CHAPTER II. 



THE FARMERS' INTEREST IN THE SOCIAL OUTLOOK. 



We may disinter the vanished draperies, we may revive the 

 stately minuet, we may rehabilitate the old scenes, but the march of a 

 century cannot be halted or reversed, and the enormous change in 

 the situation can neither be disguised nor ignored. Then we were, 

 though not all of us, sprung from one nationality, practically one 

 people. Now that steadily deteriorating process, against whose 

 dangers a great thinker of our own generation warned his country- 

 men just fifty years ago, goes on on every hand apace." 



— Bishop Potter. 



Probably, the most far-reaching problem before the 

 public mind in America to-day is the vexed question of 

 social rights. Whether we have presented to our con- 

 sideration the difficulties existing between labor and 

 capital, the distribution of land, the matter of public 

 instruction, or the formation of fiscal policies, we have 

 in some measure to deal with an important phase of the 

 social question. Nearly every important movement in 

 industrial and social life has much to do with this truly 

 great matter ; and it might be stated, with little proba- 

 bility of contradiction, that at few former periods has 

 this problem been subjected to such varied and urgent 

 notice as it is now receiving. America is not now very 

 much behind the rest of the world in furnishing material 

 for the study of these matters ; and the old maritime 

 States of the northeast of the Union, in a marked de- 



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