must common naturalness be and how much has it been driven from our lives!

If a person has given any serious thought to public questions, he has his own contribution to make as to the causes of present conditions and the means of bettering them; so I make mine: what is now much needed in the public temper is such a change of attitude as will make us to see and appreciate the commonplace and the spontaneous, and to have the desire to maintain and express our youthful and native enthusiasms. And it is my special part to try, so far as possible, to open the eyes and the heart to nature and the common-day environment. My point of view is, of course, that of the countryman, and no doubt it has the countryman's bias.

So great has been the extension of knowledge, and so many the physical appliances that multiply our capabilities,

that we are verily burdened with riches. We are so eager to enter all the strange and ambitious avenues that open before us that we overlook the soil at our feet. We live in an age of superlatives, I had almost said of super-superlatives, so much so that even the superlatives now begin to pall. The reach for something new has become so much a part of our lives that we cease to recognize the fact and accept novelty as a matter of course. If we shall fail to satisfy ourselves with the new, the strange, and the eccentric, perhaps we shall find ourselves returning to the old commonplace and the familiar, and perhaps we shall be able to extract new delights from them because of the flights we have taken. Perhaps in their turn the commonplaces will be again the superlatives, and we shall be content with the things that come naturally and in due order. Certain it is that every sen

sitive soul feels this longing for something simple and elemental in the midst of the voluminous and intricate, something free and natural that shall lie close to the heart and really satisfy our best desires.

It is not likely that we shall greatly simplify our outward physical and business affairs. Probably it is not desirable that we should do so, for we must maintain our executive efficiency. We have seen a marvelous development of affairs, expressed in the renovation of a hundred old occupations and the creation of a thousand new ones. Most of these occupations and businesses are clear gain to the world, and we may expect them to endure. This rise of affairs has emphasized the contrasts of business and of home. Machinery and complexity belong to affairs; but a simpler and directer mental attitude should belong to our

personal and private hours. Perhaps our greatest specific need is a wholesome return to nature in our moments of

leisure, all the more important now that the moments of leisure are so few. This return to nature is by no means a cure-all for the ills of civilization, but it is one of the means of restoring the proper balance and proportion in our lives. It stands for the antithesis of acting and imitation, for a certain pause and repose, for a kind of spiritual temper, for the development of the inner life as contrasted with the externals.

The outlook to nature is, of course, the outlook to optimism, for nature is our governing condition and is beyond the power of man to modify or to correct. We look upward and outward to nature. Some persons have supposed, however, that the "contentment" preached by the nature-lover implies unvexed

that

indifference to the human affairs of the time, and that therefore it makes for a kind of serene and weak utopianism; but, to my mind, the outlook to nature makes for just the reverse of all this. If nature is the norm, then the necessity for correcting and amending the abuses accompany civilization becomes baldly apparent by very contrast. The repose of the nature-lover and the assiduous exertion of the man of affairs are complementary, not antithetical, states of mind. The return to nature affords the very means of acquiring the incentive and energy for ambitious and constructive work of a high order; it enforces the great truth that, in the affairs of men, continued progress is conditioned upon a generous discontent and diligent unrest.

By nature, I mean the natural out-ofdoors, the snow and the rain, the sky, the plants, the animals, the running brooks,