with the prosperity of the business community. But about the economic foundation of this class Mr. Nicholson sounds as innocent as a babe. Take his attitude towards the farmer. You gather from these pages that in the Middle West the farmer is a somewhat unfortunate anomaly, a shadow on the bright scene. Farming is scarcely even a respectable profession: “the great-grandchildren of the Middle Western pioneers are not easily persuaded that farming is an honorable calling”! He hints darkly at a decay in fiber. Only one chapter out of six is given to the farmer, and that is largely occupied with the exertions of state agencies, universities, to lift him out of his ignorance and selfishness. The average farmer has few of the admirable qualities of the Valley of Democracy. He is not “folksy”; he is suspicious, conservative, somewhat embittered, little given to coöperation; he even needed prodding with his Liberty bonds. In Mr. Nicholson’s pages the farmer becomes a huge problem which lies on the brain and conscience of a Middle West that can only act towards him in its best moments like a sort of benevolent Charity Organization Society. “To the average urban citizen,” says Mr. Nicholson, “farming is something remote and uninteresting, carried on by men he never meets in regions that he only observes hastily from a speeding automobile or the window of a limited train.” It would take whole volumes to develop the implications of that sentence. Remember that that urban citizen is Mr. Nicholson’s Middle West, and that the farmer comprises the huge bulk of the population. Is this not interesting, the attitude of the prosperous minority of an urban minority--a small but significant class which has in its hands all the non-productive business and political power--towards the great productive mass of the people? Could class division be revealed in plainer terms? This Middle West of Mr. Nicholson’s class sees itself as not only innocent of exploitation, but full of all the personal and social virtues besides. But does the farmer see this class in this light? He does not. And Mr. Veblen has given us in one of his books an analysis of this society which may explain why: “The American country town and small city,” he says, “is a business community, that is to say it lives for and by business traffic, primarily of a merchandising sort.... Municipal politics is conducted as in some sort a public or overt extension of that private or covert organization of local interests that watches over the joint pecuniary benefit of the local businessmen. It is a means ... of safe-guarding the local business community against interlopers and against any evasive tactics on the part of the country population that serves as a host.... The country town is a product and exponent of the American land system. In its beginning it is located and ‘developed’ as an enterprise of speculation in land values; that is to say, it is a businesslike endeavor to get