
WHAT THE EMIGRANT TO KA 

HIM, AT LAST, RETURN 
which has gone far beyond her borders. 
Nor will the pursuit of agriculture in any 
large sense succeed upon a soil which, 
always yielding grudgingly, has been tilled 
to the limit of its productiveness. No, the 
future importance of the East lies in its 
adaptability to the national requirement of 
an immense sanitarium, not wholly in the 
sense of a refuge for the weak and the 
invalid, the rejected material of the 
country’s builders, but as the common 
recreation ground, the source of mental, 
moral and physical energy, the reservoir 
from which to draw in the necessities of an 
acute struggle the fundamental essentials of 
new blood and intellectual vigor which 
must always play the important part in a 
lasting structure. 
I have said that the evidences of this 
reconstructive spirit are already manifest in 
New England; to prove the soundness of 
my vision it is but necessary to refer to the 
general activities which reflect it—to the 
creation of forest reserves, to the impetus 
given to fish and game protection and 
propagation, to the movement for good 
roads, to the rebellion against a railroad 
monopoly which has corrupted a_ whole 
State and to the ever-increasing exodus of 
our city dwellers to the country. 
‘These are the more salient features, the 
foreground as it were of the picture. Back 
of all this and yielding to closer inspection 
are the more subtle and even more convin- 
cing evidences of the sincerity and depth of 
the spirit which animates our people to-day. 
Take, for an instance of this, the true 
significance of the “Old Home Week’”’ 
celebrations. These are more than mere 
opportunities for the renewal of old ac- 
quaintanceships and immersion in_ the 
familiar associations of earlier days. They 
form an advertisement, the most compelling 
advertisement imaginable, of the spirit 
which is abroad, and in the conversions 
which follow add new strength to a growing 
cause. For not all of those who come to 
these reunions return again to their former 
homes. Caught in the web of those dearest of 
all memories, many are content, yes, even 
glad, again to take up the broken thread of 
an earlier existence and identify themselves 
once more with the land they had forsaken. 
Several years ago, while on a railroad 
