One effect, if the tendency continues, will
be such a reduction in home-produced foodstuffs that we shall have to
import from other countries lying abroad a good portion of the means of
our physical sustenance, and shall face such an increase in the cost of
the same that thousands and thousands of our people will find it
increasingly harder as the years pass by to maintain their relative
economic position. Another effect will be that our civilization, which to
this point has sprawled over broad acres, will become an urban
civilization, penned in amid conditions, restraints, privations, and
perhaps also opportunities unprecedented in our past history and unknown
to the experience we have had hitherto. A final effect will be that our
most conservative class, the rural populace, will no longer present
resistance that is formidable to the innovations which those who hold
extreme views are forever exhorting us to embrace; and the result may well
be that the disintegration of this staying and stabilizing element in our
citizenship--one that retards and mollifies if it does not inhibit
change--will produce consequences in its train which may be as dire as
they are difficult to foretell.
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