I realized that the Herr Director spoke truly when he said that what we lack over here is a healthy class spirit, which the German farmer has. A sort of pride in his calling which makes him care for the soil and nourish it with a lover's passion. To him robbing the soil is as great a crime as it would be to rob his children. It is not only the Emperor who regards himself as a partner with God, and sometimes the senior partner; the commonest, poorest peasant is apt to say as he drenches his field with the accumulated compost: "_Ich und Gott_." Speaking of the farmer, the Herr Director admitted that in Germany as elsewhere there is a trend to the city; but the tide is held back by the pride of the German farmer, who glories in having his traditions, his folksongs, and, above all, this sense of partnership with God. We scarcely have such a thing as a farmer class; we have merely merchandizers in dirt who sell not only the products of the soil, but unhesitatingly the soil itself. The land which we see from the car window, which the pioneers won from this boundless space, these houses and sheltering groves, the homesteads in which a great race was cradled, are all for sale, now that the soil is robbed of its fertility and the robbers have moved on to repeat the process elsewhere. We are doing something, he admitted, to stem the tide to the cities; we are introducing agricultural training into our public schools and are making the raising of corn and wheat a science, but not as yet a sacrament. We stayed over night in one of the half-asleep towns on the shores of the river, a town whose history is written upon the headstones in the cemetery, in the center of which the stately meeting-house stands. We met the descendants of those who sleep there, whose pride lies in the fact that their forefathers were the pioneers who fought the Indians, the fevers and each other. Their houses are full of old furniture shipped from England and Holland, and we ate their food and drank their tea from costly silver and exquisite china which they have inherited. We looked upon the portraits of their ancestors and were told of their virtues and their fame; we saw fine memorials to the past in churches and town halls and rode in their automobiles, to see the farms bequeathed to them. One thing, alas! they have not and never will have--descendants. On one of the farms we saw a swarthy Italian with a bright red rose behind his ear. His wife and children were working with him in the field, and they were doing this strange thing as they pulled weeds from the onion beds--they were singing. The Herr Director said significantly, "These are the heirs to all this," and I think he was a true prophet.