Almost every man in our history formed his character in the leisure and deliberation of village or country life, and drew his strength from the drugs of the earth even as a child draws his from his mother’s breast. In the diminution of this rural population, virtuous and competent, patriotic and honest, living beneath its own roof-tree, building its altars by its own hearthstone and shrining in its own heart its liberty and its conscience, there is abiding cause for regret. In the corresponding growth of our cities—already center spots of danger, with their idle classes, their sharp rich and poor, their corrupt politics, their consorted thieves, and their clubs and societies of anarchy and socialism—I see a pressing and impending danger. Let it be noted that the professions are crowded, that middlemen are multiplied beyond reason, that the factories can in six months supply the demand of twelve—that machinery is constantly taking the place of men—that labor in every department bids against itself until it is mercilessly in the hands of the employer, that the new-comers are largely recruits of the idle and dangerous classes, and we can appreciate something of the danger that comes with this increasing movement to strip the villages and the farms and send an increasing volume into the already overcrowded cities. This is but one phase of that tendency to centralization and congestion which is threatening the liberties of this people and the life of this Republic. Now, let us go one step further. What is the most notable financial movement in America? It is the mortgaging of the farm lands of the country—the bringing of the farmer into bondage to the money-lender. In Illinois the farms are mortgaged for $200,000,000, in Iowa for $140,000,000, in Kansas for $160,000,000, and so on through the Northwest. In Georgia about $20,000,000 of foreign capital holds in mortgage perhaps one-fourth of Georgia’s farms, and the work is but started. Every town has its loan agent—a dozen companies are quartered in Atlanta, and the work goes briskly on. A mortgage is the bulldog of obligations—a very mud-turtle for holding on. It is the heaviest thing of its weight in the world. I had one once, and sometimes I used to feel, as it rested on my roof, deadening the rain that fell there, and absorbing the sunshine, that it would crush through the shingles and the rafters and overwhelm me with its dull and persistent weight, and when at last I paid it off, I went out to look at the shingles to see if it had not flopped back there of its own accord. Think of it, Iowa strips from her farmers $14,000,000 of interest every year, and sends it to New York and Boston to be reloaned on farms in other States, and to support and establish the dominion of the money-lenders over the people. Georgia gathers from her languishing fields $2,000,000 of interest every year, and sends it away forever. Could her farmers but keep it at home, one