All the fine arts are subsidiary to and dependent upon material progress, and the primal source of well-being is the soil. Man is a land animal, and he must have access to the land with the same freedom that a babe enjoys at its mother's breast; otherwise he will be stunted and dwarfed. The earth is the Old Mother, yielding an abundance of food for all her children. More reason and more consciousness on their part will induce them to share it with one another, not like unreasoning pigs but like reasoning men. The "new freedom" means eventually the accessibility of the earth to every man. In the meantime the biggest business at hand is to build soils as well as schools; to keep the land full of sap; to extend mechanism into the arts of agriculture; to unify the thought and purpose of city and country. All this will follow the world-mindedness that is being developed by industrialism and internationalism.
All constructive thought and action must deal not less with the city but more and more with the country--the land. Typical cities are sapping the wealth of life that grows up round them. The obsessed man in the market place needs the poise and power of the shepherd on the hill. The only true and durable magnificence of a state lies in the equitable use of its natural resources. No man who has thought profoundly wants to own land, but the majority of men do want to use it. That ought to be every man's privilege, for every man is in some fashion a lover of the verdant earth. But even the millions of us who are landless, because a few men legally own the earth, have occasional esthetic accesses to it, and if we passionately loved its beauty we should hasten the day of its release by an uneconomic monopoly. An intelligent love of the earth as a living thing is at the bottom of the dynamic impulse of man to be forever becoming.
And as these lovely days of wanton greenness steal like fairies into the secret recesses of his child-heart, man has a sense of eternal kinship with
... that small untoward class which knows the divine call of the spirit through the brain, and the secret whisper of the soul in the heart, and for ever perceives the veils of mystery and the rainbows of hope upon our human horizons; which hears and sees, and yet turns wisely, meanwhile, to the life of the green earth, of which we are part, to the common kindred of living things, with which we are at one--is content, in a word, to live, because of the dream that makes living so mysteriously sweet and poignant; and to dream, because of the commanding immediacy of life.