Four Studs For The Bride

Statistics are usually thought of as the dullest of all possible subjects, but statistics that represent people are anything but dull. They can represent change, growth, progress—and they can also represent human misery of the worst kind. Let's take a few examples. Statistic one: in the spring of 1969, President Nixon met in the Cabinet Room of the White House with the mayors of ten great American cities. The ten had been chosen to be as representative as possible, and the group was a highly varied mixture of parties, races and religions. They were alike in only one way: their qualities of energy and intelligence would have set them apart in any company. The really most notable thing about them, however, was this: in the time between being invited to the White House and the day the meeting actually took place, four of them had effectively resigned from office. All but assured of reelection, these four had announced that under no circumstances would they run again. Four out of ten. That's a statistic. Perhaps these personal decisions were of no consequence in the overall course of history, but we rather think otherwise. To demonstrate why, here are some more statistics: Today two out of three Americans live in metropolitan areas; and, while our country's population has more than doubled since 1900, the number of people in metropolitan areas has increased more than three and one-half times. The trends toward mechanization, the consolidation of farms into large units, and away from farm work in general are so strong that our farm population has fallen until fewer than one in twenty Americans now work on farms of any kind.