Already the taint is perceptible in our literature. The centripetal tendency is not a purely economic one. Commerce and industry draw the crowds to the cities, and immediately there arises a set of writers who write only of the city. How large a proportion of our fiction portrays only the wretched drawing-room intrigue, the wretched rivalries of wretched citizens. The Epic was buried three hundred years ago. The Ode is dead. The Lyric is dying. Now we have the Novel and the Problem Play, the sensational Newspaper and the Picture Magazine. In time, I suppose, we shall come to the Snapshot and the Paperette. Already we are almost there.--Was it for this that the mighty Areopagitical pleader for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing strove? I wish that whole populations of crowded cities could be turned out hebdomadally to take long week-end walks in the country, there to mew its mighty youth and kindle its undazzled eyes at the full midday beam; there to slough off the skin of daily toil, cleanse itself from the dross of money-getting, and learn that there is something in life more worth living for than the weekly wage, and other joys than those of _panem et circenses_.--But this is a wild dream. As well try to rehabilitate the Bacchic dance and Chian wine in place of Football and beer or Baseball and peanuts.--Yet methinks I have heard of wilder. What did Jean-Jacques and his school really mean by "back to nature"? To me, I confess, this polipetal or city-seeking tendency in modern life (if I may so call it) wears a most serious, a most sinister aspect. So, I am inclined to think, it did to Ruskin. "I had once purposed," wrote John Ruskin half-a-century ago, "to show what kind of evidence existed respecting the possible influence of country life on men; it seeming to me, then, likely that here and there a reader would perceive this to be a grave question, more than most which we contend about, political or social, and might care to follow it out with me earnestly. The day will assuredly come when men will see that it _is_ a grave question."[59] If we read history aright, always the bloated city succumbs to the pagan horde. It is in the crowded city that all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life,[60] have most free play. And it is in the city, where division of labour is daily carried to greater extremes, that men's activities as a whole have least free play. The result is twofold: the nobler emotions are stunted; the baser passions are stimulated. Socialism (whatever the precise prescription so labelled may be) is no remedy for this. Perhaps Rousseau reasoned better than he knew.