79 LIFE, NOT MERELY 



MAKING A LIVING 



people have a natural taste for the land. They 

 love to prune, they love to plant, they love to 

 help nature perform her marvels. They potter 

 away in their little garden patches at their homes 

 in the suburbs, and find more real enjoyment in 

 their gardens than in anything else. These are 

 the ones who might make grand successes of 

 their lives if they worked the soil. And it is a 

 life worth living, with real social advantages. 



Civilization does not breed over-crowded cities, 

 nor do we need to stay in them. The slums and 

 the billionaires are not diseases, but the symp- 

 toms of a disease, the divorce of the people from 

 the land. 



All things that go to make well-being, things 

 that we call wealth, come from the land by 

 work; so that all political economists agree that 

 wealth is anything that people want which is got- 

 ten out of the earth by labor. Cotton, wool, 

 linen, leather, felt, all that we wear; wheat, fish, 

 beef, vegetables, everything that we use, comes 

 directly or indirectly out of parts of the earth. 



Even the money that we buy or sell these 

 things for, the tools that we use to make them, 



