NOVAE MILITIAE

"Take a look at your city, suburb, town, or even factory-in-the-fields still anachronistically called a farm. Ask honestly if the place has been improved since its purchase from the Indians or if you have been improved by living there. … You can move back a hundred years by a trip to rural Europe. There are still some villages left where you can see direct, visible proof that the human race can live in harmony with nature on a human scale, decently in 'glad poverty,' not in destitution but with a snug, hard-working frugality where villages like necklaces and rings still ornament the hills. You can see with your own eyes that there is no inevitability in the suicide of civilization. If America had been governed by its farmers and craftsmen supplying their real needs and nothing more, as Jefferson hoped, not catering to lust and the agitated sloth which masquerades as lust, without the waterbeds and cyclotrons but obedient to the Christian religion and the rough philosophy of frontier common sense, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles would be as beautiful as Assisi, Chartres and Salamanca and its sons as strong, generous and free as cavaliers. … Go home to the ruined neighborhoods and villages of your childhood and rebuild them." (The Restoration of Christian Culture, pp. 65-66)