what is left of an axe embedded in a pile of reddish vegetable mould, which was once the chopping block. Peering through the windows of the house, you see a few bits of simple furniture still inhabiting the ruined rooms. Just outside, in the door-yard, the day lilies, run wild in the grass, speak to you of a housewife's hand across the vanished years. The barn has gone completely, overthrown and wiped out by the advancing forest edge. Enough of the clearing still remains, however, to show where the cornfields and the pastures lay. They are wild with berry stalks and flowers now, still and vacant under the Summer sun. The ruins of war are melancholy, and raise our bitter resentment. Yet how often we pass such an abandoned farm as this without any realization that it, too, is a ruin of war, the ceaseless war of commercial greed. No less surely than in stricken Belgium has there been a deportation here. Factories and cities have swallowed up a whole population, indeed, along the Beartown road. It is easy to say that they went willingly, that they preferred the life of cities; that the dreary tenement under factory grime, with a "movie" theatre around the corner, is an acceptable substitute to them for the ample fireplaces, the fanlight door, the rolling fields and roadside brook. We hear much discussion in New England to-day of "how to keep the young folks on the farm." But why should they stay on the farm, to toil and starve, in body and mind? We have so organized our whole society on a competitive commercial basis that they can now do nothing else. Those ancient apple trees beside the ruined house once grew fruit superior in taste to any apple which ever came from Hood River or Wenatchee, and could grow it again; but greed has determined that our cities shall pay five cents apiece for the showy western product, and the small individual grower of the East is helpless. We have raised individualism to a creed, and killed the individual. We have exalted "business," and depopulated our farms. The old gray ruin on the back road to Monterey is an epitome of our history for a hundred years.