Regular men and women long for children as they long for good luck, long life, and sweet happiness. But they do not want just children, any kind whatever so that they be children. No indeed! It is always a whole, healthy child, a bright, intelligent child, a loving, obedient child, a beautiful, virtuous child, that lives warm in their dreams. And a child with such characteristics costs more than many men and women can pay; for a well-bred child, like a well-bred colt, is the product of many favoring tides of good fortune. _Farms, The Place of Children_ So it is that the Johns and Marys who leave the farm and its open spaces for city life give up having children of their own,--often without knowing it when they leave the country, to be sure,--and find themselves later doomed to work out human contentment in some other way; for the high cost of city space, of just sufficient elbow-room for a child to grow in and acquire the human characteristics desired, is almost as prohibitive as if a law were on the statute-books forbidding the rearing of children in city blocks. While my critic is biting his thumb at this “exaggeration,” gravely asserting that he knows there are many families of children in our American cities, I have caught his eye and will hold it long enough to tell him a thing disclosed by the last United States Census report, viz., among the thirty millions of farm people, there are 4,000,000 more children under twenty-one years of age than there are among any thirty millions of city people. And this bald fact virtually declares the truth I am uttering--that the country contains the children of the nation, that the farm is the natural rearing-ground of well-bred children, and that the city core--the stamping-ground of business and adults--abhors children as “nature abhors a vacuum.” My story will not reach home, however, unless one pauses a moment to let this census fact soak in. Here is an excess of children living on our farms that would make a small nation,--bigger than Switzerland, bigger than Chili, than Norway, than famous little agricultural Denmark. _Cities Get Youth from Farms_ And what will become of this excess of children? What else than this? The farms will manage to feed them, clothe them, educate them until they come of age, when, possessed of the strong right arm, they will turn their backs on the farm and farming, and go to recruit the nerve-fagged industry of cities.