Mark what has happened. Capital was accumulated in the cities. Capital
gradually organized business and established it in the great centres.
When business was centralized, labor was centralized and began to
organize. Now capital and labor are at each other's throats and likely
to prove themselves the substance of Shelley's symbols.
"We two will sink on the wide waves of ruin
Even as a vulture and a snake outspent
Drop, twisted in inextricable fight,
Into a shoreless sea."
At the present time the farmers are the sole inheritors of the ideals
of our fathers. But like the foolish men of the cities they are also
organizing for profit. They have forgotten that the home was the one
great ideal of the men and women who braved the perils of the ocean
and conquered the wilderness. Farming is above all a home-building
occupation--rather than a money-making business. But now men no longer
regard the place where they live as a home. It is merely a speculation
in real estate. They try to estimate everything in terms of
dollars--and the money profits are so meagre that all who are able are
deserting the farms and joining in the great jazz-time dollar dance of
the cities. The farmers are forsaking the substance for the
glitter--or are organizing for political power so that they may divert
the stream of dollars toward the farms. Of course it can be shown
that under modern conditions there can be no home without money. But
why trouble about modern conditions? The world is very old and has
developed many great men and all that we know of good without the aid
of modern conditions. Few of the poets and prophets and great leaders
of the past were born in the cities. "Modern conditions"--luxury,
extravagance, dissipation, and parasitism--undoubtedly encompassed the
destruction of all the great cities whose names move sonorously in
verse. And now the farmers are lusting for the "modern conditions"
that are hurrying the cities to destruction.
Now that the farmers are educated and "profess apprehension," why do
they not read the great portents of our time? Can they not see that some
cosmic pendulum that measures the progress of man toward his destiny has
started on its backward swing? All the great symbols and allegories by
which we have been taught in the past are now being reversed.
After the Deluge men built the Tower of Babel so that they might not be
destroyed. And for their presumption they were scattered by a confusion
of tongues.
After the Great War--a man-made disaster as terrible as the Flood--we
are having all the confused tongues of ancient Babel uniting in a cry
that men must come together to make the world safe for democracy. What
was scattered is reassembling.
We are told that in the beginning man was placed in a garden--on the
land--but for his disobedience he was driven forth by cherubim with a
flaming sword.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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