6 PRINCIPLES OF RURAL ECONOMICS 



with few and doubtful exceptions, they manufacture some form 

 of clothing ; while higher races have all succeeded in modifying 

 their natural surroundings to such a degree as to have created 

 for themselves a new and better environment. 



Changing the environment. It has been a favorite literary 

 device to represent some one as falling into a Rip Van Winkle 

 sleep on the eve of a social or political revolution and awaking 

 after the revolution is accomplished, to find himself in a new 

 world, though in the old place. For the purpose of showing how 

 far our civilized life has changed from that of primitive man, we 

 may get along with a much simpler device. Let us imagine that 

 a philosophical savage has been whisked through space and set 

 down at one of those points where modern civilization has taken 

 on an acute form. Let us imagine him on the busy corner of a 

 great city, where pavements have displaced the native turf, where 

 the ground beneath is honeycombed with ^cellars, subways, 

 sewers, conduits, etc., where many-storied buildings rise into 

 the air on every hand, and the sky is obscured by elevated rail- 

 ways, and wires, poles, and other obstacles. Or imagine him in 

 a law court, where the notorious John Doe and Richard Roe are 

 having one of their interminable disputes adjudicated amid much 

 learned disputation of counsel and the citing of many ancient 

 precedents and modern instances. Or picture him in a stock 

 exchange where men in every stage of corpulency and physical 

 unfitness are furiously buying and selling intangible rights to 

 give or receive intangible evidences of ownership in intangible 

 forms of property, and all the while deceiving themselves into 

 thinking that the world is fed and clothed by such operations 

 as these. In the effort to imagine the surprise and perplexity of 

 our philosophic savage we may ourselves arrive at a conception 

 of the extreme complexity and artificiality of that which we call 

 civilized life. Moreover, we shall see that it is all connected, 

 directly or indirectly, with the work of getting a living. 



