growths of civilization," but it had more substantial accomplishments to its credit: a sound balance of industry and agriculture; town meetings; houses with a "solidity and abidingness about them which makes them part of the rugged landscape." Dorothy Canfield Fisher made a spirited case for backwardness in her essay on Vermont, "Our Rich Little Poor State." Vermont's secret, Fisher thought, lay in her refusal to live beyond her means. She had not yet acquired the fear of poverty that made the "modern world go around." ^* She refused to exchange an "unenvious satisfaction with plain ways" for the illusory advantages of wealth, power, and status. Outsiders, driven by what they called "strictly business lines of industrial efficiency," might confuse this absence of envy with "bucolic stolidity," but Vermonters knew better and were undisturbed by the world's adverse judgment of their rustic ways. "It makes an ironic quirk come into the corner of their mouths, as at the transparent absurdity of a child."

No doubt the Vermonter paid "for his high-handed scoffing at sacred social distinctions by a rough plainness, not to say abruptness, of speech and manner." But his plain style freed him not only from the fear of poverty but from the paralyzing skepticism about politics that made other Americans feel that they would never be able "to get what they want through political action." Lacking an obsession with money-making, Vermonters had no need for that "lazy substitute for self-government"—representative democracy. Dependent neither on employers nor on a governing class, Vermonters enjoyed the "ability to deal with life at first hand."

The contrast between these four essays and the series as a whole shows how completely most liberals had come to identify liberalism with a cultural critique of backwardness and provincialism. Thinking of themselves as a civilized minority in a nation of Babbitts, Rotarians, and rednecks, liberals fell into a style of social criticism that had the curious effect

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This might be taken as an admirably succinct statement of the essence of Adam Smith's political economy. The fear of poverty—the morally suspect but economically invigorating overestimation of wealth and luxury—makes the world turn, according to Smith. But Fortune smiled on Vermont: the idea of progress never took hold there.

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