I have been at Trudeau, Saranac Lake, and at Stony Wold, the consumptive sanitariums, and found there both by observation and by testimony that to send back the convalescents to the bench or the workshop from which they came is practically to repronounce upon them the sentence of death from which the sanitarium has offered them a reprieve.  The only practical thing to do with such convalescents, and with such persons who are not capable of their ordinary avocations, is to get them in some way upon the land.  There is a large demand for persons who understand the new intensive gardening, and places can be found for more than we can hope to educate in that line.

There should be buildings upon the land sufficient to bunk one hundred to one hundred and fifty men; accommodations could be made with the small timber for a considerable number.  Many of these men would need some help, but most of them would shift for themselves if only they could get the opportunity to build upon the land and to have a secure tenure of it.  A mere tenant knows that it is bunkum when he says “Our Country.”

It is perfectly practicable to sell about one half of the land in a year or two, and have a thousand acres or more left free and clear, which will cost the promoters nothing.  Renting this out or selling it will repay the whole cost, and probably bring a large profit besides.

This is no experiment, it is only to do the thing that we have been doing under various conditions with various sorts of men in different localities for the past twenty years in the Vacant Lot Gardens:  namely, to give men the opportunity of living upon and cultivating land, putting up their own tents, shacks, or bungalows, and giving them such instruction and such help as does not cost anything more than the salary of the superintendent.  There are abundant men who can make good and shift for themselves under those circumstances; the men who are available are single men, such men as those for whom Mr. Hallimond, a clergyman working in the Bowery, has been finding rural employment in the past ten years.  Also many families will come to us through the Vacant Lot Gardens and the Little Land agitation.  People such as these will increase the land value, for every decent man carries around with him at least five hundred dollars’ worth of increase in land values which his presence adds to somebody’s holdings of land.  The struggle to pocket this increase accounts for much of the human drift from the field to the factory.

God made the country; man made the city—­and the devil made the suburbs, by the aid of the speculator.

Alpha of the Plough says in the London Star: “I was walking with a friend along the Spaniards-road the other evening talking on the inexhaustible theme of these days, when he asked, ’What is the biggest thing that has happened to this country as the outcome of the war?’

“‘It is within two or three hundred yards from here,’ I replied.  ‘Come this way and I’ll show it to you.’