The base of the pyramid of civilization which rests upon the soil is shrinking through the drift of population from farm to city.  For a generation we have been expressing more or less concern about this tendency.  Economists have warned and statesmen have deplored.  We thought for at time that modern conveniences and the more intimate contact would halt the movement, but it has gone steadily on.  Perhaps only grim necessity will correct it, but we ought to find a less drastic remedy.

The existing scheme of adjusting freight rates hits been favoring the basing points, until industries are attracted to some centers and repelled from others.  A great volume of uneconomic and wasteful transportation has attended, and the cost increased accordingly.  The grain-milling and meat-packing industries afford ample illustration, and the attending concentration is readily apparent.  The menaces in concentration are not limited to the retardingly influences on agriculture.  Manifestly the. conditions and terms of railway transportation ought not be permitted to increase this undesirable tendency.  We have a just pride in our great cities, but we shall find a greater pride in the Nation, which has it larger distribution of its population into the country, where comparatively self-sufficient smaller communities may blend agricultural and manufacturing interests in harmonious helpfulness and enhanced good fortune.  Such a movement contemplates no destruction of things wrought, of investments made, or wealth involved.  It only looks to a general policy of transportation of distributed industry, and of highway construction, to encourage the spread of our population and restore the proper balance between city and country.  The problem may well have your earnest attention.

It has been perhaps the proudest claim of our American civilization that in dealing with human relationships it has constantly moved toward such justice in distributing the product of human energy that it has improved continuously the economic status of the mass of people.  Ours has been a highly productive social organization.  On the way up from the elemental stages of society we have eliminated slavery and serfdom and are now far on the way to the elimination of poverty.

Through the eradication of illiteracy and the diffusion of education mankind has reached a stage where we may fairly say that in the United States equality of opportunity has been attained, though all are not prepared to embrace it.  There is, indeed, a too great divergence between the economic conditions of the most and the least favored classes in the community.  But even that divergence has now come to the point where we bracket the very poor and the very rich together as the least fortunate classes.  Our efforts may well be directed to improving the status of both.