We are told to-day (1920) that millions of workers in our great cities are unemployed. I reflect at once upon the figures which are placed before us. In round numbers we have, this winter, about six millions of unnaturalized foreign working people living in our cities, and almost exactly the same number of employed on our hands. What would they have us do? Are six millions more to come to us and thus give us a total of twelve millions of unemployed? What would these people all do for a living? There are simply not enough jobs in the cities for them, and it seems evident that there will not be in our generation. It is these masses, which, by sheer force of number, gave us the present insoluble problem of the city. Our cities can maintain their large populations only if the country population is increased to supply them food and raw materials on the one hand, and with markets on the other. Overgrown cities are in themselves a menace. When the surplus is composed of unassimilated and unemployed aliens the menace is doubled,--nay, it is multiplied tenfold. The great city as at present constructed and conducted corrodes the very soul of our American life. Factory work, with every new invention of automatic machinery, progressively selects those who are more and more unfit to be Americans. A factory manager in Chicago recently amended a new rule for the selection of employees. He would hire no blondes. The big blonde people, he said, "would not stay at their machines until the whistle blew." He was evidently hunting for a people who could be trained never to move a foot, or an eye, for ten hours a day. The growth of an American is ordinarily impossible under the conditions of either great wealth or great poverty. The city simply can not furnish the character-building elements which must needs go into the making of an American. Every American child should be born to a vast heritage. This heritage should include a fine healthy parentage, clean birth, gentle care, proper nourishment and opportunity for play and education in the open country. Is there no cause for the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan among the robust, native-born folk of the countryside? Is not the menace of the city to our ideals and institutions an urgent demand for the organization of our unspoiled rural life to save the nation from infection by the great cities?