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Editor:
The story that you ran on the debate with, Jack Kilpatrick (“Anarchy vs. Conservation,” July 23) was fine. My own feeling is that it was also kind and very understanding.
The entire evening was frustrating, in a way, for me. There were so many things unsaid—that need saying. I feel, for instance, that two worlds, maybe three, are touching down there. There is a landed, stately and feudal world (but without, alas, the feudal sense of noblesse oblige—inasmuch as, it seems to me, the landed gentry try their darndest to get the hardpressed middle class and working class to pay for everything while the upper income folk enjoy the “perks” of tax exempt bonds, hobby farm deductions and ever so many other gentile benefits.)
This stately and, I must confess, lovely, world conjoins a world of small farmers steadily being driven from their vocation and their land by the relentless pressures (a gaudy but nevertheless true phrase) of agribusiness, inflation, and land speculation.
And then there is the working middle class, the well-off but far from rich professionals, artisans, small lawyers, independent businessmen, contractors, etc. They do the chores of the gentry and yet the gentry-supporting system (which soaks up more and more of the profits of the productive system to maintain heirs and rich retirees in grand idleness) also feeds the very concentrations of economic power which steadily drive middle class people to the wall.
It is a problem which the people of the area will face steadily but will try not to confront, being peaceable. And, of course, it is not a new problem at all. The sturdy yeomen have always had to decide at which point they would tire of supporting the idle rich,
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