WILLIAM FAULKNER, apparently with deliberate intent, is vitally aware of the land question, and in this awareness one detects a relation of his ideas to those philosophers of the past whose concepts were dependent upon a belief in natural law and natural rights, a belief especially popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Faulkner is, of course, a Southerner, and he possesses a deep feeling for the soil, a recognition of the land's importance and the effects it can have upon the men who put their lives into it, who fertilize it with their blood and water it with their sweat. It would be impossible, generally, for a Southerner to ignore the land, as impossible as it would be for him to ignore Negroes or the Civil War, for land is the basis of Southern life and economy, and upon it the legend of the South has been painfully and gloriously constructed. Faulkner is agrarian realist, but with profundity and depth, rising above Erskine Caldwell. His realism shows what is true in agricultural society, his depth and profundity speak in glowing rhetoric of the land and the part it plays in almost every aspect of Southern life; and from his realism and his rhetoric, from his depth and his profundity, there evolves in his work a philosophy or a concept of land, its ownership and its fundamental character that is brilliant and humanitarian in its vastness of scope and its depth of understanding. Bertrand Russell has pointed out that various philosophic ideas often evolve from the environments in which they are found, that they are both an effect and a cause of the character of the various communities in which1 they flourish. So it must be with Faulkner's concepts. From his agrarian world, from his realm of black soil and white cotton, where land is the heart and soul of existence, he has taken cognizance of the land question; and his realization of the importance of that question has led