cities are stripped of the bright, tempered instruments necessary for their regeneration; and the great metropolis is crowded too full for elbow-room. I think the next step in our higher education must be the effective preaching of a "new provincialism." I think we need to show our graduates the field for service and the large opportunity for the increase of happiness by carrying their college and university training back to the home-town, and making the new standards prevail there. The mentally poor and needy should perhaps go to the metropolis and receive. But the essentially rich may safely remain in the provinces and give. The greater your talent, the better you can afford to strike root where you are.
Our democratic theory is that American life should taste good at all points in the States, We cannot tolerate the idea of a rich and intellectual capital of highly civilized people surrounded by an immense population of peasants and yokels. Already many conveniences of our material civilization have penetrated the remote countryside. Already one can buy as good gasoline, soap, shredded wheat biscuit, and tobacco in Gopher Prairie and Sleepy Eye as in New York City. But we want more than that. We want to be able to get as good talk, as good
