'THE HORSE AND BUGGY AGE' is a belittling phrase.
To the smart modern city dweller, it conjures up a picture of
old men with beards poking along country roads and using
queer words, which they enunciate (over the radio) in still
queerer voices. It is especially hard for the modern city
dweller, with his ant-like ways, to imagine another mode of
life, different from his own and with different values. It always
has been hard for the city dweller to appreciate rural values
(especially when so many city dwellers are escapees from the
country). During most of history the countryman's fortunes
have answered to the derisive terms the city dweller applies to
him, for he usually gets the worst of it, and sooner or later
is depressed to the level of either a peasant, a serf, or a slave.
More rarely, he is elevated to that of gentleman or feudal noble-
man--in which case he earns the citizens' equally hearty con-
tempt for different reasons.

There have been, however, rare periods when the country
has provided a way of life that was good and neither depressed
nor elevated, whereby large numbers of men attained to sub-
stantial heights of well-being. These have been the 'yeoman'
periods, when sturdy, independent men owned their own land
and lived their own lives, with no consciousness of inferiority
to others. The 'franklin' of the English Danelagh appears to
have been such a man, as was the English yeoman of the seven-
teenth century and early eighteenth century--the man who
took the measure of Charles I and his cavaliers. We read of
the same type in more distant times, in both Greece and Rome,
and we also read sad poetry about their decline.--

"But a bold peasantry, their country's pride
When once destroyed, can never be supplied. . . ."

It has been North America's boast that her soils could pro-
vide the foundation for such a yeomanry as no other land

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