With the greatest self-denial I refrain from concluding this chapter with a ringing peroration in glorification of farm life. From a desk on the fifteenth floor of an office-building, with an outlook across a smoky, clanging industrial city, I could do this comfortably and with an easy conscience. But the scientist has stolen farming away from the sentimentalist and the theorist. Farming, I may repeat, is a business, the oldest and the newest in the world. No year passes in which its methods and processes are not carried nearer to perfection. City boys now about to choose a vocation will do well to visit an agricultural college and extension plant, or, better still, a representative corn-belt farm, before making the momentous decision. Perhaps the thousands of urban lads who this year volunteered to aid the farmers as a patriotic service will be persuaded that the soil affords opportunities not lightly to be passed by. No one can foretell the vast changes that will be precipitated when the mighty war is ended; but one point is undebatable: the world, no matter how low its fortunes may sink, must have bread and meat. Tremendous changes and readjustments are already foreshadowed; but in all speculations the productiveness of the American farm will continue to be a factor of enormous importance. A wide-spread absorption of land by large investors, the increase of tenantry, and the passing of the farm family are possibilities of the future not to be overlooked by those who have at heart the fullest and soundest development of American democracy. For every 100 acres of American land now under cultivation there are about 375 acres untilled but susceptible of cultivation. Here is a chance for American boys of the best fibre to elect a calling that more and more demands trained intelligence. All things considered, the rewards of farming average higher than those in any other occupation, and the ambitious youth, touched with the new American passion for service, for a more perfect realization of the promise of democracy, will find in rural communities a fallow field ready to his hand. CHAPTER IV CHICAGO “And yonder where, gigantic, wilful, young, Chicago sitteth at the northwest gates, With restless violent hands and casual tongue Moulding her mighty fates----” WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY. I A fateful Titan, brooding over a mammoth chess-board, now cautious in his moves as he shifts his myriad pigmies, now daring, but always resolute, clear-eyed, steady of hand, and with no thought but victory--as such a figure Rodin might have visualized twentieth-century Chicago.