had planned for that day. He couldn't desert Mr. Bacon, who seemed so anxious to have him stay.

They sat for more than an hour in a comfortable corner of the lobby, Mr. Bacon entertaining Mr. McRae with anecdotes and comments on the people about them. When dinner-time came Mr. McRae had to leave. As he got up to go, Mr. Bacon smiled sympathetically at him and said: "You're very lonely, aren't you!" There he had been propping his eyes open all afternoon, keeping Mr. McRae company, and Mr. McRae had been sacrificing himself in order to keep Mr. Bacon company! Each of them was so fine in his regard for the other's feelings that each was convinced the other was the lonely one.

There were many wonderful thrills for Mr. Bacon, too. Nothing bigger-or as big-has ever been done for any actor than the send-off New York gave him when he left for Chicago after his recordbreaking run on Broadway. That marvellous, stupendous parade was not the work of a press-agent. It was a spontaneous expression of the love and affection which his fellow actors and the public had for him.

Mr. Bacon went out of New York with banners flying and bands playing; with the traffic of Broadway stopped from Forty-sixth Street and Broadway to the Pennsylvania Station. All along the line of march the sidewalks were jammed with his admirers, who called to him and cheered. The mayor of the city of New York marched with him, and the wonderful police band played for him. Right into that great Pennsylvania Station the band went. How the music reverberated through that beautiful structure, and what a curious bee-like noise those thousands of voices made!

As he went down the steps to his train, that mob of people sang "Auld Lang Syne." Instead of the usual train sign, there was a card which read "Frank Bacon leaves New York for Chicago after three years and a day on Broadway." The train was placarded with similar signs all during its thousand-mile run. I imagine that his thousands of acts of self-sacrifice were all more than repaid that day! Chicago loved him dearly, too. Wherever he went, rules were set aside in order

that he might do as he liked and have whatever he desired. Every club in Chicago wanted to entertain him, and the majority of them sent him honorarymembership cards for the length of his stay in Chicago. One evening as he was leaving the dining-room of the Drake Hotel with Mrs. Bacon, every person in the huge room rose to his feet and burst into applause!

When his health made it necessary for him to discontinue his own performance on Sunday night (the Chicago theatres all have Sunday-night performances) and he went to other theatres, the moment he was recognized the audience went wild with excitement and forced him to stand up and speak to them. But none of these things spoiled him. He simply enjoyed them to the full and remained exactly the

same.

Then came the time when his physician told him he must rest. Rest? He didn't see how he could do such a thing as rest. Every few weeks he was breaking records and piling up his own record, and it seemed impossible to stop. I asked him one day why he didn't drop it all for a couple of months. "You know you're awfully tired," I said. "Yes," he replied, "I am, and I'd like to go away for eight or nine weeks, but every one in the company is so happy and so nicely settled that I hate to upset them all." Again thinking of others.

"I guess I can keep on until the season ends," he continued, "and then I will take a good rest." But he discovered that he couldn't fight it out until the end of the season and at last he was forced to stop. But he stopped only on condition that the company should not close-that some one else take his place and keep the company playing.

On November 11, 1922, he played his last performance. We none of us felt that it was the last. We all believed that a long rest was all our beloved star needed. But just eight days later-November 19-he was gone.

It was a staggering blow to the company and to the public. I am sure that there is not a member among the fortunate people who formed the "Lightnin'" company who will ever overcome a sense of personal loss. What a privilege to have been associated with such a man!

INCE 1919 our agriculturists have been decidedly depressed; and those who know how hard has been the lot of the average farmer during these four hectic years can readily sympathize with such a state of mind. Good-will in abundance, however, does not prevent one from feeling that the intense excitement stimulated by so vagrant a phase in rural affairs is a little incongruous. The present situation is simply a normal stage in national evolution at which no one should evince the slightest surprise. It is the result of the growth from three million to one hundred and ten million people which this superorganism known as the United States has exhibited during the short century and a half of its existence.

Like a boy shooting up to manhood, the country has met new conditions which require a change in tactics. There are grave problems to be solved which ought not to be approached in a spirit of frivolity; but, since they are not problems for the pathologist, one has reason to be very hopeful of the outcome. If any doubts and fears are to be entertained, they should concern our adaptiveness rather than the fancied dangers assumed to be inherent in the mere word innovation. Our career has had in it something of the behavior usually to be expected of the prodigal heir; and a care-free childhood amid the luxuries permitted by an ample maternal allowance of earthly resources is generally not the best training for grinding out a living under the goad of stern necessity. When the period of irresponsibility finally reaches the inevitable end, there is always difficulty in getting down to serious business.

During the last few years the more obvious features of the situation on the farm have been advertised thoroughly and

well. Earlier, when the farmer formed the majority of the population, and could have directed the affairs of the nation rather easily if he had taken his hand from the plough long enough to learn the game, the only publicity he received was when he had raised a particularly huge pumpkin or a prize cow. Knowing the farmers to be unorganized individualists who were not likely to cause trouble either at the polls or elsewhere, the politicians and the newspapermen let them severely alone. Valiant sons of toil just before elections, perhaps; but contemptible tons of soil immediately after. To-day, though the farmers are in the minority, they are beginning to make the strength of that minority felt. They are learning the power and use of organization; and they are arousing feverish activity in Congressional circles by their efforts. The pleasantest dream of each inmate of the Capitol is to be pointed out as the man who put the farmer on his feet.

Personally, I have small hopes that political activity will ever strew our rural paths with roses. The major agricultural problems of the United States are not to be solved by legislation. They are economic problems, created constantly anew by every change from national childhood to old age, and their solution lies in adapting ourselves to each new condition and making the best of it. There are subsidiary questions, perhaps, which are properly enough within the province of the lawmakers. Changes in taxes, import duties, railroad rates and credits, regulation of speculation and of the charges of middlemen, protection against the importation of disease or of cheap labor, aid for diffusion of the latest knowledge acquired by scientific research are examples of subjects upon which progressive legislation seems desirable. One may rest assured, however, that all the legal acumen in the world concentrated on such points will be but of minor assistance in

smoothing the farmer's way. The quintessence of the farmer's difficulties is a condition ruled by nature's laws; and nature's laws are undisturbed by Congressional enactments. True, man can dominate and control natural laws which he is unable to change. And in buckling to this task several heads are better than one. But farmers' organizations will go farther and faster by endeavoring to insert more business into agriculture than they will by trying to extract more business out of politics.

The farmers must rely upon their own calloused hands to haul their chestnuts from the fire. Their task is to become efficient purveyors of food for an extensive and populous country. The country needs the food, and they need the efficiency to make their efforts pay just dividends. It is no small undertaking, and doubtless there will be much to learn before it is accomplished to the satisfaction of both producer and consumer. But more important than any lessons to be learned, it seems to me, are two things to be forgotten. First must fade the memory that formerly the soil was plundered to gain cheap food for export. Food exportation is an economic sin to be forgiven only in the young, and we are no longer young. Second, it will be necessary for our agriculturists to lose entirely the old idea that they are isolated capitalists running separate industries and competing with one another, replacing it with the thought that each is a unit in one great corporation. Only with this thought constantly in mind will they ever arrive at the point where they can control the output of their products, where they can dominate their markets, where in fact they can earn a reasonable profit and can hope to receive what they earn. American farmers ought to have learned the value of co-operation long ago from its miraculous rejuvenation of Danish agriculture, or from the history of organized labor in the cities; but, as is so commonly the case, a direct pressure on their private pocketbooks was needed to impress the lesson.

Unfortunately, the war's industrial afterclap has not been interpreted correctly in most quarters. The price gyrations of farm products have brought forth such a rumble of protest from rural dis

tricts that we have been led to believe in an impending disastrous calamity. In reality, these roars have not been stimulated so much by the actual painfulness of the situation as by the hope that they will bring about a modicum of temporary relief. They heralded the "buy a bale of cotton" type of panhandling, a means of dodging essentials that is becoming habitual in America.

Post-war distress in agricultural circles was a real tangible fact, however, in spite of the tendency to exaggerate it; but if we are able to profit by the sad experience, it may prove not to have been an unmixed evil. If, on the other hand, we accept one writer's belief that the event demonstrated the nation's ability to support a much larger population, and that immigrants sufficiently numerous to devour 300 million bushels of wheat annually should be encouraged to enter the portals forthwith, then the incident was a dead loss. One must distinguish carefully between potential strength and actual strength. The latent power of food production stored in our fertile acres was known full well before. What this untoward affair really did was to uncover some of the vulnerable points in our agricultural ménage rather than to prove its impregnability. It showed that our greatest business enterprise, the foundation of our whole social structure, was still in a primitive stage of development, with scarcely the science and system back of it that we had been wont to assume. Had there been proper organization, the obvious and only remedy for cereal overproduction might have been applied with reasonable speed, instead of wasting four years in trying to legislate new markets into being. Probably no practicable scheme would have saved the farmer wholly from his cup of misery; but a sharp immediate curtailment of acreage, under the direction of an agency empowered to take means for distributing the deflation burden more equitably, would have helped immensely.

The situation was so simple that no occult power was needed to see what the inevitable trend of events must be. Indeed, it was predicted with absolute accuracy by the United States Food Administration. During hostilities the country made use of reserve funds and

natural wealth to enlarge every type of productive effort. Proportionately the farmers made the greatest expansion in their workshops. This fact ultimately worked against them in two ways. Since they were able to increase production more quickly and to a greater extent and were thus enabled more nearly to equal the demand than were those engaged in manufacturing, the tillers of the soil were the most poorly paid in kind of all our laborers. Lack of organization and food price-regulation also tended toward the same end. Unlike the factory-owners and the machine-workers, therefore, the farmers could not lay up any great amount from the spoils of war-time industry against the day of readjustment. This is a true statement despite the height to which the index figures of farm products rose during the war, for one must remember that the farmer has never received the returns of workers in other occupations. His profit, beyond the bare wages of his labor, has depended solely upon the increment of land values; and in recent years even his modest service wage was curtailed by the necessity of replacing shortlived equipment at ever-increasing prices. In addition, the great wheels of the farmer's war-machine could not be stopped immediately when demand from over the seas diminished. Nor could there be an easy shift in production, as was the case in some other lines. A tremendous excess in cereals was the result. The wheatgrower was prostrated; the remaining farmers were demoralized; and the declining rural market reacted on the cities. That matters should have gone in just this way is to be regretted, transient though the effect may be. A throbbing molar, while not dangerous, can be pretty troublesome to him most intimately concerned. If one is interested in essentials, however, he must begin farther back than 1919. One can hardly find out what makes our bucolic automaton go, and where it is going when it does go, from superficial observations of current events. Our introductory simile was not a literary makeshift. Doctor Raymond Pearl, distinguished both as a biologist and a mathematician, has demonstrated that the increase of a country in population takes precisely the same course as the growth of an individual organism in size.

Accretion, starting slowly, becomes progressively faster and faster up to a certain maximum, after which the first half of the history is repeated in reverse order by means of a progressively diminishing rate of growth. The census figures of the United States during the past century, which fit such a curve with extraordinary exactness, show that this country reached the point of greatest inflection about 1914, and henceforth may be expected to grow more and more slowly. Thus it follows that the American nation actually did pass through the mercurial changes characteristic of adolescence early in the twentieth century.

Such a phenomenon arouses the curiosity. A radical alteration in the development of a great nation does not just happen. It must have had a cause or causes, and in turn must lead to certain consequences. Why, let us ask ourselves, have destructive factors begun to overbalance constructive factors in our national economy? Then let us follow with a question of still more vital importance: What changes in our domestic habits will be required to accommodate ourselves to these novel conditions?

Contrary to what one might expect, the World War does not appear to have been a decisive factor in the change. The trend of the curve is obvious long before international affairs were turned topsyturvy by battle. The logical place to find the answers to our questions is in America, and not in the city but on the farm.

Agriculture went through a critical period between 1890 and 1900, though no one knew it at the time and few realize it to-day. Gardeners have found that to influence the fruitfulness of various plants a certain treatment must be applied long before the buds appear. The susceptible stage comes early and passes quickly, proof of its existence showing only at the harvest. Our agriculture was like that. It turned the corner from extensive to intensive practice with the dying of the nineteenth century, yet gave scarcely a warning sign. Now one can look back and trace the change in all sorts of economic data-the decrease of land settlement contrasted with the rise of land values, the great expansion of farm capital compared with the small change in crop returns, the mounting labor costs per unit

of harvest, the trend of meat production, or any one of several other ways. Corrected to comparable indices over the different periods, these facts all show that decreasing returns in agriculture have arrived. Having once arrived, they will be ours for all time, unless a complete revolution in the ancient art of tillage occurs that cannot be foreseen to-day.

Decreasing returns mean simply that there must be an ever greater expenditure of capital and labor for what is obtained from Mother Earth. When this point is reached in a nation's agricultural development that nation is no longer a child. It has reached full manhood and must assume the toga virilis, whether ready for the responsibility thus indicated or not. Obviously, our mounting density of population has been the effective cause of this marked change; for the development of a commonwealth is controlled in exactly the same way as that of an individual, where the rapidly dividing cells finally clog the growth processes with the products of their own activity.

In a sense it is just as well that this stereotyped first chapter, universal in the history of every new country, is closed. Expansive agriculture means wholesale food exportation, and selling soil fertility is a bad business aside from the precarious position in which the seller finds himself when his market slips away. But we must come to realize that the chapter is closed, and that the wheat débâcle is a shining example of the agricultural difficulties a country meets when it tries to perform exploits unsuited to its age and dignity.

A few illustrations will make clear where we stand to-day without recourse to voluminous statistics or involved reasoning. The course of American empire has been steadily westward from the very beginning. There was new country in the path of the setting sun to be conquered and put to work, and as long as this advance continued no one might venture to set its limit. But there is an end to everything. The 1920 census shows that the centres of gravity both of the total area in farms and of the total acreage of improved farm land lie about in the middle of the State of Missouri. And this is an important fact, for, when one totals up the acreage and location of all

the potential arable land in the country, this centre stays in just about the same place. In truth, it seems more likely to move slightly southeast than it is to move farther west. In other words, the openingup process is over in the United States. People have drifted out and settled in every quarter. Henceforth additional food production must come largely from a more intensive farm practice, which will raise the yield per unit area. To double the food-supply there must be two blades of grass where one grew before, since there are no longer many places to grow one blade where formerly was none.

It is difficult to accept this statement as one of cold hard fact; but such it is. The mushroom agricultural growth of the latter part of the nineteenth century, caused by the extension of railroad service and the improvement of farm machinery, and facilitated by the homestead laws, simply had to cease from lack of satisfactory raw material. If one examines the record, he sees why. The expansion of farm-land holdings from 1850 to 1900, leaving out the decade in which the Civil War occurred, staggers the imagination. Germany is a sizable country, cultivating 63 million acres; yet for forty years this amount of land was added to our farms during each quinquennium. The climax came during the last decade when the tremendous total of 216 million acres was added. Then came the reaction. In their race for government territory, the last group of homesteaders were overhasty. They found their purchases full of flaws. And the result was that during the first ten years of the twentieth century settlers optimistic enough to take a chance on making a living with third-rate farms were found for only 40 million additional acres.

There are many more square miles of arable land still uncultivated, it is true; but the amount is not so great as one might suppose after making one of the casual estimates habitual with transcontinental travellers. Only five-eighths of the acreage which ultimately will be put to the plough is tilled to-day; but the reason why the remaining three-eighths lies unused is simply because at present it is not worth cultivating. If it had not been for the prevalence of hills and stones and swamps-and low prices-a higher tide of