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No home town can afford to spend its years raising crops of young people for the cities. That is the worst kind of soil impoverishment all going out and nothing coming back. That is the drain that devitalizes the home towns more than all the city mail order houses. America is to be great, not in the greatness of a few crowded cities, but in the greatness of innumerable home towns.
The tendency of opinion is in the direction of putting the chief blame upon the disposition of the employer to exploit the worker, and the indifference of society to such exploitation; it is the discouraging conditions in which the working man lives, the uncertainty of employment and the high cost of living, the danger of accident and disease that constantly hangs over the laborer and his family, that devitalizes and disheartens him, and casts him before he is old on the social scrap heap.
And the second truth is, that many are born so close in relationship to the unseen plane and in such psychical correspondence, that some slight thing which weakens the will-power sorrow, a disease that devitalizes the physical, some shock, or some prolonged or strained mental condition, breaks down the remaining law of separation, and the life is astray in the psychical world, manifesting abnormal, physical laws.
We may be edified or we may be sceptical, according to our temperament and training; but a profound unconcern devitalizes both scepticism and edification. What have we mortals in common with these perfected prodigies of grace? It was Cardinal Newman who first entered a protest against "minced" saints, against the pious and popular custom of chopping up human records into lessons for the devout.
Of course the pupils must write, and write well, just as they must read, and read much; but that English suffers from insisting upon this double long circuit too early and cultivates it to excess, devitalizes school language and makes it a little unreal, like other affectations of adult ways, so that on escaping from its thraldom the child and youth slump back to the language of the street as never before.
It is a preposterous fake. They do not satisfy they produce further craving and they know that that craving grows, until the habit is formed and their "satisfied" victim becomes a hopeless slave known as a cigarette fiend. There is only one drawback for the cigarette manufacturer, his consumer is too short lived; the cigarette devitalizes, pauperizes, and destroys.
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