96 Missouri Agricultural Report. 



Distribution must follow production. Near to the factory smoke 

 stack we find the telegraph and telephone poles. Cheap transportation 

 pushes back the borders of our great cities, increases their population 

 and their problems. Steam and electricity have annihilated distance. 

 One touch of the daily newspaper makes the whole world kin. We could 

 once see other peoples only with a telescope — and had no telescope — 

 while now we have the world for a back lot. The re-alignment of the 

 world's sky line, brought about by the changed condition of transporta- 

 tion marks a new era. The great round globe is field for the home 

 missionary. Transportation re-maps the earth's surface. We have 

 harnessed steam and extracted the sting from the thunderbolt to do 

 man's bidding. Commerce has made a department store of all the 

 globe and we may deal at will at any nation's counter. Production and 

 distribution are upon gigantic scale. Man's arms are lengthened, his 

 feet are given wings. A thousand Goliaths moulded into one would not 

 make a single citizen of the twentieth century. Samson had no such 

 power as the weakest woman plus an electric button. With this enor- 

 mous increase of factory and railway has come a tremendous impetus 

 to materialism. We have commenced to think in dollars. We measure 

 manhood by Troy weight, by the assayer' scales. We coiuit him suc- 

 cessful who has a balance at the bank and set him down a failure who 

 has not this, though all else beside. The voice which pleads for the 

 idealism of simplicity is drowned amid the clamor for the things the 

 factory produces and which steam brings to our doors. 



Consequent upon factory and telegraph pole, accompaniment of 

 production and distribution, the office building, a city within a city, is 

 here upon the Road to Tomorrow. How high it towers. Jealous of any 

 interference, it flings itself against the very blue. The office building 

 typifies concentrated wealth, syndicated millions. The products of 

 farm and factory are here controlled and the toll of transportation is 

 paid into its coffers. What shall be done with swollen fortunes, with 

 arrogant, predatory wealth? How may the problem of unequal distri- 

 bution, of over-much concentration be solved? Those who prefer com- 

 plaint to achievement may be content w4th hurling epithets, but others, 

 eager to make the most for good of every great new fact, will heed the 

 challenge that the throbbing office building brings, will seek to have it 

 serve other purpose than the glorification of the dollar, the making of 

 more millionaires. 



Hard by the roadside is the schoolhouse, with its troops of child- 

 ren, the fathers of the morrow. The schoolhouse is larger than in olden 

 days and better. This regiment of children who go in and out of its 

 doors in this State is more numerous than the army which Xerxes led 



