But there will also arise countrymen with statesmanship in them; if not so, then we cannot make the progress that we need. The movement will have its significant political aspect, and we may look for governors of states and perhaps more than one President of the United States to come out of it. In the end, the farmer controls the politics because he makes the crops on which the wealth of the country depends. There is probably a greater proportion of tax-payers among voting farmers than among city people. Considered in total results, educational and political as well as social and economic, the country-life movement in North America is probably farther advanced than in any other part of the world. It may not have such striking manifestations in some special lines, and our people may not need so much as other peoples that these particular lines be first or most strongly attacked. The movement really has been under way for many years, but it has only recently found separate expression. Most of the progress has been fundamental, and will not need to be done over again. The movement is well afoot among the country people themselves, and they are doing some of the clearest thinking on the situation. Many of our own people do not know how far we have already come. _A transition period._ Such undercurrent movements are usually associated with transition epochs. In parts of the Old World the nexus in the social structure has been the landlord, and the change in land-tenure systems has made a social reorganization necessary. There is no political land-tenure problem in the United States, and therefore there is no need, on that score, of the coöperation of small owners or would-be owners to form a new social crystallization. But there is a land problem with us, nevertheless, and this is at the bottom of our present movement: it is the immanent problem of remaining more or less stationary on our present lands, rather than moving on to untouched lands, when the ready-to-use fertility is reduced. We have had a new-land society, with all the marks of expansion and shift. We are now coming to a new era; but, unlike new eras in some other countries, it is not complicated by hereditary social stratification. Our real agricultural development will now begin. In the discussion of these rural interests, old foundations and old ideas in all probability will be torn up. We shall probably discard many of the notions that now are new and that promise well. We may face trying situations, but something better will come out of it. It is now a time to be conservative and careful, and to let the movement mature. _The commission on country life._