126 FLIGHT FROM THE CITY 



and almost every article of food is purchased at the 

 store. If the unemployed of the cities turn to that 

 kind of farming, they will merely have exchanged one 

 kind of economic insecurity for another. 



What is called subsistence farming, however, is a 

 step, though only a step, in the right direction. 



But no return to farming, no establishment of 

 unemployment insurance, and not even the planning 

 or socialization of industrial activities, will furnish an 

 adequate alternative way of life to the artist and 

 craftsman for whom the problem of living includes 

 some sort of escape from the repetitive work which 

 is all that an industrial civilization offers them. 



A short time ago I received the following letter 

 from a man with quite a reputation as a poet. The 

 situation with which he has been confronted by our 

 industrial civilization is quite typical of that with 

 which countless numbers of talented men and women 

 are today faced. Since my book appeared I have re- 

 ceived scores of similar letters: 



The question that persisted in my mind after reading 

 the necessarily incomplete account of your ideas and their 

 operation in that interview, is this: Can your plans, 

 obviously sound and salutary in their application to a 

 crisis like the present, be made continuously operative; 

 not only, that is, to provide self-sustaining work instead 

 of wasteful charity to the jobless victims of hard times, 

 but to afford a continuous way of living through all 

 kinds of times? But by "way of living" I do not mean 



