It is ill with the world, my masters, It is ill for the world and you, When our eyes look down, and our faces frown, ’Mid the tasks we are set to do. Beware of the frown of the People, Lest their wrath and their patience part! Oh! let not a wrong ever burden the song That comes from the People’s heart. [Illustration: Back To Nature—Part The Way BY EUGENE WOOD.] About once in every so often, we, as a race, all lay back our heads, shut our eyes, and let out the shuddering shriek: “Back to Nature!” It is so loud and heart-felt a cry that it makes you wonder why we have to go back at all—why we didn’t stay there. If the Get-Strong-Quick professors are right, this thing of our wearing clothes, and dwelling in houses, and eating dainty cooked food three times a day is sheer tom-foolishness, all the more tom-foolish in that once we led the healthy, happy life that inevitably results from fasting three or four days in the week, then dining on goobers and timothy hay; wearing nothing but a nose-ring and a dash of paint, and sleeping in the hollow trees. For most of us, “Back to Nature” is too long a road to travel—all the way. Nevertheless, the cry is so loud, and so general throughout the civilized world that we cannot dismiss it as impracticable and meaningless. It betokens something. I think I know what, and if it didn’t look so much like serious thinking for you and me, I’d write out what I think it means. I’ll say this, though: If we judge the future by the past this universal impulse to touch the naked earth once more, and so to gather strength and vigor from it, means that the world is pregnant with a great event, and we must be fortified for the labor-pains of it. A new age is struggling to be born. Mark my words.