Healthy national ideals require a contribution from both urban and rural experience. The first we have in quantity. It is the second we lack. It is the business of those who conserve social welfare to respect the conclusions of rural thinkers and to discover how rural experience may make its largest contribution to national policy and social opinion. RURAL VS. URBAN ENVIRONMENT VII RURAL VS. URBAN ENVIRONMENT We had just finished eating lunch at one of the more quiet hotels of our greatest city. We lingered after the meal for a chat, this being one of the privileges of the place, untroubled by the type of waiter, hungry for tips, who so often at the metropolitan hotels conveys unmistakably the idea that one's departure is expected to follow directly the presentation of his bill. The host was a man of business, famed for his success and his interest in public affairs, and especially generous in giving of his money and time to further movements that attempt the betterment of rural life. He had spent his youth in the open country and had never lost any of the vividness of his first joys. It was this mutual interest in rural problems that had brought host and guest together for a quiet talk. "Will you give me your deepest impression of the city as you came into it from the country?" asked the man of business of the student. "I hardly can claim one impression, there are so many." "But one must be deeper or at least more consciously so than the others. It is that I want. I'll tell you in return my strongest impression when recently I visited, for the first time in several years, the farm where I was born." "I suppose the line of thought that captured my mind when I first came into the city tonight is what you want." "Yes." "I began to think not of your noise or your hurry, your poverty or your crowds, but of your atmosphere of what I call popular materialism. Do you understand what I mean?" "Perhaps not." "I mean I sensed everywhere the emphasis upon the power of money. I suppose it is an experience forced upon the consciousness of everyone who comes into the life of this great city from a small community. It seems as if the city was a monument to the idea that money can do everything, that the getting of money is the only satisfactory purpose of life." "You must not forget the miser of the small village or the considerable number of city people who do not make business and money-making the chief object of their lives."