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Show FINE IF IT CAN BE DONE. One of the plans for the future, en-volved en-volved by our social engineers, is that which visualizes the moving of people peo-ple from our congested centers of population out into the wide open ippaces. Mrs. Rosalie SampineHi of somewhere near Washington square is to become Mary of the Vineclad Cottage, amid the hills of old Kentucky. Ken-tucky. All of which is fine, if it will work. But there are some difficulties. In the first place the average city dweller, one born and raised on and near the cement pavements and by the busy roar of traffic, has some distorted dis-torted ideas of rural life, and the kind of people who live there. The average native New Yorker thinks that civilization civi-lization ends a few miles west of the Hudson river and that life would not be worth living away from the bright lights, the beach at Coney, and the rush and roar of subway traffic. To him "Joisey" is some distant land across the river in which there may still dwell monsters of the kind the boys used to read about in the tale of "Jack the Giant Killer." And Indiana In-diana is a place where the Indians still chase the buffalo and scalp the unwary white pioneer. And he wants none of the "hick country" for himself. him-self. He prefers the milk that comes in bottles to that which comes fresh from the cow when he prefers milk at all the smell of the city street to the odor of new-mown hay. Dwellers Dwell-ers in other great cities are no different. dif-ferent. Of course it may be possible for our social engineers to change this psychology, but we doubt it. The country boy naturally turns with longing eyes to the city, but few city boys look toward the country as a place for a career. A few of them did in the Horatio Alger stories, but no place else. And if the psychology can be changed, just how good a farmer will one of these dwellers of the city canyons make? Of course he might be lodged in a small factory town but we doubt whether this would very much improve his esthetic spirit or his outlook on life. It may be and has been possible to put this over on the Russian worker, and move him about like a load of goods, but it is going to be a little more difficult in the United States. And those who think that tenement I folks in the city are just waiting for a chance to rush 0ut into the wide-open wide-open spaces to live are due for some disappointment. Some of them might try It as a lark, but most of these would drift back to the bright lights as soon as Uncle Sam got tired putting up the money. |