Chapter III: Part 3

The struggle for existence, as expressed in human combat, does not necessarily result in the survival of the most desirable, so far as we are able to define desirability. We are confusing very unlike situations in our easy application of the struggle for existence to war. The struggle is not now between individuals to decide the fitter; it is between vast bodies hurling death by wholesale. We pick the physically fit and send them to the battle-line; and these fit are slain. This is not the situation in nature from which we draw our illustrations. Moreover, the final test of fitness in nature is adaptation, not power. Adaptation and adjustment mean peace, not war. Physical force has been immensely magnified in the human sphere; we even speak of the great nations as "powers," a terminology that some day we shall regret. The military method of civilization finds no justification in the biological struggle for existence.

The final conquest of a man is of himself, and he shall then be greater than when he takes a city. The final conquest of a society is of itself, and it shall then be greater than when it conquers its neighboring society.

Man now begins to measure himself against nature also, and he begins to see that herein shall lie his greatest conquests beyond himself; in fact, by this means shall he conquer himself,--by great feats of engineering, by completer utilization of the possibilities of the planet, by vast discoveries in the unknown, and by the final enlargement of the soul; and in these fields shall be the heroes. The most virile and upstanding qualities can find expression in the conquest of the earth. In the contest with the planet every man may feel himself grow.

What we have done in times past shows the way by which we have come; it does not provide a program of procedure for days that are coming; or if it does, then we deny the effective evolution of the race. We have passed witchcraft, religious persecution, the inquisition, subjugation of women, the enslavement of our fellows except alone enslavement in war.

Here I come particularly to a consideration of the struggle for existence. Before I enter on this subject, I must pause to say that I would not of myself found an argument either for war or against it on the analogies of the struggle for existence. Man has responsibilities quite apart from the conditions that obtain in the lower creation. Man is a moral agent; animals and plants are not moral agents. But the argument for war is so often founded on this struggle in nature, that the question must be considered.

It has been persistently repeated for years that in nature the weakest perish and that the victory is with the strong, meaning by that the physically powerful. This is a false analogy and a false biology. It leads men far astray. It is the result of a misconception of the teaching of evolution.

Our minds dwell on the capture and the carnage in nature,--the hawk swooping on its prey, the cat stealthily watching for the mouse, wolves hunting in packs, ferocious beasts lying in wait, sharks that follow ships, serpents with venomous fangs, the vast range of parasitism; and with the poet we say that nature is "red in tooth and claw." Of course, we are not to deny the struggle of might against might, which is mostly between individuals, and of which we are all aware; but the weak and the fragile and the small are the organisms that have persisted. There are thousands of little and soft things still abundant in the world that have outlived the fearsome ravenous monsters of ages past; there were Goliaths in those days, but the Davids have outlived them, and Gath is not peopled by giants. The big and strong have not triumphed.

The struggle in nature is not a combat, as we commonly understand that word, and it is not warfare. The earth is not strewn with corpses.

I was impressed in reading Roosevelt's "African Game Trails" with the great extent of small and defenseless and fragile animal life that abounds in the midst of the terrible beasts,--little uncourageous things that hide in the crevices, myriads that fly in the air, those that ride on the rhinos, that swim and hide in the pools, and bats that hang in the acacia-trees. He travelled in the region of the lion, in the region that "holds the mightiest creatures that tread the earth or swim in its rivers; it also holds distant kinsfolk of these same creatures, no bigger than woodchucks, which dwell in crannies of the rocks, and in the tree tops. There are antelope smaller than hares and antelope larger than oxen. There are creatures which are the embodiment of grace; and others whose huge ungainliness is like that of a shape in a nightmare. The plains are alive with droves of strange and beautiful animals whose like is not known elsewhere." The lion is mighty; he is the king of beasts; but he keeps his place and he has no kingdom. He has not mastered the earth. No beast has ever overcome the earth; and the natural world has never been conquered by muscular force.

Nature is not in a state of perpetual enmity, one part with another.

My friend went to a far country. He told me that he was most impressed with the ferocity, chiefly of wild men. It came my time to go to that country. I saw that men had been savage,--men are the most ferocious of animals, and the ferocity has never reached its high point of refined fury until to-day. (Of course, savages fight and slay; this is because they are savages.) But I saw also that these savage men are passing away. I saw animals that had never tasted blood, that had no means of defense against a rapacious captor, and yet they were multiplying. Every stone that I upturned disclosed some tender organism; every bush that I disturbed revealed some timid atom of animal life; every spot where I walked bore some delicate plant, and I recalled the remark of Sir J. William Dawson "that frail and delicate plants may be more ancient than the mountains or plains on which they live"; and if I went on the sea, I saw the medusae, as frail as a poet's dream, with the very sunshine streaming through them, yet holding their own in the mighty upheaval of the oceans; and I reflected on the myriads of microscopic things that for untold ages had cast the very rock on which much of the ocean rests. The minor things and the weak things are the most numerous, and they have played the greatest part in the polity of nature. So I came away from that far country impressed with the power of the little feeble things. I had a new understanding of the worth of creatures so unobtrusive and so silent that the multitude does not know them.

I saw protective colorings; I saw fleet wings and swift feet; I saw the ability to hide and to conceal; I saw habits of adaptation; I saw marvellous powers of reproduction. You have seen them in every field; you have met them on your casual walks, until you accept them as the natural order of things. And you know that the beasts of prey have not prevailed. The whole contrivance of nature is to protect the weak.

We have wrongly visualized the "struggle." We have given it an intensely human application. We need to go back to Darwin who gave significance to the phrase "struggle for existence." "I use this term," he said, "in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny." The dependence of one being on another, success in leaving progeny,--how accurate and how far-seeing was Darwin!

I hope that I speak to naturists and to farmers. They know how diverse are the forms of life; and they know that somehow these forms live together and that only rarely do whole races perish by subjugation. They know that the beasts do not set forth to conquer, but only to gain subsistence and to protect themselves. The beasts and birds do not pursue indiscriminately. A hen-hawk does not attack crows or butterflies. Even a vicious bull does not attack fowls or rabbits or sheep. The great issues are the issues of live and let-live. There are whole nations of plants, more unlike than nations of humankind, living together in mutual interdependence. There are nations of quiet and mightless animals that live in the very regions of the mighty and the stout. And we are glad it is so.

Consider the mockery of invoking the struggle for existence as justification for a battle on a June morning, when all nature is vibrant with life and competition is severe, and when, if ever, we are to look for strife. But the very earth breathes peace. The fulness of every field and wood is in complete adjustment. The teeming multitudes of animal and plant have found a way to live together, and we look abroad on a vast harmony, verdurous, prolific, abounding. Into this concord, project your holocaust!

_The daily fare_

Some pages back, I said something about the essential simplicity in habit of life that results from the nature contact, and I illustrated the remark by calling attention to the righteousness of simple eating and drinking. Of course, the eating must be substantial, but the adventitious appetites accomplish nothing and they may be not only intemperate and damaging to health but even unmoral. Yet it is not alone the simplicity of the daily fare that interests me here, but the necessity that it shall be as direct as possible from the ground or the sea, and that it shall be undisguised and shall have meaning beyond the satisfying of the appetite.

I was interested in Tusser's "Christmas husbandly fare," notwithstanding some suggestion of gluttony in it and of oversupply. There is a certain vigor and good relish about it, and lack of ostentation, that seem to suggest a lesson.

It was more than three centuries ago that native Thomas Tusser, musician, chorister, and farmer, gave to the world his incomparable "Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry." He covered the farm year and the farm work as completely as Vergil had covered it more than fifteen centuries before; and he left us sketches of the countryside of his day, and the ways of the good plain folk, and quaint bits of philosophy and counsel. He celebrated the Christmas festival with much conviction, and in the homely way of the home folks, deriving his satisfactions from the things that the land produces. His sketches are wholesome reading in these days of foods transported from the ends of the earth, and compounded by impersonal devices and condensed into packages that go into every house alike.

Thomas Tusser would celebrate with "things handsome to have, as they ought to be had." His board would not be scant of provisions, for he seems not to have advised the simple life in the way of things good to eat; but he chose good raw materials, and we can imagine that the "good husband and huswife" gave these materials their best compliments and prepared them with diligence and skill. Not once does he suggest that these materials be secured from the market, or that any imported labor be employed in the preparation of them.

"Good bread and good drink, a good fire in the hall,
Brawn, pudding, and souse, and good mustard withal."

Here is the whole philosophy of the contented festival,--the fruit of one's labor, the common genuine materials, and the cheer of the family fireside. The day is to be given over to the spirit of the celebration; every common object will glow with a new consecration, and everything will be good,--even the mustard will be good withal. What a contempt old Tusser would have had for all the imported and fabricated condiments and trivialities that now come to our tables in packages suggestive of medicines and drugs! And how ridiculously would they have stood themselves beside the brawn, pudding, and souse! A few plain accessories, every one stout and genuine, and in good quantity, must accompany the substantialities that one takes with a free hand directly from the land that one manages.

It surprises us that he had such a bountiful list from which to draw, and yet the kinds are not more than might be secured from any good land property, if one set about securing them:

"Beef, mutton, and pork, shred pies of the best,
Pig, veal, goose, and capon, and turkey well drest,
Cheese, apples, and nuts, joly carols to hear,
As then in the country, is counted good cheer."

In these days we should draw less heavily on the meats, for in the three centuries we have gained greatly in the vegetable foods. Tusser did not have the potato. But nevertheless, these materials are of the very bone of the land. They grow up with the year and out of the conditions, and they have all the days in them, the sunshine, the rain, the dew of morning, the wind, the cold foggy nights, and the work of laborious hands. Every one of them means something to the person who raises them, and there is no impersonality in them. John's father drained the land when yet he was a boy; the hedges were set; long ago the place was laid out in its rotations; the old trees in the fields are a part of it; every stall in the stables and every window-seat in the old house hold memories; and John has grown up with these memories, and with these fields, and with the footpaths that lead out over brooks and amongst the herds of cattle. It is a part of his religion to keep the land well; and these supplies at Christmas time are taken with a deep reverence for the goodness that is in them, and with a pride in having produced them.

And Thomas Tusser, good husbandman, rejoiced that these bounties cost no cash:

"What cost to good husband, is any of this?
Good household provision only it is.
Of other the like, I do leave out a many
That costeth a husbandman never a penny."

To farm well; to provide well; to produce it oneself; to be independent of trade, so far as this is possible in the furnishing of the table,--these are good elements in living. And in this day we are rapidly losing all this; many persons already have lost it; many have never known the satisfaction of it. Most of us must live from the box and the bottle and the tin-can; we are even feeding our cattle from the factory and the bag. The farmer now raises a few prime products to sell, and then he buys his foods in the markets under label and tag; and he knows not who produced the materials, and he soon comes not to care. No thought of the seasons, and of the men and women who labored, of the place, of the kind of soil, of the special contribution of the native earth, come with the trademark or the brand. And so we all live mechanically, from shop to table, without contact, and irreverently.

May we not once in the year remember the earth in the food that we eat? May we not in some way, even though we live in town, so organize our Christmas festival that the thought of the goodness of the land and its bounty shall be a conscious part of our celebration? May we not for once reduce to the very minimum the supply of manufactured and sophisticated things, and come somewhere near, at least in spirit, to a "Christmas husbandly fare?"

Yet, Thomas Tusser would not confine his husbandly fare to the Christmas time. In another poem, he gives us "The farmer's daily diet," in which the sturdy products are still much the same, secured and prepared by those who partake. All this may be little applicable literally in our present living, and yet I think it is easily possible, as certainly it is very desirable, to develop a new attitude toward the table fare, avoiding much unnecessary and insignificant household labor and lending an attitude of good morality to the daily sustenance.

Much of our eating and feasting is a vicious waste of time, and also of human energy that might be put to good uses. One can scarcely conceive how such indirect and uncomfortable and expensive methods could have come into use. Perhaps they originated with persons of quality in an aristocratic society, when an abundance of servants must be trained to serve and when distinctions in eating were a part of the distinction in rank. But to have introduced these laborious and unintelligent methods into hotels, where persons tarry for comfort and into homes that do not need to maintain an extrinsic appearance, is a vain and ludicrous imitation. The numbers of courses, with more service than food, that one often meets at the table d'hote of the frequented hotels abroad, are most exasperating to one who values time and has a serious purpose in travel and a rightful care for the bodily apparatus. Here is the performance--it was nothing more than a performance, consisting in repeated changing of all the dishes, the removing of every fragment of edibles, and in passing very small separate parcels of food--that it was my lot to endure on an otherwise happy day in a hotel that had little else to distinguish it:

Course 1. Dry bread (no butter).
Removal.

Course 2. Soup (nothing else).
Removal.

Course 3. Fish (very economical), with a potato on the side.
Removal.

Course 4. Veal, macaroni.
Removal.

Course 5. Spoonful of green beans (nothing else).
Removal.

Course 6. Beef and salad (fragmentary).
Removal.

Course 7. Charlotte Russe, bit of cake.
Removal.

Course 8. Fruit (slight).
Removal.

Course 9. Morsel of cheese, one cracker.
Removal.

Course 10. Coffee.
Relief.

The traveler knows that this species of time-wasting is not unusual; certainly the food is not unusual and does not merit such considerate attention, although it may profit by the magnification. All this contributes nothing to human efficiency--quite the reverse--and certainly nothing to the rightful gusto in the enjoyment of one's subsistence. It is a ceremony. Such laborious uselessness is quite immoral.

I am afraid that our food habits very well represent how far we have moved away from the essentials and how much we have misled ourselves as to the standards of excellence. I looked in a cookbook to learn how to serve potatoes: I found twenty-three recipes, every one of which was apparently designed to disguise the fact that they were potatoes; and yet there is really nothing in a potato to be ashamed of. Of course, this kind of deception is not peculiar to cookery. It is of the same piece as the stamping of the metal building coverings in forms to represent brick and stone, although everybody knows that they are not brick and stone, rather than to make a design that shall express metal and thereby frankly tell the truth; of the same kind also as the casting of cement blocks to represent undressed rock, although every one is aware of the deception, rather than to develop a form that will express cement blocks as brick expresses brick; of the same order as the inflating of good wholesome water by carbonic gas; and all the other deceits in materials on which our common affairs are built. It is, of course, legitimate to present our foods in many forms that we may secure variety even with scant and common materials; but danger may lie in any untruthfulness with which we use the raw materials of life.

So cookery has come to be a process of concealment. Not only does it conceal the materials, but it also conceals the names of them in a ridiculous nomenclature. Apparently, the higher the art of cookery, the greater is the merit of complete concealment. I think that one reason why persons enjoy the simple cooking of farmers and sailors and other elemental folk, is because of its comparative lack of disguise, although they may not be aware of this merit of it. We have so successfully disguised our viands through so many years that it is not "good form" to make inquiries: we may not smell the food, although the odor should be one of the best and most rightful satisfactions, as it is in fruits and flowers. We may smell a parsnip or a potato when it grows in the field, but not when it is cooked.

We add the extrinsic and meaningless odors of spices and flavorings, forgetting that odor no less than music hath occasions; each of the materials has its own odor that the discriminating cook will try to bring out in its best expression. Were we to be deprived of all these exotic seasonings, undoubtedly cookery would be the gainer in the end; nor could we so readily disguise materials that in themselves are not fit to eat. There is a reason why "all foods taste alike," as we often hear it said of the cooking in public places.

Moreover, we want everything that is out of season, necessitating great attention to the arts of preserving and requiring still further fabrication; and by this desire we also lessen the meaning of the seasons when they come in their natural sequence, bringing their treasure of materials that are adapted to the time and to the place. We can understand, then, why it so happens that we neglect the cookery of the common foods, as seeming to be not quite worth the while, and expend ourselves with so much effort on the accessories and the frills. I have been interested to observe some of the instruction in cooking,--how it often begins with little desserts, and fudge, and a variety of dib-dabs. This is much like the instruction in manual training that begins with formal and meaningless model work or trivialities and neglects the issues of life. It is much like some of the teaching in agriculture not so many years ago, before we attacked very effectively the serious problems of wheat and alfalfa and forests and markets. Mastery does not lie in these pieces of play work, nor does the best intellectual interest on the part of the student reside in them.

Result is that one finds the greatest difficulty in securing a really good baked potato, a well-cooked steak, or a wholesome dish of apple-sauce that is not strained and flavored beyond recognition. It is nearly impossible for one to secure an egg fried hard and yet very tender and that has not been "turned" or scorched on the edges,--this is quite the test of the skill of the good cook. The notion that a hard fried egg is dangerously indigestible is probably a fable of poor cookery. One can secure many sophisticated and disguised egg dishes, but I think skill in plainly cooking eggs is almost an unknown art, perhaps a little-practised art.

Now, it is on these simple and essential things that I would start my instruction in cookery; and this not only for the gain to good eating but also for the advantage of vigor and good morals. I am afraid that our cooking does not set a good example before the young three times every day in the year; and how eager are the young and how amenable to suggestion at these three blessed epochs every day in the year!

Some unsympathetic reader will say that I am drawing a long bow; yet undoubtedly our cookery has prepared the public mind for the adulteration. Knowing the elaboration of many of the foods and fancy dishes, the use of flavoring and spice and other additions to disguise unwholesome materials, the addition of coloring matter to make things attractive, the mixtures, the elaborate designs and trimmings and concoctions, and various deceptions, one wonders how far is the step from some of the cookery to some of the adulteration and whether these processes are really all of one piece. I will leave with my reader a paragraph assembled from a statement made by a food chemist but a few years ago, to let him compare adulteration with what is regarded as legitimate food preparation and note the essential similarity of many of the processes. I do not mean to enter the discussion of food adulteration, and I do not know whether these sophistications are true at the present day; but the statement describes a situation in which we found ourselves and indicates what had become a staggering infidelity in the use of the good raw materials.

Hamburg steak often contains sodium sulphite; bologna sausage and similar meats until recently usually contained a large percentage of added cereal. "Pancake flour" often contains little if any buckwheat; wheat flour is bleached with nitric oxide to improve its appearance. Fancy French peas are colored with sulphate of copper. Bottled ketchup usually contains benzoate of soda as a preservative. Japanese tea is colored with cyanide of potassium and iron. Prepared mustard usually contains a large quantity of added starch and is colored with tumeric. Ground coffee has recently been adulterated with roasted peas. So-called non-alcoholic bottled beverages often contain alcohol or a habit-forming drug and are usually colored with aniline. Candy is commonly colored with aniline dye and often coated with paraffine to prevent evaporation. Cheap candies contain such substances as glue and soapstone. The higher-priced kinds of molasses usually contain sulphites. Flavoring extracts seldom are made from pure products and usually are artificially colored. Jams are made of apple jelly with the addition of coloring matter and also of seeds to imitate berries from which they are supposed to be made; the cheap apple jelly is itself often imitated by a mixture of glucose, starch, aniline dye, and flavoring. Lard nearly always contains added tallow. Bakeries in large cities have used decomposed products, as decayed eggs. Cheap ice-cream is often made of gelatin, glue, and starch. Cottonseed-oil is sold for olive-oil. The poison saccharine is often used in place of sugar in prepared sweetened products.

The attentive reader of the public prints in the recent years can greatly extend this humiliating recital if he choose. It is our habit to attach all the blame to the adulterators, and it is difficult to excuse them; but we usually find that there are contributory causes and certainly there must be reasons. Has our daily fare been honest?

_The admiration of good materials_

Not even yet am I done with this plain problem of the daily fare. The very fact that it is daily--thrice daily--and that it enters so much into the thought and effort of every one of us, makes it a subject of the deepest concern from every point of view. The aspect of the case that I am now to reassert is the effect of much of our food preparation in removing us from a knowledge of the good raw materials that come out of the abounding earth.

Let us stop to admire an apple. I see a committee of the old worthies in some fruit-show going slowly and discriminatingly among the plates of fruits, discussing the shapes and colors and sizes, catching the fragrance, debating the origins and the histories, and testing them with the utmost precaution and deliberation; and I follow to hear their judgment.

This kind of apple is very perfect in spherical form, deeply cut at the stem, well ridged at the shallow crater, beautifully splashed and streaked with carmine-red on a yellowish green under-color, finely flecked with dots, slightly russet on the shaded side, apparently a good keeper; its texture is fine-grained and uniform, flavor mildly subacid, the quality good to very good; if the tree is hardy and productive, this variety is to be recommended to the amateur for further trial! The next sample is somewhat elongated in form, rather below the average in color, the stem very long and well set and indicating a fruit that does not readily drop in windstorms, the texture exceedingly melting but the flavor slightly lacking in character and therefore rendering it of doubtful value for further test. Another sample lacks decidedly in quality, as judged by the specimens on the table, and the exhibitor is respectfully recommended to withdraw it from future exhibitions; another kind has a very pronounced aromatic odor, which will commend it to persons desiring to grow a choice collection of interesting fruits; still another is of good size, very firm and solid, of uniform red color, slightly oblate and therefore lending itself to easy packing, quality fair to good, and if the tree bears such uniform samples as those shown on the table it apparently gives promise of some usefulness as a market sort. My older friends, if they have something of the feeling of the pomologist, can construct the remainder of the picture.

In physical perfectness of form and texture and color, there is nothing in all the world that exceeds a well-grown fruit. Let it lie in the palm of your hand. Close your fingers slowly about it. Feel its firm or soft and modelled surface. Put it against your cheek, and inhale its fragrance. Trace its neutral under-colors, and follow its stripes and mark its dots. If an apple, trace the eye that lies in a moulded basin. Note its stem, how it stands firmly in its cavity, and let your imagination run back to the tree from which, when finally mature, it parted freely. This apple is not only the product of your labor, but it holds the essence of the year and it is in itself a thing of exquisite beauty. There is no other rondure and no other fragrance like this.

I am convinced that we need much to cultivate this appreciation of the physical perfectness of the fruits that we grow. We cannot afford to lose this note from our lives, for this may contribute a good part of our satisfaction of being in the world. The discriminating appreciation that one applies to a picture or a piece of sculpture may be equally applied to any fruit that grows on the commonest tree or bush in our field or to any animal that stands on a green pasture. It is no doubt a mark of a well-tempered mind that it can understand the significance of the forms in fruits and plants and animals and apply it in the work of the day.

I sometimes think that the rise of the culinary arts is banishing this fine old appreciation of fruits in their natural forms. There are so many ways of canning and preserving and evaporating and extracting the juices, so many disguises and so much fabrication, that the fruit is lost in the process. The tin-can and the bottle seem to have put an insuperable barrier between us and nature, and it is difficult for us to get back to a good munch of real apples under a tree or by the fireside. The difficulty is all the greater in our congested city life where orchards and trees are only a vacant memory or stories told to the young, and where the space in the larder is so small that apples must be purchased by the quart. The eating of good apples out of hand seems to be almost a lost art. Only the most indestructible kinds, along with leather-skinned oranges and withered bananas, seem to be purchasable in the market. The discriminating apple-eater in the Old World sends to a grower for samples of the kinds that he grows; and after the inquirer has tested them in the family, and discussed them, he orders his winter supply. The American leaves the matter to the cook and she orders plain apples; and she gets them.

I wonder whether in time the perfection of fabrication will not reach such a point that some fruits will be known to the great public only by the picture on the package or on the bottle. Every process that removes us one step farther from the earth is a distinct loss to the people, and yet we are rapidly coming into the habit of taking all things at second hand. My objection to the wine of the grape is not so much a question of abstinence as of the fact that I find no particular satisfaction in the shape and texture of a bottle.

If one has a sensitive appreciation of the beauty in form and color and modelling of the common fruits, he will find his interest gradually extending to other products. Some time ago I visited Hood River Valley in company with a rugged potato-grower from the Rocky Mountains. We were amazed at the wonderful scenery, and captivated by the beauty of the fruits. In one orchard the owner showed us with much satisfaction a brace of apples of perfect form and glowing colors. When the grower had properly expounded the marvels of Hood River apples, which he said were the finest in the world, my friend thrust his hand into his pocket and pulled out a potato, and said to the man: "Why is not that just as handsome as a Hood River apple?" And sure enough it was. For twenty-five years this grower had been raising and selecting the old Peachblow potato, until he had a form much more perfect than the old Peachblow ever was, with a uniform delicate pink skin, smooth surface, comely shape, and medium size, and with eyes very small and scarcely sunken; and my Hood River friend admitted that a potato as well as an apple may be handsome and satisfying to the hand and to the eye, and well worth carrying in one's pocket. But this was a high-bred potato, and not one of the common lot.

This episode of the potato allows me another opportunity to enforce my contention that we lose the fruit or the vegetable in the processes of cookery. The customary practice of "mashing" potatoes takes all the individuality out of the product, and the result is mostly so much starch. There is an important dietary side to this. Cut a thin slice across a potato and hold it to the light. Note the interior undifferentiated mass, and then the thick band of rind surrounding it. The potato flavor and a large part of the nutriment lie in this exterior. We slice this part away and fry, boil, or otherwise fuss up the remainder. When we mash it, we go still farther and break down the potato texture; and in the modern method we squeeze and strain it till we eliminate every part of the potato, leaving only a pasty mass, which, in my estimation, is not fit to eat. The potato should be cooked with the rind on, if it is a good potato, and if it is necessary to remove the outer skin the process should be performed after the cooking. The most toothsome part of the potato is in these outer portions, if the tuber is well grown and handled. We have so sophisticated the potato in the modern disguised cookery that we often practically ruin it as an article of food, and we have bred a race of people that sees nothing to admire in a good and well-grown potato tuber.

I now wish to take an excursion from the potato to the pumpkin. In all the range of vegetable products, I doubt whether there is a more perfect example of pleasing form, fine modelling, attractive texture and color, and more bracing odor, than in a well-grown and ripe field pumpkin. Place a pumpkin on your table; run your fingers down its smooth grooves; trace the furrows to the poles; take note of its form; absorb its rich color; get the tang of its fragrance. The roughness and ruggedness of its leaves, the sharp-angled stem strongly set, make a foil that a sculptor cannot improve. Then wonder how this marvellous thing was born out of your garden soil through the medium of one small strand of a succulent stem.

We all recognize the appeal of a bouquet of flowers, but we are unaware that we may have a bouquet of fruits. We have given little attention to arranging them, or any study of the kinds that consort well together, nor have we receptacles in which effectively to display them. Yet, apples and oranges and plums and grapes and nuts, and good melons and cucumbers and peppers and carrots and onions, may be arranged into the most artistic and satisfying combinations.

I would fall short of my obligation if I were to stop with the fruit of the tree and say nothing about the tree or the plant itself. In our haste for lawn trees of new kinds and from the uttermost parts, we forget that a fruit-tree is ornamental and that it provides acceptable shade. A full-grown apple-tree or pear-tree is one of the most individual and picturesque of trees. The foliage is good, the blossoms as handsome as those of fancy imported things, the fruits always interesting, and the tree is reliable. Nothing is more interesting than an orange tree, in the regions where it grows, with its shining and evergreen leaves and its continuing flowers and fruits. The practice of planting apples and pears and sweet cherries, and other fruit and nut trees, for shade and adornment is much to be commended in certain places.

But the point I wish specially to urge in this connection is the value of many kinds of fruit-trees in real landscape work. We think of these trees as single or separate specimens, but they may be used with good result in mass planting, when it is desired to produce a given effect in a large area or in one division of a property. I do not know that any one has worked out full plans for the combining of fruit-trees, nuts, and berry-bearing plants into good treatments, but it is much to be desired that this shall be done. Any of you can picture a sweep of countryside planted to these things that would be not only novel and striking, but at the same time conformable to the best traditions of artistic rendering.

I think it should be a fundamental purpose in our educational plans to acquaint the people with the common resources of the region, and particularly with those materials on which we subsist. If this is accepted, then we cannot deprive our parks, highways, and school grounds of the trees that bear the staple fruits. It is worth while to have an intellectual interest in a fruit-tree. I know a fruit-grower who secures many prizes for his apples and his pears; when he secures a blue ribbon, he ties it on the tree that bore the fruit.

The admiration of a good domestic animal is much to be desired. It develops a most responsible attitude in the man or the woman. I have observed a peculiar charm in the breeders of these wonderful animals, a certain poise and masterfulness and breadth of sympathy. To admire a good horse and to know just why he admires him is a great resource to any man, as also to feel the responsibility for the care and health of any flock or herd. Fowls, pigs, sheep on their pastures, cows, mules, all perfect of their kind, all sensitive, all of them marvellous in their forms and powers,--verily these are good to know.

If the raw materials grow out of the holy earth, then a man should have pride in producing them, and also in handling them. As a man thinketh of his materials, so doth he profit in the use of them. He builds them into himself. There is a wide-spread feeling that in some way these materials reflect themselves in a man's bearing. One type of man grows out of the handling of rocks, another out of the handling of fishes, another out of the growing of the products from the good earth. All irreverence in the handling of these materials that come out of the earth's bounty, and all waste and poor workmanship, make for a low spiritual expression.

The farmer specially should be proud of his materials, he is so close to the sources and so hard against the backgrounds. Moreover, he cannot conceal his materials. He cannot lock up his farm or disguise his crops. He lives on his farm, and visibly with his products. The architect does not live in the houses and temples he builds. The engineer does not live on his bridge. The miner does not live in his mine. Even the sailor has his home away from his ship. But the farmer cannot separate himself from his works. Every bushel of buckwheat and every barrel of apples and every bale of cotton bears his name; the beef that he takes to market, the sheep that he herds on his pastures, the horse that he drives,--these are his products and they carry his name. He should have the same pride in these--his productions--as another who builds a machine, or another who writes a book about them. The admiration of a field of hay, of a cow producing milk, of a shapely and fragrant head of cabbage, is a great force for good.

It would mean much if we could celebrate the raw materials and the products. Particularly is it good to celebrate the yearly bounty. The Puritans recognized their immediate dependence on the products of the ground, and their celebration was connected with religion. I should be sorry if our celebrations were to be wholly secular.

We have been much given to the display of fabricated materials,--of the products of looms, lathes, foundries, and many factories of skill. We also exhibit the agricultural produce, but largely in a crass and rude way to display bulk and to win prizes. We now begin to arrange our exhibitions for color effect, comparison, and educational influence. But we do not justly understand the natural products when we confine them to formal exhibitions. They must be incorporated into many celebrations, expressing therein the earth's bounty and our appreciation of it. The usual and common products, domesticated and wild, should be gathered in these occasions, and not for competition or for prize awards or even for display, but for their intrinsic qualities. An apple day or an apple sabbath would teach the people to express their gratitude for apples. The moral obligation to grow good apples, to handle them honestly, to treat the soil and the trees fairly and reverently, could be developed as a living practical philosophy into the working-days of an apple-growing people. The technical knowledge we now possess requires the moral support of a stimulated public appreciation to make it a thoroughly effective force.

Many of the products and crops lend themselves well to this kind of admiration, and all of them should awaken gratitude and reverence. Sermons and teaching may issue from them. Nor is it necessary that this gratitude be expressed only in collected materials, or that all preaching and all teaching shall be indoors. The best understanding of our relations to the earth will be possible when we learn how to apply our devotions in the open places.

_The keeping of the beautiful earth_

The proper care-taking of the earth lies not alone in maintaining its fertility or in safeguarding its products. The lines of beauty that appeal to the eye and the charm that satisfies the five senses are in our keeping.

The natural landscape is always interesting and it is satisfying. The physical universe is the source of art. We know no other form and color than that which we see in nature or derive from it. If art is true to its theme, it is one expression of morals. If it is a moral obligation to express the art-sense in painting and sculpture and literature and music, so is it an equal obligation to express it in good landscape.

Of the first importance is it that the race keep its artistic backgrounds, and not alone for the few who may travel far and near and who may pause deliberately, but also for those more numerous folk who must remain with the daily toil and catch the far look only as they labor. To put the best expression of any landscape into the consciousness of one's day's work is more to be desired than much riches. When we complete our conquest, there will be no unseemly landscapes.

The abundance of violated landscapes is proof that we have not yet mastered. The farmer does not have full command of his situation until the landscape is a part of his farming. Farms may be units in well-developed and pleasing landscapes, beautiful in their combinations with other farms and appropriate to their setting as well as attractive in themselves.

No one has a moral right to contribute unsightly factory premises or a forbidding commercial establishment to any community. The lines of utility and efficiency ought also to be the lines of beauty; and it is due every worker to have a good landscape to look upon, even though its area be very constricted. To produce bushels of wheat and marvels of machinery, to maintain devastating military establishments, do not comprise the sum of conquest. The backgrounds must be kept.

If moral strength comes from good and sufficient scenery, so does the preservation of it become a social duty. It is much more than a civic obligation. But the resources of the earth must be available to man for his use and this necessarily means a modification of the original scenery. Some pieces and kinds of scenery are above all economic use and should be kept wholly in the natural state. Much of it may yield to modification if he takes good care to preserve its essential features. Unfortunately, the engineer seems not often to be trained in the values of scenery and he is likely to despoil a landscape or at least to leave it raw and unfinished.

On the other hand, there is unfortunately a feeling abroad that any modification of a striking landscape is violation and despoliation; and unwarranted opposition, in some cases amounting almost to prudery, follows any needful work of utilization. Undoubtedly the farmer and builder and promoter have been too unmindful of the effect of their interference on scenery, and particularly in taking little care in the disposition of wastes and in the healing of wounds; but a work either of farming or of construction may add interest and even lines of beauty to a landscape and endow it with the suggestion of human interest. If care were taken in the construction of public and semi-public work to reshape the banks into pleasing lines, to clean up, to care for, to plant, to erect structures of good proportions whether they cost much or little, and to give proper regard to the sensibilities of the communities, most of the present agitation against interference with natural scenery would disappear. One has only to visit the factory districts, the vacation resorts, the tenement areas, the banks of streams and gorges, to look at the faces of cliffs and at many engineering enterprises and at numberless farmyards, to find examples of the disregard of men for the materials that they handle. It is as much our obligation to hold the scenery reverently as to handle the products reverently. Man found the earth looking well. Humanity began in a garden.

The keeping of the good earth depends on preservation rather than on destruction. The office of the farmer and the planter is to produce rather than to destroy; whatever they destroy is to the end that they may produce more abundantly; these persons are therefore natural care-takers. If to this office we add the habit of good housekeeping, we shall have more than one-third of our population at once directly partaking in keeping the earth. It is one of the bitter ironies that farmers should ever have been taken out of their place to wreak vengeance on the earth by means of military devastation. In the past, this ravage has been small in amount because the engines of destruction were weak, but with the perfecting of the modern enginery the havoc is awful and brutal. While we have to our credit the improvement of agriculture and other agencies of conservation, it is yet a fact that man has never been so destructive as now. He is able to turn the skill of his discovery to destructive ends (a subject that we have already approached from another point of view). The keeping of the earth is therefore involved in the organization of society. Military power heads toward destructiveness. Civil power heads toward conservation. The military power may be constructive in times of peace, but its end, if it uses the tools it invents, is devastation and the inflicting of injury. When the civil power is subjugated to the military power, society is headed toward calamity.

To keep and to waste are opposite processes. Not only are we able to despoil the earth by sheer lust of ravage and by blighting the fields with caverns of human slaughter, but we shoot away incredible supplies of copper and petroleum and other unrenewable materials that by every right and equity belong to our successors; and, moreover, we are to make these successors pay for the destruction of their heritage. Day by day we are mortgaging the future, depriving it of supplies that it may need, burdening the shoulders of generations yet unborn.

Merely to make the earth productive and to keep it clean and to bear a reverent regard for its products, is the special prerogative of a good agriculture and a good citizenry founded thereon; this may seem at the moment to be small and ineffective as against mad impersonal and limitless havoc, but it carries the final healing; and while the land worker will bear much of the burden on his back he will also redeem the earth.

_The tones of industry_

One of the clearest notes of our time is the recognition of the holiness of industry and the attempt to formulate the morals of it. We accept this fact indirectly by the modern endeavor to give the laboring man his due.

The handworker is more or less elemental, dealing directly with the materials. We begin to recognize these industries in literature, in sculpture, and in painting; but we do not yet very consciously or effectively translate them into music.

It is to be recognized, of course, that melody is emotional and dynamic not imitative, that its power lies in suggestion rather than in direct representation, and that its language is general; with all this I have nothing to do. Meunier has done much with his chisel to interpret the spirit of constructive labor and to develop its higher significance. His art is indeed concrete and static, and sculpture and music are not to be compared; yet it raises the question whether there may be other bold extensions of art.

The primitive industries must have been mostly silent, when there were no iron tools, when fire felled the forest tree and hollowed the canoe, when the parts in construction were secured by thongs, and when the game was caught in silent traps or by the swift noiseless arrow and spear. Even at the Stone Age the rude implements and the materials must have been mostly devoid of resonance. But now industry has become universal and complex, and it has also become noisy,--so noisy that we organize to protect ourselves from becoming distraught.

And yet a workshop, particularly if it works in metal, is replete with tones that are essentially musical. Workmen respond readily to unison. There are melodies that arise from certain kinds of labor. Much of our labor is rhythmic. In any factory driven by power, there is a fundamental rhythm and motion, tying all things together. I have often thought, standing at the threshold of a mill, that it might be possible somewhere by careful forethought to eliminate the clatter and so to organize the work as to develop a better expression in labor. Very much do we need to make industry vocal.

It is worth considering, also, whether it is possible to take over into music any of these sounds of industry in a new way, that they may be given meanings they do not now possess.

At all events, the poetic element in industry is capable of great development and of progressive interpretation; and poetry is scarcely to be dissociated from sound. All good work well done is essentially poetic to the sensitive mind; and when the work is the rhythm of many men acting in unison, the poetry has voice.

The striking of the rivet
The purr of a drill
The crash of a steam-shovel
The plunge of a dredge
The buzz of a saw
The roll of belts and chains
The whirl of spindles
The hiss of steam
The tip-tap of valves
The undertone rumble of a mill
The silence intent of men at work
The talk of men going to their homes,--
These are all the notes of great symphonies.