He built himself cities as places of refuge from the savage creatures and enemies of the country. But the cities betrayed his trust. They became great and terrible until now those who are disillusioned of "modern conditions" are turning toward the country as a refuge from the cities. The procedure has been reversed and all who have vision can see that a day will come--a day of hunger and fear--when man will be driven back to his garden by cherubim with a flaming sword. But this is the old-time prophecy of woes to come--and pessimism is not popular. Let us return to everyday life and see what we can find of hope. At the risk of an anticlimax I shall venture to deal with what will seem but little things after your thoughts have been dealing with what we have ignorantly regarded as great things. Let us consider one little thing--that is the greatest thing in the world. Let us give a thought to the home. While visiting the great cities I have visited in homes, and in the thing most complained of I have found the first ray of hope. There are no longer any servants for families of moderate means. The work of the home must be done by those who enjoy the home. Because of this there is a fuller and freer home life. Women of education and culture who have been compelled by the high cost of living to do their own work are doing it better than it was ever done by servants. They are better cooks than the cooks they had in the past, and all the members of the family are of necessity learning lessons of helpfulness. If the death-struggle of labor and capital should paralyze, or at least decentralize, civilization, we have an atavistic capacity to do our own work. Our forefathers did their own work and we look back to them proudly as being better than we are. The cities are full of men and women who were born on the farms and know how to do the work of farms, and when the truth of Job's words is brought home to them--"as for bread, it cometh from the earth"--they can go back to the earth with confidence. The true mission of the educated, thinking farmer to-day is to use his newly acquired power to preserve the new experiment in civilization tried by our fathers and which made the home rather than money the unit of success. Let them coöperate to establish their own homes and to help others to establish self-supporting homes and we shall have a more glorious civilization than has been. If we return to the vision and hope of those who established the democracies of the new world, the cherubim with the flaming sword may prove to be heralds, whose sword will be miraculously changed into a torch lighting us to a better world. But this change will be wrought, not by statesmen, but by men and women worthy to be citizens of a democracy--men and women who are not ashamed to do little things and do them well. And we are taught not to "despise the day of little things." CHAPTER VIII A WORLD DRAMA