The word "renter" we used Out West as a term of contempt. The ownership of an acre of land gives a sense of security which religion can not bestow. God's acre, with vegetables, fruits, flowers, a cow and poultry, places a family beyond the reach of famine, even if not of avarice. Moreover, this single acre means sound sleep, good digestion and resultant good thoughts, all from digging in the dirt and mixing with the elements. "All wealth comes from the soil," says Adam Smith, and he might have added, man himself comes from the soil and is brother to the trees and the flowers. Men can no more live apart from land than can the grass. The ownership of a very small plot of ground steadies life, lends ballast to existence, and is a bond given to society for good behavior. "I am no longer an anarchist--I have bought a lot and am building a house," a Russian refugee advised his restless colleagues at home, when they wrote, asking him for quotations on dynamite. It is obvious and easy to say that the people who make city slums possible do not want to own houses and would not live upon land and improve it, if they could. The worst about this statement is that it is true. They are so sunken in fear, superstition and indifference that they lack the squirrel's thrift in providing a home and laying in a stock of provisions; they are even without the ground-hog's ambition to burrow. They are too sodden to know what they are missing, and are lacking in the imagination which pictures a better condition. They are like those pigmy bondsmen who work in the cotton-mills of the South--yellow, gaunt, too dead to weep, too hopeless to laugh, too pained to feel. From these creatures and creators of slums it is absurd to talk of gratitude for the offer of betterment. People who expect gratitude do not deserve it. Neither can the slumsters by force be placed on land and be expected to till it. A generation, at least, will be required to work a change, and this change will come through educating the children--through the kindergarten and the kindergarten methods--and most of all through school-gardens. The so-called "back districts" are fast being annihilated, for quick transportation is bringing city and country close together. The time is coming, and shortly, too, when a fare of one cent a mile will be the universal rule, and a mile a minute will not be regarded as an unusual speed. Now here is something which Henry George did not say, and if he knew was too diplomatic to mention: The reason the people have not had possession of the land is because they did not want it. The ownership of the land you need to use comes in answer to prayer--and prayer is the soul's desire, uttered or unexpressed. The will of the people is supreme. If fraud and rascality exist in high places, it is because we elect rascals to office.