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.
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