But give me a house with a yard rather than a hole in the wall, a city tenement, or a flat. The whole trend of society is toward the city, or camp, military, rather than agricultural. The modern city is a social camp. Life is becoming a series of mass movements, military maneuvers, at the command of social leaders. Industry has long been militarized both in form and spirit, and is rapidly perfecting its organization. Today, 1923, there are more than a hundred different automobile manufacturing concerns in this country. Only those capable of “quantity production” will survive. Already the manufacturers see the entire industry reduced to five different concerns. This is strictly military, the making of society into a vast, and vaster machine, which, too great at last for control, will turn upon and crush its makers. We are all conscripted. The Draft Board of industrialism allows no exemptions. The only way I see is to desert, to take to the woods, as I have done, to return individually to a simple, elemental manner of life out of the soil. But who can pay the social cost? Our social or camp psychology is better understood and more easily handled than the mind of the lone scout within us. We are gregarious by nature; we hunt in packs, we collect into crowds. Yet we are selves, separate, single, each of us a cave-man as well as cliff-dweller, a Remus as well as a Romulus. The city-building brother killed his country brother. And the murder still goes on. Out of a commentary on the Bible I take the following observation, partly for its charm, but also because it holds a profound truth: God’s people from the earliest time had never been builders of cities. The earliest account of city-building is that of the city of Enoch by Cain, and all the subsequent mention of city-building is in connection with the apostate families of the earth, such as Nimrod and his descendants, the Canaanites and the Egyptians. Sodom is one of the earliest mentioned cities properly so called, and the story of it is not encouraging for the people of God. But which is the city whose story is encouraging to the people of God? Not Boston’s, nor New York’s, nor London’s, nor Vienna’s. Vienna is starving; the country is bankrupt Austria’s governmental machine is a total wreck; but the peasant goes his way, suffering little inconvenience, though the crown is not to-day worth the paper it is printed on. The peasant lives on the land, not on the bank; he gets his simple life directly out of the soil instead of a pay envelope; he has no New York, New Haven and Hartford stock, worth one hundred and eighty-six dollars yesterday, and ten dollars to-day, to-morrow, and until he starves. He has a piece of land and, impossible as it sounds on paper, lives on it, and out of it, and in it, an almost independent life, as the wage-slave and the coupon-victim cannot live.