Speaking from the financial viewpoint alone, and taking no account of the other and greater values involved, anything that breaks down the idealism of a city costs it heavily in money. The business man who helps to inaugurate an evil with the thought that it will bring him profit will live to realize that, for every dollar of profit it brings him in trade, it will cost him a dollar in taxes and toward the suppression of crime and undesirable conditions. Such is the result of the coming of undesirable persons, practices, and situations to a community. The addition to the population, permanently or temporarily, of a rough and rude element with no ideals of conduct, no standards of sobriety, no regard for the sanctity of the Lord’s Day, and no respect for property rights has never profited a city yet. If you want thieves, hoodlums, and libertines, create a low standard of ideals in the community, and you will get them. Your jails, poorhouses, and insane asylums may serve in the place of a hospital and ambulance to take care of the casualties, but a high level of idealism would be a railing along the top of the cliff to save the people. The history of the ages is the story of the progress of the human race from the Garden of Eden to the New Jerusalem, from the status of a perfect garden to that of a perfect city, from a simple but happy primal state to a complex but ideal social order. The drift of life is to the city. The farm is giving its products, but it is also giving its sons and daughters to the town. The drift of life is to the city. When the race has reached the climax of its progress, that condition will be a perfect city—a city of justice, righteousness, truth, faith, and brotherhood. It will have beautiful buildings, broad avenues, flowering parks, and prosperous institutions, but its real glory will be the quality of its people. Destiny is waiting on the city to become all this. What dizzy distances it will have to travel. It will have to fling aside the acknowledged domination of Mammon. It will have to get spiritual ideals and human values back into the first place where they belong. Each promoter of the interests of a city is advertising a precipice from which people may stumble to their doom, or pointing with pride to the beautiful hospital and ambulance provided by the magnanimous people to take care of the maimed and broken, or building railings along the tops of cliffs to keep people from falling and to make the place safe, even for the young, the weak, and the blind. Which one of these things are you doing for your town? Capitalizing War for the Tobacco Trade (1919) The effect of war in the battle zones themselves is hardly less definite than that which it exerts among the home populations of the nations involved. With no uncertain hand it writes its name across the commercial and social life of a country. There is hardly a phase of thought and activity which does not show marked reaction to war conditions.