 
 and efficiency ought also to be the lines of beauty; 
 and it is due every worker to have a good land- 
 scape to look upon, even though its area be very 
 constricted. To produce bushels of wheat and mar- 
 vels of machinery, to maintain devastating mili- 
 tary establishments, do not comprise the sum of con- 
 quest. The backgrounds must be kept. 
 
 If moral strength comes from good and sufficient 
 scenery, so does the preservation of it become a 
 social duty. It is much more than a civic obliga- 
 tion. But the resources of the earth must be avail- 
 able to man for his use and this necessarily means 
 a modification of the original scenery. Some pieces 
 and kinds of scenery are above all economic use and 
 should be kept wholly in the natural state. Much 
 of it may yield to modification if he takes good 
 care to preserve its essential features. Unfortu- 
 116 
 
The Keeping of the Beautiful Earth 
 
 nately, the engineer seems not often to be trained 
 in the values of scenery and he is likely to despoil a 
 landscape or at least to leave it raw and unfinished. 
 On the other hand, there is unfortunately a feeling 
 abroad that any modification of a striking land- 
 scape is violation and despoliation; and unwar- 
 ranted opposition, In some cases amounting almost 
 to prudery, follows any needful work of utilization. 
 Undoubtedly the farmer and builder and promoter 
 have been too unmindful of the effect of their in- 
 terference on scenery, and particularly in taking 
 little care In the disposition of wastes and In the 
 healing of wounds; but a work either of farming 
 or of construction may add interest and even lines 
 of beauty to a landscape and endow It with the sug- 
 gestion of human interest. If care were taken in 
 the construction of public and semi-public work to 
 reshape the banks into pleasing lines, to clean up, 
 to care for, to plant, to erect structures of good 
 proportions whether they cost much or little, and 
 to give proper regard to the sensibilities of the 
 communities, most of the present agitation against 
 interference with natural scenery would disappear. 
 One has only to visit the factory districts, the va- 
 cation resorts, the tenement areas, the banks of 
 streams and gorges, to look at the faces of cliffs 
 and at many engineering enterprises and at num- 
 berless farmyards, to find examples of the disregard 
 117 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 of men for the materials that they handle. It is as 
 much our obligation to hold the scenery reverently 
 as to handle the products reverently. Man found 
 the earth looking well. Humanity began in a garden. 
 The keeping of the good earth depends on preser- 
 vation rather than on destruction. The office of ' 
 the farmer and the planter is to produce rather than 
 to destroy; whatever they destroy is to the end that 
 they may produce more abundantly; these persons 
 are therefore natural care-takers. If to this office 
 we add the habit of good housekeeping, we shall 
 have more than one-third of our population at once 
 directly partaldng in keeping the earth. It is one 
 of the bitter ironies that farmers should ever have 
 been taken out of their place to wreak vengeance 
 on the earth by means of military devastation. In 
 the past, this ravage has been small in amount be- 
 cause the engines of destruction were weak, but with 
 the perfecting of the modern enginery the havoc is 
 awful and brutal. While we have to our credit the 
 improvement of agriculture and other agencies of 
 conservation, it is yet a fact that man has never 
 been so destructive as now. He is able to turn the 
 skill of his discovery to destructive ends (a subject 
 that we have already approached from another 
 point of view). The keeping of the earth is there- 
 fore involved in the organization of society. Mili- 
 tary power heads toward destructiveness. Civil 
 118 
 
The Keeping of the Beautiful Earth 
 
 power heads toward conservation. The military 
 power may be constructive in times of peace, but 
 its end, if it uses the tools it invents, is devastation 
 and the inflicting of injury. When the civil power 
 is subjugated to the mihtary power, society is 
 headed toward ravage. 
 
 To keep and to waste are opposite processes. Not 
 only are we able to despoil the earth by sheer lust of 
 ravage and by blighting the fields with caverns of 
 human slaughter, but we shoot away incredible 
 supplies of copper and petroleum and other unre- 
 newable materials that by every right and equity 
 belong to our successors; and, moreover, we are to 
 make these successors pay for the destruction of 
 their heritage. Day by day we are mortgaging the 
 future, depriving it of supplies that it may need, 
 burdening the shoulders of generations yet unborn. 
 
 Merely to make the earth productive and to keep 
 it clean and to bear a reverent regard for its prod- 
 ucts, is the special prerogative of a good agriculture 
 and a good citizenry founded thereon; this may seem 
 at the moment to be small and ineffective as against 
 mad impersonal and limitless havoc, but it carries 
 the final healing; and while the land worker will bear 
 much of the burden on his back he will also redeem 
 the earth. 
 
 119 
 
The tones of indudry 
 
 One of the clearest notes of our time is the recog- 
 nition of the holiness of industry and the attempt 
 to formulate the morals of it. We accept this fact 
 indirectly by the modern endeavor to give the 
 laboring man his due. 
 
 The handworker is more or less elemental, deal- 
 ing directly with the materials. We begin to recog- 
 nize these industries in literature, in sculpture, and 
 in painting; but we do not yet very consciously or 
 effectively translate them into music. 
 
 It is to be recognized, of course, that melody is 
 emotional and dynamic not imitative, that its power 
 lies in suggestion rather than in direct representa- 
 tion, and that its language is general; with all this 
 I have nothing to do. Meunier has done much 
 with his chisel to interpret the spirit of constructive 
 labor and to develop its higher significance. His 
 art is indeed concrete and static, and sculpture and 
 music are not to be compared; yet it raises the 
 question whether there may be other bold exten- 
 sions of art. 
 
 The primitive industries must have been mostly 
 silent, when there were no iron tools, when fire 
 120 
 
The Tones of Industry 
 
 felled the forest tree and hollowed the canoe, when 
 the parts in construction were secured by thongs, 
 and when the game was caught in silent traps or 
 by the swift noiseless arrow and spear. Even at 
 the Stone Age the rude implements and the ma- 
 terials must have been mostly devoid of resonance. 
 But now industry has become universal and com- 
 plex, and it has also become noisy, — -so noisy that 
 we organize to protect ourselves from becoming 
 distraught. 
 
 And yet a workshop, particularly if it works in 
 metal, is replete with tones that are essentially 
 musical. Workmen respond readily to unison. 
 There are melodies that arise from certain kinds 
 of labor. Much of our labor is rhythmic. In any 
 factory driven by power, there is a fundamental 
 rhythm and motion, tying all things together. I 
 have often thought, standing at the threshold of a 
 mill, that it might be possible somewhere by care- 
 ful forethought to eliminate the clatter and so to 
 organize the work as to develop a better expression 
 in labor. Very much do we need to make industry 
 vocal. 
 
 It is worth considering, also, whether it is possible 
 to take over into music any of these sounds of in- 
 dustry in a new way, that they may be given mean- 
 ings they do not now possess. 
 
 At all events, the poetic element in industry is 
 121 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 capable of great development and of progressive in- 
 terpretation; and poetry is scarcely to be dis- 
 sociated from sound. All good work well done is 
 essentially poetic to the sensitive mind; and when 
 the work is the rhythm of many men acting in 
 unison, the poetry has voice. 
 
 The striking of the rivet 
 
 The purr of a drill 
 
 The crash of a steam-shovel 
 
 The plunge of a dredge 
 
 The buzz of a saw 
 
 The roll of belts and chains 
 
 The whirl of spindles 
 
 The hiss of steam 
 
 The tip-tap of valves 
 
 The undertone rumble of a mill 
 
 The silence intent of men at work 
 
 The talk of men going to their homes, — 
 
 These are all the notes of great symphonies. 
 
 Nor should I stop with the industries of com- 
 merce and manufacture. There are many possibil- 
 ities in the sounds and voices that are known of 
 fisherfolk and campers and foresters and farmers. 
 Somehow we should be able to individualize these 
 voices and to give them an artistic expression in 
 some kind of human composition. There are rich 
 suggestions in the voices of the farmyard, the calls 
 of wild creatures, the tones of farm implements and 
 machinery, the sounds of the elements, and par- 
 122 
 
The Tones of Industry 
 
 ticularly in the relations of all these to the pauses, 
 the silences, and the distances beyond. 
 
 Whether it is possible to utilize any of these 
 tones and voices artistically is not for a layman to 
 say; but the layman may express the need that he 
 feels. 
 
 123 
 
The threatened literature 
 
 A fear seems to be abroad that the inquisitive- 
 ness and exactness of science will deprive literature 
 of imagination and sympathy and wUl destroy ar- 
 tistic expression; and it is said that we are in dan- 
 ger of losing the devotional element in literature. 
 If these apprehensions are well founded, then do 
 we have cause for alarm, seeing that literature is an 
 immeasurable resource. 
 
 Great literature may be relatively independent 
 of time and place, and this is beyond discussion 
 here; but if the standards of interpretative litera- 
 ture are lowering it must be because the standards 
 of life are lowering, for the attainment and the out- 
 look of a people are bound to be displayed in its 
 letters. 
 
 Perhaps our difficulty lies in a change in methods 
 and standards rather than in essential qualities. 
 We constantly acquire new material for literary use. 
 The riches of life are vaster and deeper than ever 
 before. It would be strange indeed if the new 
 experience of the planet did not express itself in 
 new literary form. 
 
 We are led astray by the fatal habit of making 
 comparisons, contrasting one epoch with another. 
 124 
 
The Threatened Literature 
 
 There may be inflexible souls among the investiga- 
 tors who see little or nothing beyond the set of 
 facts in a little field, but surely the greater number 
 of scientific men are persons of keen imagination 
 and of broad interest in all conquests. Indeed, a 
 lively imagination is indispensable in persons of the 
 best attainments in science; it is necessary only 
 that the imagination be regulated and trained. 
 Never has it been so true that fact is stranger than 
 fiction. Never have the flights of the poets been 
 so evenly matched by the flights of science. All 
 great engineers, chemists, physiologists, physicists 
 work in the realm of imagination, of imagination 
 that projects the unknown from the known. Al- 
 most do we think that the Roentgen ray, the wire- 
 less telegraphy, the analysis of the light of the stars, 
 the seriun control of disease are the product of 
 what we might call pure fancy. The very utilities 
 and conquests of modern society are the results of 
 better imagination than the world has yet known. 
 If it is true that the desire to measure and to analyze 
 is now an established trait, equally is it true that it 
 directs the mind into far and untried reaches; and 
 if we have not yet found this range of inspiration 
 in what is called artistic literature, it must be be- 
 cause literary criticism has not accepted the im- 
 agery of the modern world and is still looking for 
 its art to the models of the past. 
 125 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 The models of the past are properly the stand- 
 ards for the performances of their tune, but this 
 does not constitute them the standards of all time 
 or of the present time. Perhaps the writing of lan- 
 guage for the sake of writing it is losing its hold; 
 but a new, clear, and forceful literature appears. 
 This new literature has its own criteria. It would 
 be violence to judge it only by standards of criti- 
 cism founded on Elizabethan writings. We do not 
 descend into crude materialism because we describe 
 the materials of the cosmos; we do not eliminate 
 imagination because we desire that it shall have 
 meaning; we do not strip literature of artistic qual- 
 ity because it is true to the facts and the outlook 
 of our own time. 
 
 It may be admitted that present literature is in- 
 adequate, and that we are stUl obliged to go to the 
 former compositions for our highest artistic expres- 
 sions. Very good. Let us hope that we shall never 
 cease to want these older literatures. Let us hope 
 that we shall never be severed from our past. But 
 perhaps the good judge in a coming generation, when 
 the slow process of elimination has perfected its 
 criticism, will discover something very noble and 
 even very artistic in the abundant writing of our 
 day. Certainly he will note the recovery from the 
 first excess of reaction against the older orders, and 
 he will be aware that at this epoch man began anew 
 126 
 
The Threatened Literature 
 
 to express his social sense in a large way, as a result 
 of all his painstaking studies in science. Even if he 
 should not discover the highest forms of literary 
 expression, he might find that here was the large 
 promise of a new order. Possibly he would dis- 
 cover major compositions of the excellence of which 
 we oiu'selves are not aware. 
 
 It is less than forty years since Darwin and less 
 than fifty years since Agassiz. It is only twenty 
 years since Pasteur. It is only a century and a 
 quarter since Franklin, fifty years since Faraday, 
 less than twenty-five since Tyndall. It is sixty 
 years since Humboldt glorified the earth with the 
 range of his imagination. It is not so very far even 
 if we go back to Newton and to Kepler. Within 
 the span of a century we coimt name after name of 
 prophets who have set us on a new course. So com- 
 plete has been the revolution that we lost our old 
 bearings before we had found the new. We have 
 not yet worked out the new relationships, nor put 
 into practice their moral obligations, nor have we 
 grasped the fulness of our privileges. We have not 
 yet made the new knowledge consciously into a 
 philosophy of life or incorporated it completely into 
 working attitudes of social equity. Therefore, not 
 even now are we ripe for the new literature. 
 
 We have gone far enough, however, to know that 
 science is not unsympathetic and that it is not con- 
 127 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 temptuous of the unknown. By lens and prism and 
 balance and line we measure minutely whatever we 
 can sense J then with bared heads we look out to 
 the great unknown and we cast our lines beyond 
 the stars. There are no realms beyond which the 
 prophecy of science would not go. It resolves the 
 atom and it weighs the planets. 
 
 Among the science men I have found as many 
 poetic souls as among the literary men, although 
 they may not know so much poetry, and they are 
 not equally trained in literary expression; being 
 free of the restraint of conventional criticism, they 
 are likely to have a peculiarly keen and sympathetic 
 projection. Close dissection long continued may 
 not lead to free artistic literary expression; this is 
 as true of literary anatomy as of biological anatomy: 
 but this does not destroy the freedom of other souls, 
 and it may afford good material for the artist. 
 
 Two kinds of popular writing are confused in the 
 pubhc mind, for there are two classes that express 
 the findings of scientific inquiry. The prevailing 
 product is that which issues from estabHshments and 
 institutions. This is supervised, edited, and made to 
 conform; it is the product of our perfected organ- 
 izations and has all the hardness of its origin. The 
 other literature is of a different breed. It is the 
 expression of personality. The one is a useful and 
 necessary public literature of record and advice; the 
 128 
 
The Threatened Literature 
 
 other is a literature of outlook and inspiration. The 
 latter is not to be expected from the institutions, 
 for it is naturally the literature of freedom. 
 
 My reader now knows my line of approach to 
 the charge that literature is in danger of losing its 
 element of devotion, and hereby lies the main reason 
 for introducing this discussion into my little book. 
 We may be losing the old literary piety and the 
 technical theology, because we are losing the old 
 theocratic outlook on creation. We also know that 
 the final control of human welfare will not be gov- 
 ernmental or military, and we shall some day learn 
 that it will not be economic as we now prevailingly 
 use the word. We have long since forgotten that 
 once it was patriarchal. We shall know the creator 
 in the creation. We shall derive more of our solaces 
 from the creation and in the consciousness of our 
 right relations to it. We shall be more fully aware 
 that righteousness inheres in honest occupation. 
 We shall find some bold and free way in which the 
 human spirit may express itself. 
 
 129 
 
The separate soul 
 
 Many times in this journey have we come against 
 the importance of the individual. We are to de- 
 velop the man's social feeling at the same time 
 that we allow him to remain separate. We are to 
 accomplish certain social results otherwise than by 
 the process of thronging, which is so much a part 
 of the philosophy of this anxious epoch; and there- 
 fore we may pursue the subject still a little further. 
 
 Any close and worth-while contact with the earth 
 tends to make one original or at least detached in 
 one's judgments and independent of group control. 
 In proportion as society becomes organized and in- 
 volved, do we need the separate spirit and persons 
 who are responsible beings on their own account. 
 The independent judgment should be much furthered 
 by studies in the sciences that are founded on obser- 
 vation of native forms and conditions. And yet the 
 gains of scientific study become so rigidly organized 
 into great enterprises that the individual is likely 
 to be lost in them. 
 
 As an example of what I mean, I mention John 
 Muir, who has recently passed away, and who stood 
 for a definite contribution to his generation. He 
 130 
 
The Separate Soul 
 
 could hardly have made this contribution if he had 
 been attached to any of the great institutions or 
 organizations or to big business. He has left a 
 personal impression and a remarkable literature 
 that has been very little influenced by group psy- 
 chology. He is the interpreter of mountains, for- 
 ests, and glaciers. 
 
 There is one method of aggregation and social 
 intercourse. There is another method of isolation 
 and separateness. Never in the open country do I 
 see a young man or woman at nightfall going down 
 the highways and the long fields but I think of the 
 character that develops out of the loneliness, in 
 the silence of vast surroundings, projected against 
 the backgrounds, and of the suggestions that must 
 come from these situations as contrasted with those 
 that arise from the babble of the crowds. There is 
 hardiness in such training; there is independence, 
 the taking of one's own risk and no need of the pro- 
 tection of compensation-acts. There is no over- 
 imposed director to fall back on. Physical recu- 
 peration is in the situation. As against these fields, 
 much of the habitual golf and tennis and other ad- 
 ventitious means of killing time and of making up 
 deficiencies is almost ludicrous. 
 
 Many of our reformers fail because they express 
 only a group psychology and do not have a living 
 personal interpretation. Undoubtedly many per- 
 131 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 sons who might have had a message of their own 
 have lost it and have also lost the opportunity to 
 express it by belonging to too many clubs and by too 
 continuous association with so-called kindred spirits, 
 or by taking too much post-graduate study. It is a 
 great temptation to join many clubs, but if one feels 
 any stir of originality in himself, he should be cau- 
 tious how he joins. 
 
 I may also recall the great example of Agassiz at 
 Penikese. In his last year, broken in health, feeling 
 the message he still had for the people, he opened 
 the school on the little island off the coast of Massa- 
 chusetts. It was a short school in one summer only, 
 yet it has made an indelible impression on American 
 education. It stimulates one to know that the per- 
 son who met the incoming students on the wharf was 
 Agassiz himself, not an assistant or an instructor. 
 Out of the great number of applicants, he chose fifty 
 whom he would teach. He wanted to send forth 
 these chosen persons with his message, apostles to 
 carry the methods and the way of approach. (When 
 are we to have the Penikese for the rural back- 
 grounds?) 
 
 Sometime there will be many great unattached 
 teachers, who will choose their own pupils because 
 they want them and not merely because the appli- 
 cants have satisfied certain arbitrary tests. The 
 students may be graduates of colleges or they may 
 132 
 
The Separate Soul 
 
 be others. They will pursue their work not for 
 credit or for any other reward. We shall yet come 
 back to the masters, and there will be teaching in 
 the market-places. 
 
 We are now in the epoch of great organization 
 not only in industrial developments but also in ed- 
 ucational and social enterprises, in religious work, 
 and in governmental activities. So completely is 
 the organization proceeding in every direction, and 
 so good is it, that one habitually and properly de- 
 sires to identify oneself with some form of associ- 
 ated work. Almost in spite of oneself, one is caught 
 up into the plan of things, and becomes part of a 
 social, economic, or educational mechanism. No 
 longer do we seek our educational institutions so 
 much for the purpose of attaching ourselves to a 
 master as to pursue a course of study. No more 
 do we sit at the feet of Gamaliel. 
 
 In government, the organization has recently 
 taken the form of mechanism for efficiency. We 
 want government and aU kinds of organization to 
 be efficient and effective, but administrative effi- 
 ciency may easily proceed at the expense of person- 
 ality. Much of our public organization for effi- 
 ciency is essentially monarchic in its tendency. It 
 is likely to eliminate the most precious resource in 
 human society, which is the freedom of expression 
 of the competent individual. We are piling organ- 
 133 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 ization on organization, one supervising and watch- 
 ing and "investigating" the other. The greater the 
 number of the commissions, investigating commit- 
 tees, and the interlocking groups, the more complex 
 does the whole process become and the more diffi- 
 cult is it for the person to find himself. We can 
 never successfully substitute bookkeepuig for men 
 and women. We are more in need of personality 
 than of administrative regularity. 
 
 This is not a doctrine of laisser-faire or let-alone. 
 The very conditions of modern society demand 
 strong control and regulation and vigorous organ- 
 ization; but the danger is that we apply the con- 
 trols uniformly and everywhere and eliminate the 
 free action of the individual, as if control were in 
 itself a merit. 
 
 In some way we must protect the person from 
 being submerged in the system. We need always to 
 get back of the group to the individual. The per- 
 son is the reason for the group, although he is re- 
 sponsible to the group. 
 
 It is probably a great advantage to our democ- 
 racy that our educational institutions are so com- 
 pletely organized, for by that means we are able to 
 educate many more persons and to prepare them 
 for the world with a clear and direct purpose in life. 
 But this is not the whole of the public educational 
 process. Some of the most useful persons cannot 
 134 
 
The Separate Soul 
 
 express themselves in institutions. This is not the 
 fault of the institutions. In the nature of their 
 character, these persons are separate. For the most 
 part, they do not now have adequate means of self- 
 expression or of contributing themselves to the pub- 
 lic welfare. 
 
 When we shall have completed the present neces- 
 sity of consolidation, centralization, and organiza- 
 tion, society will begin to be conscious of the sepa- 
 rate souls, who in the nature of the case must stand 
 by themselves, and it will make use of them for the 
 public good. Society will endow persons, not on a 
 basis of salary, and enable them thereby to teach in 
 their own way and their own time. This wUl rep- 
 resent one of the highest types of endowment by 
 government and society. 
 
 We begin to approach this time by the support, 
 through semi-public agencies, of persons to accom- 
 plish certain results or to imdertake special pieces 
 of work, particularly of research; but we have not 
 yet attained the higher aim of endowing individuals 
 to express themselves personally. There are liber- 
 ated personalities, rare and prophetic, who are con- 
 sumed only in making a living but who should be 
 given unreservedly to the people: the people are 
 much in need. 
 
 Never have we needed the separate soul so much 
 as now. 
 
 1.35 
 
The element of separateness in society 
 
 If it is so important that we have these separate 
 souls, then must we inquire where they may be 
 found and particularly how we may insure the req- 
 uisite supply. Isolated separates appear here and 
 there, in all the ranges of hmnan experiences; these 
 cannot be provided or foretold; but we shall need, 
 in days to come, a group or a large class of persons, 
 who in the nature of their occupation, situation, 
 and training are relatively independent and free. 
 We need more than a limited number of strong out- 
 standing figures who rise to personal leadership. 
 We must have a body of unattached laborers and 
 producers who are in sufficient numbers to influence 
 unexpressed public opinion and who will form a 
 natural corrective as against organization-men, 
 habitual reformers, and extremists. 
 
 It is apparent that such a class must own pro- 
 ductive property, be able to secure support by work- 
 ing for themselves, and produce supplies that are 
 indispensable to society. Their individual inter- 
 ests must be greater and more insistent than their 
 associative interests. They should be in direct con- 
 tact with native resources. This characterization 
 136 
 
The Element of Separateness in Society- 
 describes the farmer, and no other large or impor- 
 tant group. 
 
 We have considered, on a former page, that we 
 are not to look for the self-acting individuals among 
 the workingmen as a class. They are rapidly par- 
 taking in an opposite development. They are 
 controlled by associative interests. Even under a 
 profit-sharing system they are parts in a close 
 concert. 
 
 How to strike the balance between the needful 
 individualism and social crystallization is probably 
 the most difficult question before society. Of the 
 great underlying classes of occupations, farming is 
 the only one that presents the individualistic side 
 very strongly. If individualism is to be preserved 
 anywhere, it must be preserved here. The tendency 
 of our present-day discussion is to organize the 
 farmers as other groups or masses are organized. 
 We are in danger here. Assuredly, the farmer needs 
 better resources in association, but it is a nice 
 question how far we should go and how completely 
 we should try to redirect him. Fortunately, the 
 holding of title to land and the separateness of 
 farm habitations prevent solidification. If, on this 
 individualism and without destroying it, we can de- 
 velop a co-acting and co-operating activity, we shall 
 undoubtedly be on the line of safety as well as on 
 the line of promise. It would be a pity to organize 
 137 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 the farming people merely to secure them their 
 "rights." We ought soon to pass this epoch in 
 civilization. There are no " rights " exclusive to any 
 class. "Rights" are not possessions. 
 
 I do not know where the element of separateness 
 in society is to be derived unless it comes out of 
 the earth. 
 
 Given sufficient organization to enable the farmer 
 to express himself fully in his occupation and to 
 secure protection, then we may well let the matter 
 rest until his place in society develops by the opera- 
 tion of natural forces. We cannot allow the fun- 
 damental supplies from the common earth to be 
 controlled by arbitrary class regulation. It would 
 be a misfortune if the farmer were to isolate himself 
 by making "demands" on society. I hope that the 
 farmer's obligation may be so sensitively developed 
 in him as to produce a better kind of mass-cohesion 
 than we have yet known. 
 
 138 
 
The democratic basis in agriculture 
 
 All these positions are capable of direct appli- 
 cation in the incorporation of agriculture into a 
 scheme of democracy. A brief treatment of this 
 subject I had developed for the present book; and 
 this treatment, with applications to particular situ- 
 ations now confronting us, I used recently in the 
 vice-presidential address before the new Section INI 
 of the American Association for the Advancement 
 of Science (published in Science, February 26, 1915, 
 where the remainder of it may be found). Some of 
 the general points of view, modified from that ad- 
 dress, may be brought together here. The desirabil- 
 ity of keeping a free and unattached attitude in the 
 people on the land may be expounded in many di- 
 rections, but for my purpose I will confine the illus- 
 trations to organization in the field of education. 
 
 The agricultural situation is now much in the 
 public mind. It is widely discussed in the press, 
 which shows that it has news value. Much of this 
 value is merely of superficial and temporary inter- 
 est. Much of it represents a desire to try new rem- 
 edies for old ills. Many of these remedies will not 
 work. We must be prepared for some loss of pub- 
 139 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 lie interest in them as time goes on. We are now 
 in a publicity stage of our rural development. It 
 would seem that the news-gathering and some other 
 agencies discover these movements after the work 
 of many constructive spirits has set them going and 
 has laid real foundations; and not these founda- 
 tions, but only detached items of passing interest, 
 may be known of any large part of the public. I 
 hope that we shall not be disturbed by this circum- 
 stance nor let it interfere with good work or with 
 fundamental considerations, however much we may 
 deplore the false expectations that may result. 
 
 We are at the parting of the ways. For years 
 without niunber — for years that run into the cen- 
 turies when men have slaughtered each other on 
 many fields, thinking that they were on the fields 
 of honor, when many awful despotisms have ground 
 men into the dust, the despotisms thinking them- 
 selves divine — for all these years there have been 
 men on the land wishing to see the light, trying to 
 make mankind hear, hoping but never realizing. 
 They have been the pawns on the great battlefields, 
 men taken out of the peasantries to be hurled against 
 other men they did not know and for no rewards 
 except further enslavement. They may even have 
 been developed to a high degree of manual or tech- 
 nical skill that they might the better support gov- 
 ernments to make conquests. They have been on 
 140 
 
The Democratic Basis in Agriculture 
 
 the bottom, upholding the whole superstructure and 
 pressed into the earth by the weight of it. When 
 the final history is written, the lot of the man on 
 the land will be the saddest chapter. 
 
 But in the nineteenth century, the man at the 
 bottom began really to be recognized politically. 
 This recognition is of two kinds, — the use that a gov- 
 ernment can make in its own interest of a highly 
 efiicient husbandry, and the desire to give the hus- 
 bandman full opportunity and full justice. I hope 
 that in these times the latter motive always pre- 
 vails. It is the only course of safety. 
 
 Great public-service institutions have now been 
 founded in the rural movement. The United States 
 Department of Agriculture has grown to be one of 
 the notable governmental establishments of the 
 world, extending itself to a multitude of interests 
 and operating with remarkable effectiveness. The 
 chain of colleges of agriculture and experiment sta- 
 tions, generously co-operative between nation and 
 State, is unlike any other development anywhere, 
 meaning more, I think, for the future welfare and 
 peace of the people than any one of us yet foresees. 
 There is the finest fraternalism, and yet without 
 clannishness, between these great agencies, setting 
 a good example in public service. And to these 
 agencies we are to add the State departments of 
 ligriculture, the work of private endowments al- 
 141 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 though yet in its infancy, the growing and very 
 desirable contact with the rural field of many in- 
 stitutions of learning. All these agencies comprise 
 a distinctly modern phase of public activity. 
 
 A new agency has been created in the agricul- 
 tural extension act which was signed by President 
 Wilson on the 8th of May in 1914. The farmer is to 
 find help at his own door. A new instrumentality in 
 the world has now received the sanction of a whole 
 people and we are just beginning to organize it. The 
 organization must be extensive, and it ought also to 
 be liberal. No such national plan on such a scale 
 has ever been attempted; and it almost staggers 
 one when one even partly comprehends the tremen- 
 dous consequences that in all likelihood wiU come 
 of it. The significance of it is not yet grasped by 
 the great body of the people. 
 
 Now, the problem is to relate all this public work 
 to the development of a democracy. I am not 
 thinking so much of the development of a form of 
 govermnent as of a real democratic expression on 
 the part of the people. Agriculture is our basic 
 industry. As we organize its affairs, so to a great 
 degree shall we secure the results in society in gen- 
 eral. It is very important in our great experiment 
 in democracy that we do not lose sight of the first 
 principle in democracy, which is to let the control 
 of policies and affairs rest directly back on the 
 people. 
 
 142 
 
The Democratic Basis in Agriculture 
 
 We have developed the institutions on public 
 funds to train the farmer and to give him voice. 
 These institutions are of vast importance in the 
 founding of a people. The folk are to be developed 
 in themselves rather than by class legislation, or by 
 favor of government, or by any attitude of benevo- 
 lence from without. 
 
 Whether there is any danger in the organization 
 of our new nationalized extension work, and the 
 other public rural agencies, I suppose not one of us 
 knows. But for myself, I have apprehension of the 
 tendency to make some of the agricultural work into 
 "projects" at Washington and elsewhere. If we are 
 not careful, we shall not only too much centralize 
 the work, but we shall tie it up in perplexing red- 
 tape, official obstacles, and bookkeeping. The merit 
 of the projects themselves and the intentions of the 
 officers concerned in them are not involved in what 
 I say; I speak only of the tendency of all govern- 
 ment to formality and to crystallization, to machine 
 work and to armchair regulations; and even at the 
 risk of a somewhat lower so-called "efficiency," I 
 should prefer for such work as investigating and 
 teaching in agriculture, a dispersion of the initia- 
 tive and responsibility, letting the co-ordination and 
 standardizing arise very much from conference and 
 very little from arbitrary regulation. 
 
 The best project anywhere is a good man or 
 woman working in a program, but unhampered. 
 143 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 If it is important that the administration of agri- 
 cuhural work be not overmuch centralized at Wash- 
 ington, it is equally true that it should not be too 
 much centralized in the States. I hear that persons 
 who object strongly to federal concentration may 
 nevertheless decline to give the counties and the 
 communities in their own States the benefit of any 
 useful starting-power and autonomy. In fact, I am 
 inclined to think that here at present lies one of our 
 greatest dangers. 
 
 A strong centralization within the State may be 
 the most hurtful kind of concentration, for it may 
 more vitally affect the people at home. Here the 
 question, remember, is not the most efficient formal 
 administration, but the best results for the people. 
 The farm-bureau work, for example, can never pro- 
 duce the background results of which it is capable 
 if it is a strongly intrenched movement pushed out 
 from one centre, as from the college of agriculture 
 or other institution. The college may be the guid- 
 ing force, but it should not remove responsibility 
 from the people of the localities, or offer them a 
 kind of co-operation that is only the privilege of 
 partakmg in the college enterprises. I fear that 
 some of our so-called co-operation in public work 
 of many kinds is little more than to allow the co- 
 operator to approve what the official administration 
 has done. 
 
 144 
 
The Democratic Basis in Agriculture 
 
 In the course of our experience in democracy, we 
 have developed many checks against too great cen- 
 tralization. I hope that we may develop the checks 
 effectively in this new welfare work in agriculture, 
 a desire that I am aware is also strong with many 
 of those who are concerned in the planning of it. 
 
 Some enterprises may be much centralized, 
 whether in a democracy or elsewhere; an example 
 is the postal service: this is on the business side of 
 government. Some enterprises should be decen- 
 tralized; an example is a good part of the agricul- 
 tural service: this is on the educational side of 
 government. It is the tendency to reduce all pub- 
 lic work to uniformity; yet there is no virtue in 
 uniformity. Its only value is as a means to an 
 end. 
 
 Thus far, the rural movement has been whole- 
 somely democratic. It has been my privilege for 
 one-third of a century to have known rather closely 
 many of the men and women who have been in- 
 strumental in bringing the rural problem to its pres- 
 ent stage of advancement. They have been public- 
 minded, able, far-seeing men and women, and they 
 have rendered an unmeasurable service. The rural 
 movement has been brought to its present state 
 without any demand for special privilege, without 
 bolstering by factitious legislation, and to a remark- 
 able degree without self-seeking. It is based on a 
 145 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 real regard for the welfare of all the people, rather 
 than for rural people exclusively. 
 
 Thrice or more in this book I have spoken as if 
 not convinced that the present insistence on "effi- 
 ciency" in government is altogether sound. That 
 is exactly the impression I desire to convey. As 
 the term is now commonly applied, it is not a mea- 
 sure of good government. 
 
 Certain phrases and certain sets of ideas gain 
 dominance at certain times. Just now the idea of 
 administrative efficiency is uppermost. It seems 
 necessarily to be the controlling factor in the prog- 
 ress of any business or any people. Certainly, a 
 people should be efficient; but an efficient govern- 
 ment may not mean an efficient people, — it may 
 mean quite otherwise or even the reverse. The 
 primary purpose of government in these days, and 
 particularly in this country, is to educate and to 
 develop all the people and to lead them to express 
 themselves freely and to the full, and to partake 
 politically. And this is what governments may not 
 do, and this is where they may fail even when their 
 efficieiicy in administration is exact. A monarchic 
 form may be executively more efficient than a demo- 
 cratic form; a despotic form may be more efficient 
 than either. The justffication of a democratic form 
 of government lies in the fact that it is a means of 
 education. 
 
 146 
 
The Democratic Basis in Agriculture 
 
 The final test of government is not executive ef- 
 ficiency. Every movement, every circumstance that 
 takes starting-power and incentive away from the 
 people, even though it makes for exacter admin- 
 istration, is to be challenged. It is specially to be 
 deplored if this loss of starting-power affects the 
 persons who deal first-hand with the surface of the 
 planet and with the products that come directly 
 out of it. 
 
 There is a broad political significance to all this. 
 Sooner or later the people rebel against intrenched 
 or bureaucratic groups. Many of you know how 
 they resist even strongly centralized departments of 
 public instruction, and how the effectiveness of such 
 departments may be jeopardized and much lessened 
 by the very perfectness of their organization; and 
 if they were to engage in a custom of extraneous 
 forms of news-giving in the public press, the resent- 
 ment would be the greater. In our rural work we 
 are in danger of developing a piece of machinery 
 founded on our fundamental industry; and if this 
 ever comes about, we shall find the people organiz- 
 ing to resist it. 
 
 The reader will understand that in this discus- 
 sion I assume the agricultural work to be systemati- 
 cally organized, both in nation and State; this is es- 
 sential to good effort and to the accomplishing of 
 results: but we must take care that the formal or- 
 147 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 ganization does not get in the way of the good work- 
 ers, hindering and repressing them and wasting their 
 time. 
 
 We want governments to be economical and effi- 
 cient with funds and in the control of affairs; this 
 also is assumed: but we must not overlook the 
 larger issues. In all this new rural effort, we should 
 maintain the spirit of team-work and of co-action, 
 and not make the mistake of depending too much 
 on the routine of centralized control. 
 
 In this country we are much criticised for the 
 cost of government and for the supposed control of 
 affairs by monopoly. The cost is undoubtedly too 
 great, but it is the price we pay for the satisfaction 
 of using democratic forms. As to the other dis- 
 ability, let us consider that society lies between two 
 dangers, — the danger of monopoly and the danger 
 of bureaucracy. On the one side is the control of 
 the necessities of life by commercial organization. 
 On the other side is the control of the necessities 
 of life, and even of life itself, by intrenched groups 
 that ostensibly represent the people and which it 
 may be impossible to dislodge.- Here are the Scylla 
 and the Charybdis between which human society 
 must pick its devious way. 
 
 Both are evil. Of the two, monopoly may be 
 the lesser: it may be more easily brought under 
 control; it tends to be more progressive; it extends 
 148 
 
The t)emocratic Basis in Agriculture 
 
 less far; it may be the less hateful. They are only 
 two expressions of one thing, one possibly worse 
 than the other. Probably there are peoples who 
 pride themselves on more or less complete escape 
 from monopoly who are nevertheless suffering from 
 the most deadening bureaucracy. 
 
 Agriculture is in the foundation of the political, 
 economic, and social structure. If we cannot de- 
 velop starting-power in the background people, we 
 cannot maintain it elsewhere. The greatness of all 
 this rural work is to lie in the results and not in 
 the methods that absorb so much of our energy. 
 If agriculture cannot be democratic, then there is 
 no democracy. 
 
 149 
 
The background spaces. — The forest 
 
 "This is the forest primeval." These are the 
 significant words of the poet in Evangeline. Per- 
 haps more than any single utterance they have set 
 the American youth against the background of the 
 forest. 
 
 The backgrounds are important. The life of 
 every one of us is relative. We miss our destiny 
 when we miss or forget oiu- backgrounds. We lose 
 ourselves. Men go off in vague heresies when they 
 forget the conditions against which they live. Judg- 
 ments become too refined and men tend to become 
 merely disputatious and subtle. 
 
 The backgrounds are the great unoccupied spaces. 
 They are the large environments in which we live 
 but which we do not make. The backgrounds are 
 the sky with its limitless reaches; the silences of 
 the sea; the tundra in pallid arctic nights; the des- 
 erts with their prismatic colors; the shores that gird 
 the planet; the vast mountains that are beyond 
 reach; the winds, which are the universal voice in 
 nature; the sacredness of the night; the elemental 
 simplicity of the open fields; and the solitude of 
 the forest. These are the facts and situations 
 150 
 
The Background Spaces 
 
 that stand at our backs, to which we adjust our 
 civilization, and by which we measure ourselves. 
 
 The great conquest of mankind is the conquest 
 of his natural conditions. We admire the man who 
 overcomes: the sailor or navigator in hostile and 
 unknown seas; the engineer who projects himself 
 hard against the obstacles; the miner and the ex- 
 plorer; the builder; the farmer who ameliorates the 
 earth to man's use. 
 
 But even though we conquer or modify the 
 physical conditions against which we are set, never- 
 theless the backgrounds will remain. I hope that 
 we may always say "The forest primeval." I 
 hope that some reaches of the sea may never be 
 sailed, that some swamps may never be drained, 
 that some mountain peaks may never be scaled, that 
 some forests may never be harvested. I hope that 
 some knowledge may never be revealed. 
 
 Look at your map of the globe. Note how few 
 are the areas of great congestion of population and 
 of much human activity as compared with the vast 
 and apparently empty spaces. How small are the 
 spots that represent the cities and what a little 
 part of the earth are the political divisions that are 
 most in the minds of men ! We are likely to think 
 that all these outlying and thinly peopled places 
 are the wastes. I suspect that they contribute 
 more to the race than we think. I am glad that 
 151 
 
ITie Holy Earth 
 
 there are still some places of mystery, some reaches 
 of hope, some things far beyond us, some spaces to 
 conjm-e up dreams. I am glad that the earth is 
 not all Iowa or Belgium or the Channel Islands. 
 I am glad that some of it is the hard hills of New 
 England, some the heathered heights of Scotland, 
 some the cold distances of Quebec, some of it the 
 islands far off in little-traversed seas, and some of 
 it also the unexplored domains that lie within eye- 
 sight of our own homes. It is well to know that 
 these spaces exist, that there are places of escape. 
 They add much to the ambition of the race; they 
 make for strength, for courage, and for renewal. 
 
 In the cities I am always interested in the va- 
 riety of the contents of the store windows. Vari- 
 ously fabricated and disguised, these materials come 
 from the ends of the earth. They come from the 
 shores of the seas, from the mines, from the land, 
 from the forests, from the arctic, and from the tropic. 
 They are from the backgrounds. The cities are 
 great, but how much greater are the forests and 
 the sea ! 
 
 No people should be forbidden the influence of 
 the forest. No child should grow up without a 
 knowledge of the forest; and I mean a real forest 
 and not a grove or village trees or a park. There 
 are no forests in cities, however many trees there 
 may be. As a city is much more than a collection 
 152 
 
The Background Spaces 
 
 of houses, so is a forest much more than a collec- 
 tion of trees. The forest has its own round of life, 
 its characteristic attributes, its climate, and its in- 
 habitants. When you enter a real forest you enter 
 the solitudes, you are in the unexpressed distances. 
 You walk on the mould of years and perhaps of 
 ages. There is no other wind like the wind of the 
 forest; there is no odor like the odor of the forest; 
 there is no solitude more complete; there is no song 
 of a brook like the song of a forest brook; there is 
 no call of a bird like that of a forest bird; there 
 are no mysteries so deep and which seem yet to be 
 within one's realization. 
 
 While a forest is more than trees, yet the trees 
 are the essential part of the forest; and no one ever 
 really knows or understands a forest until he first 
 understands a tree. There is no thing in nature 
 finer and stronger than the bark of a tree; it is a 
 thing in place, adapted to its ends, perfect in its 
 conformation, beautiful in its color and its form 
 and the sweep of its contour; and every bark is pe- 
 culiar to its species. I think that one never really 
 likes a tree until he is impelled to embrace it with 
 his arms and to run his fingers through the grooves 
 of its bark. 
 
 Man listens in the forest. He pauses in the for- 
 est. He finds himself. He loses himself in the town 
 and even perhaps in the university. He may lose 
 153 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 himself in business and in great affairs; but in the 
 forest he is one with a tree, he stands by himself 
 and yet has consolation, and he comes back to his 
 own place in the scheme of things. We have almost 
 forgotten to listen; so great and ceaseless is the 
 racket that the little voices pass over our ears and 
 we hear them not. I have asked person after per- 
 son if he knew the song of the chipping-sparrow, 
 and most of them are unaware that it has any 
 song. We do not hear it in the blare of the city 
 street, in railway travel, or when we are in a thun- 
 derous crowd. We hear it in the still places and 
 when our ears are ready to catch the smaller sounds. 
 There is no music like the music of the forest, and 
 the better part of it is faint and far away or high 
 in the tops of trees. 
 
 The forest may be an asylum. "The groves 
 were God's first temples." We need all our altars 
 and more, but we need also the sanctuary of the 
 forest. It is a poor people that has no forests. I prize 
 the farms because they have forests. It is a poor 
 political philosophy that has no forests. It is a poor 
 nation that has no forests and no workers in wood. 
 
 In many places there are the forests. I think 
 that we do not get the most out of them. Cer- 
 tainly they have two uses: one for the products, 
 and one for the human relief and the inspiration. 
 I should like to see a movement looking toward 
 154 
 
The Background Spaces 
 
 the better utilization of the forests humanly, as we 
 use school buildings and church buildings and public 
 halls. I wish that we might take our friends to the 
 forests as we also take them to see the works of the 
 masters. For this purpose, we should not go in 
 large companies. We need sympathetic guidance. 
 Parties of two and four may go separately to the 
 forests to walk and to sit and to be silent. I would 
 not forget the forest in the night, in the silence and 
 the simplicity of the darkness. Strangely few are 
 the people who know a real forest at dark. Few 
 are those who know the forest when the rain is fall- 
 ing or when the snow covers the earth. Yet the 
 forest is as real in all these moments as when the 
 sun is at full and the weather is fair. 
 
 I wish that we might know the forest intimately 
 and sensitively as a part of our background. I 
 think it would do much to keep us close to the 
 verities and the essentials. 
 
 155 
 
A forest background for a reformatory 
 
 Some years ago I presented to a board that was 
 charged with establishing and maintaining a new 
 State reformatory for wayward and delinquent 
 boys an outline of a possible setting for the enter- 
 prise; and as this statement really constitutes a 
 practical application of some of the foregoing dis- 
 cussions, I present the larger part of it here. With 
 delinquents it is specially important to develop the 
 sense of obligation and responsibihty, and I fear 
 that we are endeavoring to stimulate this sense too 
 exclusively by means of direct governing and dis- 
 ciplinary methods. The statement follows. 
 
 I think that the activities in the proposed refor- 
 matory should be largely agricultural and industrial. 
 So far as possible the young men should be put 
 into direct contact with realities and with useful 
 and practical work. An effort should be made to 
 have all this work mean something to them and 
 not to be merely make-believe. It is fairly pos- 
 sible to develop such a property and organization 
 as will put them in touch with real work rather 
 than to force the necessity of setting tasks in order 
 to keep them busy. 
 
 156 
 
A Forest Background 
 
 Aside from the manual labor part of it, the back- 
 ground of the reformatory should be such as will 
 develop the feeling of responsibility in the workers. 
 This means that they must come actually in con- 
 tact with the raw materials and with things as they 
 grow. When a young man has a piece of wood or 
 metal given to him in a shop, his whole respon- 
 sibility is merely to make something out of this ma- 
 terial; he has no responsibility for the material 
 itself, as he would have if he had been obliged to 
 mine it or to grow it. One of the greatest advan- 
 tages of a farm training is that it develops a man's 
 responsibility toward the materials with which he 
 works. He is always brought face to face with the 
 problem of saving the fertility of the land, saving 
 the crops, saving the forests, and saving the live- 
 stock. The idea of saving and safeguarding these 
 materials is only incidental to those who do not 
 help to produce them. 
 
 It is important that the farm of this reformatory 
 should be large enough so that all the young men 
 may do some real pieces of work on it. Such a farm 
 is not to be commercial in the ordinary farming 
 sense. Its primary purpose is to aid in a reforma- 
 tive or educational process. You should, therefore, 
 undertake such types of farming as will best serve 
 those needs and best meet the abilities of the in- 
 mates. A very highly specialized farming, as the 
 157 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 growing of truck-crops, would be quite impracti- 
 cable as a commercial enterprise because this kind 
 of farmLag demands the greatest skUl and also be- 
 cause it requires a property very easily accessible 
 to our great markets and, therefore, very expensive 
 to procure and difficult to find in large enough acre- 
 age for an institution of this size; and it is doubt- 
 ful whether this type of farming would have the 
 best effect on the inmates. Of course, I should ex- 
 pect that the institution would try to grow its own 
 vegetables, but it would probably be unwise to 
 make truck-gardening the backbone of the farming 
 enterprise. I also feel that it would not be best to 
 make it primarily a dairy farm or a fruit farm or 
 a poultry farm, although all these things should 
 be well represented on the place and in sufficient 
 extent to supply the institution in whole or in part. 
 
 There should be such a farming enterprise as 
 would give a very large and open background, part 
 of it practically wUd, and which would allow for 
 considerable freedom of action on the part of the 
 inmates. You should have operations perhaps some- 
 what in the rough and which would appeal to the 
 manly qualities of the young men. It seems to me 
 that a forestry enterprise would possibly be the best 
 as the main part of the farming scheme. 
 
 If the reformatory could have one thousand acres 
 of forest, the area would provide a great variety of 
 158 
 
A Forest Background 
 
 conditions that the inmates would have to meet, it 
 would give work in the building of roads and culverts 
 and trails, it would provide winter activity at a time 
 when the other farming enterprises are slack, it 
 would bring the inmates directly in touch with wild 
 and native life, and it would also place them against 
 the natural resources in such a way as to make them 
 feel their responsibility for the objects and the sup- 
 plies. 
 
 Perhaps it will be impossible to secure one thou- 
 sand acres of good timber in a more or less continu- 
 ous area. However, it might be possible to assemble 
 a good number of contiguous farms in some of the 
 hill regions so that one thousand acres of timber in 
 various grades of matiu"ity might be secured. There 
 would be open spaces which ought to be planted, 
 and this of itself would provide good work and 
 supervision. The trimming, felling, and other care 
 of this forest would be continuous. The forest should 
 not be stripped, but merely the merchantable or 
 ready timber removed from year to year, and the 
 domain kept in a growing and recuperating condi- 
 tion. One thousand acres of forest, in which timber 
 is fit to be cut, should produce an annual increase 
 of two hundred thousand to three hundred thou- 
 sand board feet, and this increase should not lessen 
 as the years go on. This timber should be manu- 
 factured. I have not looked into the question as to 
 159 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 whether a market could be found for the materials 
 that would be made from this timber, but I should 
 suppose that a market could be as readily secured 
 for this kind of manufacture as for any other. The 
 educational and moral effect of seeing the material 
 grow, then caring for it, then harvesting it, and 
 then manufacturing it would be very great. One 
 could follow the process from beginning to end and 
 feel a responsibility for it in every stage. I should 
 suppose that the manufacture would be of small 
 work and not merely the sawing of lumber. It 
 might be weU to determine whether there would be 
 market for chairs, cabinets, and other furniture, 
 whip-stocks, or small material that could be used 
 in the manufacture of novelties and other like ar- 
 ticles. Possibly the reformatory could supply some 
 of the stock to the prisons that are manufacturing 
 furniture, although the educational and moral ef- 
 fects would be better if the inmates could see the 
 process from beginning to end. 
 
 Of course, you would not limit the manufactur- 
 ing activities of the reformatory to wood-working. 
 You probably would be obliged to have other kinds 
 of factories, but the wood-working shops ought to 
 be part of the plan and I should hope a very im- 
 portant part. 
 
 I have not made any careful study of this ques- 
 tion, and do not know how feasible these sugges- 
 160 
 
A Forest Background 
 
 tions may be; but they appeal to me very strongly 
 on the educational and reformational end. These 
 suggestions are made only that they may be con- 
 sidered along with other suggestions, and if they 
 seem to be worth while, to have the question in- 
 vestigated. 
 
 If something like one thousand acres of land 
 were secured for a forest, it would mean that the 
 farm itself would be rather large. There ought to 
 be probably not less than two or three hundred 
 acres of land that might be used for grazing, gar- 
 dens, and the ordinary farm operations that would 
 contribute to the support of the inmates of the in- 
 stitution. Of course, this arable land ought to be 
 valley land or at least fairly level and accessible 
 along good public highways. The forest land could 
 be more remote, running back on the hills. If the 
 property could be so located that the forest would 
 control the sources of important streams and springs, 
 the results would be all the better. The young men 
 should feel their responsibility for creeks and ponds, 
 and for the protection of wild life as well as for the 
 crops that they raise. 
 
 Where the reformatory should be located is a 
 matter that should receive very careful attention. 
 It is not alone the problem of finding a site that is 
 proper for a reformatory, but also the question of so 
 placing it that it will have some relation to State 
 161 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 development and some connection with the people's 
 interests and desires. State institutions should be so 
 separated that the greatest number of people may see 
 them or come into contact with them. I dislike the 
 tendency to group the State institutions about cer- 
 tain populous centres. In these days of easy trans- 
 portation, the carrying problem is really of less im- 
 portance than certain less definite but none the less 
 real relations to all the people. There are certain 
 great areas in the State of considerable popxdation 
 in which there are no State institutions, and in which 
 the people know nothing about such affairs beyond 
 the local school and church. Perhaps at first blush 
 the people of a locality might not reUsh the idea of 
 having a reformatory in their midst, but this feel- 
 ing ought soon to pass away; and, moreover, the 
 people should be made to feel their responsibility 
 for reformatories, asylums, and penitentiaries as well 
 as their responsibility for any other State institu- 
 tions, and the feeling should not be encouraged 
 that such institutions should be put somewhere else 
 merely because one locality does not desire them. 
 
 The character of the property that is purchased 
 will determine to a very large extent the character 
 of the institution, and, therefore, the nature of the 
 reformatory processes. This is more important than 
 transportation facUities. It is a more important 
 question even than that of the proper buildings, for 
 162 
 
A Forest Background 
 
 buildings for these purposes have been studied by 
 many experts and our ideas concerning them have 
 been more or less standardized and, moreoverj build- 
 ings can be extended and modified more easily than 
 can the landed area. It seems to me that before 
 you think actually of purchasing the land, you 
 should arrive at a fairly definite conclusion as to 
 what kind of a farming enterprise it is desired to 
 develop as a background for the institution; you 
 could then determine as far as possible on principle 
 in what general region the institution ought to be 
 located; and then set out on a direct exploration to 
 determine whether the proper kind and quantity of 
 land can be secured. 
 
 163 
 
The background spaces. — The open fields 
 
 Here not long ago was the forest primeval. Here 
 the trees sprouted, and grew their centuries, and 
 returned to the earth. Here the midsummer brook 
 ran all day long from the far-away places. Here 
 the night-winds slept. Here havened the beasts 
 and fowls when storms pursued them. Here the 
 leaves fell in the glory of the autvimn, here other 
 leaves burst forth in the miracle of spring, and 
 here the pewee called in the summer. Here the 
 Indian tracked his game. 
 
 It was not so very long ago. That old man's 
 father remembers it. Then it was a new and holy 
 land, seemingly fresh from the hand of the creator. 
 The old man speaks of it as of a golden time, now 
 far away and hallowed; he speaks of it with an at- 
 titude of reverence. "Ah yes," my father told me; 
 and calmly with bared head he relates it, every 
 incident so sacred that not one hairbreadth must 
 he deviate. The church and the master's school 
 and the forest, — ^these three are strong in his 
 memory. 
 
 Yet these are not all. He remembers the homes 
 cut in the dim wall of the forest. He recalls the 
 farms full of stumps and heaps of logs and the ox- 
 164 
 
The Open Fields 
 
 teams on them, for these were in his boyhood. The 
 ox-team was a natural part of the slow-moving con- 
 quest in those rugged days. Roads betook them- 
 selves into the forest, like great serpents devouring 
 as they went. And one day, behold I the forest was 
 gone. Farm joined farm, the village grew, the old 
 folk fell away, new people came whose names had 
 to be asked. 
 
 And I thought me why these fields are not as 
 hallowed as were the old forests. Here are the same 
 knolls and hills. In this turf there may be still 
 the fibres of ancient trees. Here are the paths of 
 the midsummer brooks, but vocal now only in the 
 freshets. Here are the winds. The autiunn goes 
 and the spring comes. The pewee calls in the 
 groves. The farmer and not the Indian tracks the 
 plow. 
 
 Here I look down on a little city. There Is a 
 great school in it. There are spires piercing the 
 trees. In the distance are mills, and I see the smoke 
 of good accomplishment roll out over the hillside. 
 It is a self-centred city, full of pride. Every 
 mile-post praises it. Toward it all the roads 
 lead. It tells itself to all the surrounding country. 
 And yet I cannot but feel that these quiet fields 
 and others like them have made this city; but I 
 am glad that the fields are not proud. 
 
 One day a boy and one day a girl will go down 
 165 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 from these fields, and out into the thoroughways of 
 life. They will go far, but these hills they will 
 still call home. 
 
 From these uplands the waters flow down into 
 the streams that move the mills and that float the 
 ships. Loads of timber still go hence for the con- 
 struction down below. Here go building-stones and 
 sand and gravel, — gravel from the glaciers. Here 
 goes the hay for ten thousand horses. Here go the 
 wheat, and here the apples, and the animals. Here 
 are the votes that hold the people steady. 
 
 Somewhere there is the background. Here is the 
 background. Here things move slowly. Trees grow 
 slowly. The streams change little from year to year, 
 and yet they shape the surface of the earth in this 
 hill country. In yonder fence-row the catbird has 
 built since I was a boy, and yet I have wandered 
 far and I have seen great changes in yonder city. 
 The well-sweep has gone but the well is still there: 
 the wells are gone from the city. The cows have 
 changed in color, but still they are cows and yield 
 their milk in season. The fields do not perish, but 
 time eats away the city. I think all these things 
 must be good and very good or they could not 
 have persisted in all this change. 
 
 In the beginning ! Yes, I know, it was holy then. 
 The forces of eons shaped it : still was it holy. The 
 forest came: still holy. Then came the open fields. 
 166 
 
The background spaces. — The ancestral sea 
 
 The planet is not all land, and the sea is as holy 
 as the soil. We speak of the "waste of waters," and 
 we still offer prayers for those who go down to the 
 sea in ships. 
 
 Superstition yet clings about the sea. The lands- 
 man thinks of the sea as barren, and he regrets that 
 it is not solid land on which he may grow grass and 
 cattle. And as one looks over the surface of the 
 waters, with no visible object on the vast expanse 
 and even the clouds lying apparently dead and ster- 
 ile, and when one considers that three-fourths of 
 the earth's siu^ace is similarly covered, one has the 
 impression of utter waste and desolation, with no 
 good thing abiding there for the comfort and cheer 
 of man. 
 
 The real inhabitants of the sea are beneath the 
 surface and every part is tenanted, so completely 
 tenanted that the ocean produces greater bulk of 
 life, area for area, than does the solid land; and 
 every atom of this life is as keen to live and fol- 
 lows as completely the law of its existence as does 
 the life of the interiors of the continents. The vast 
 meadows of plankton and nekton, albeit largely of 
 organisms microscopic, form a layer for hundreds 
 167 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 of feet beneath the surface and on which the great 
 herbivora feed; and on these anunals the legions of 
 the carnivora subsist. Every vertical region has its 
 life, peculiar to it, extending even to the bottoms of 
 the depths in the world-slimes and the darkness; 
 and in these deeps the falling remains of the upper 
 realms, like gentle primeval rains, afford a never- 
 failing, never-ending source of food and maintain 
 the slow life in the bottoms. We think of the huge 
 animals of the sea when we think of mass, and it 
 is true that the great whales are the bulkiest crea- 
 tures we know to have lived; yet it is the bacteria, 
 the desmids, the minute crustaceans, and many 
 other diminutive forms that everywhere populate 
 the sea from the equator to the poles and provide 
 the vast background of the ocean life. In these 
 gulfs of moving unseen forms nitrification proceeds, 
 and the roumds of life go on unceasingly. The levi- 
 athan whale strains out these minute organisms from 
 the volumes of waters, and so full of them may be 
 his maw that his captors remove the accumulation 
 with spades. The rivers bring down their freight 
 of mud and organic matter, and supply food for the 
 denizens of the sea. The last remains of all these 
 multitudes are laid down on the ocean floors as or- 
 ganic oozes; and nobody knows what part the abys- 
 mal soil may play in the economy of the plant in 
 some future epoch. 
 
 168 
 
The Ancestral Sea 
 
 The rains of the land come from the sea; the 
 clouds come ultimately from the sea; the trade- 
 winds flow regularly from the sea; the tempera- 
 tures of the land surface are controlled largely from 
 the sea; the high lands are washed into the sea as 
 into a basin; if all the continents were levelled into 
 the sea still would the sea envelop the planet about 
 two miles deep. Impurities find their way into the 
 sea and are there digested into the universal benefi- 
 cence. We must reckon with the sea. 
 
 It is supposed that the first life on the earth came 
 forth where the land and the waters join, from that 
 eternal interplay of cosmic forces where the solid 
 and the fluid, the mobile and the immobile, meet 
 and marry. 
 
 Verily, the ancestral sea is the background of the 
 planet. Its very vastness makes it significant. It 
 shows no age. Its deeps have no doubt existed 
 from the solidification of the earth and they will 
 probably remain when all works of man perish 
 utterly. 
 
 The sea is the bosom of the earth's mysteries. 
 Because man cannot set foot on it, the sea remains 
 beyond his power to modify, to handle, and to con- 
 trol. No breach that man may make but will im- 
 mediately fill; no fleets of mighty ships go down 
 but that the sea covers them in silence and knows 
 them not; man may not hold converse with the 
 169 
 
The Holy Earth 
 
 monsters in the deeps. The sea is beyond him, 
 surpassing, elemental, and yet blessing him with 
 abundant benedictions. 
 
 So vast is the sea and so self-recuperating that 
 man cannot sterilize it. He despoils none of its 
 surface when he sails his ships. He does not anni- 
 hilate the realms of plankton, lying layer on layer 
 in its deluging, consuming soil. It controls him 
 mightily. 
 
 The seas and the shores have provided the trading 
 ways of the peoples. The ocean connects all lands, 
 surrounds all lands. Until recent times the great 
 marts have been mostly on coasts or within easy 
 water access of them. The polity of early settle- 
 ments was largely the polity of the sea and the 
 strand. The daring of the navigator was one of the 
 first of the heroic human qualities. Probably all 
 dry land was once under the sea, and therefrom has 
 it drawn much of its power. 
 
 From earliest times the sea has yielded property 
 common to all and free to whomever would take it, 
 — ^the fish, the wrack, the drift, the salvage of ships. 
 Pirates have roamed the sea for spoil and booty. 
 When government appropriates the wreckage of 
 ships and the stranded derelict of the sea, the people 
 may think it justifiable protection of their rights to 
 secrete it. Smuggling is an old sea license. Laws 
 and customs and old restraints lose their force and 
 170 
 
The Ancestral Sea 
 
 vanish on the sea; and freedom rises out of the 
 sea. 
 
 And so the ocean has contributed to the making 
 of the outlook of the human family. The race 
 would be a very different race had there been no 
 sea stretching to the unknown, conjuring vague fears 
 and stimulating hopes, bringing its freight, bearing 
 tidings of far lands, sundering traditions, rolling the 
 waves of its elemental music, driving its rank smells 
 into the nostrils, putting its salt into the soul. 
 
 171 
 
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