Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 233, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 September 1916 — Better Understanding Between Country and City One of Nation’s Big Needs [ARTICLE]

Better Understanding Between Country and City One of Nation’s Big Needs

By JAMES A. EMERY

Counsel for Cnw M **l of Industrial Defense

The extraordinary growth of our financial and industrial operations has been aecoffipaniecT by an increasing complexity oTprocew that has made it more difficult for the smaller, the rural, communities of the West and Soutli to understand and appreciate the nature and operation of American business. The rise of great cities, with their extraordinary evidences of success and wealth, has created a feeling of jealousy among the more primitive communities and the suspicion that the great industrial centers are growing at the expense of the country. The shrewd self-seeker, who has perceived this condition and played upon it, has made matters worse. Unfortunately, the field has been left almost entirely to the demagogue; the business man too frequently has failed to play his part in making clear to his uninformed fellow-country-men that the men employing the intricate methods of modern business are just as honest, and that their mode of doing business is just as clear and just and true as those simpler and more familiar means of carrying on the nation’s work that were used when the nation itself was a much simpler structure than it has become today. We need, and need as never before, systematic effort to create better understanding between industry and agriculture, the factory and the farm, city and country, so that each may realize that there is no antagonism, but only a community of interest, not only, in the preservation of a prosperity which each shares, but in the perpetuation of those sound principles of government economics without which none can succeed.