On the labors of the countryman depend the whole strength and health, nay, the very existence of society, yet, in almost every country, politics, economics, and social reform are urban products, and the countryman gets only the crumbs which fall from the political table. It seems to be so in Canada and the States even, countries which we in Europe for long regarded as mainly agricultural. It seems only yesterday to the imagination that they were colonized, and yet we find the Minister of Agriculture in Canada announcing a decline in the rural population in Eastern Canada. As children sprung from the loins of diseased parents manifest at an early age the same defects in their constitution, so Canada and the States, though in their national childhood, seem already threatened by the same disease from which classic Italy perished, and whose ravages today make Great Britain seem to the acute diagnoser of political health to be like a fruit--ruddy without, but eaten away within and rotten at the core. One expects disease in old age, but not in youth. We expect young countries to sow their wild oats, to have a few revolutions before they settle down to national housekeeping; but we are not moved by these troubles--the result of excessive energy--as we are by symptoms of premature decay. No nation can be regarded as unhealthy when a virile peasantry, contented with rural employments, however discontented with other things, exists on its soil. The disease which has attacked our great populations here and in America is a discontent with rural life. Nothing which has been done hitherto seems able to promote content. It is true, indeed, that science has gone out into the fields, but the labors of the chemist, the bacteriologist, and the mechanical engineer are not enough to ensure health. What is required is the art of the political thinker, the imagination which creates a social order and adjusts it to human needs. The physician who understands the general laws of human health is of more importance to us here than the specialist. The genius of rural life has not yet appeared. We have no fundamental philosophy concerning it, but we have treasures of political wisdom dealing with humanity as a social organism in the city States or as great nationalities. It might be worth while inquiring to what extent the wisdom of a Solon, an Aristotle, a Rousseau, or an Alexander Hamilton might be applied to the problem of the rural community. After all, men are not so completely changed in character by their rural environment that their social needs do not, to a large extent, coincide with the needs of the townsman. They cannot be considered as creatures of a different species. Yet statesmen who have devoted so much thought to the constitution of empires and the organization of great cities, who have studied their psychology, have almost always treated the rural problem purely as an economic problem, as if agriculture was a business only and not a life.