Viewed in the perspective of these thirty-three years—that wonderful era of world thought and progress, deepened by world suffering, inaugurated by the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 —the spiritual legacy left by Miss Farmer in Green Acre represents a truly astonishing achievement. To this woman of pure New England stock must be credited the glory of founding the first universal platform in America. To Green Acre have come representatives of every race, nation and religion, to mingle in fellowship and contribute each his best to a common end. The roll of speakers who have taken part in the Green Acre Conferences represent well-nigh the flower of modern liberal thought.

“Green Acre,” Miss Farmer declared some years before her death, “was established for the purpose of bringing together all who were looking earnestly toward the New Day which seemed to be breaking over the entire world. The motive was to find the Truth, the Reality, underlying all religious forms, and to make points of contact in order to promote the unity necessary for the ushering in of the coming Day of God.”

Only the older generation can appreciate the courage and magnanimity of this woman at their true value. The note of human solidarity and interdependence has penetrated life at many points during the past twenty years, but Miss Farmer arose as a consecrated pioneer to make a definite and practical application of ideals hitherto existing only in the minds of philosophers and the lives of saints.

Too frequently, students of that marvelous period of aspiring consciousness known as the “Transcendental Movement,” and associated with the greatness of Emerson, Thoreau and their fellows, have traced the continuity of the movement down the many dividing tenuous streams of so-called “New Thought.” This is a fundamental mistake. Great thoughts do not reach fulfillment in a multiplicity of little thoughts—their fruit is in permanently ennobled customs and institutions of daily life.

This significance of Miss Farmer in the history of American progress is that she stands as the actual fulfiller of Emerson in terms of applied influence. Miss Farmer can be considered as the feminine counterpart of Emerson, for she possessed his idealism to the full, but her nature was executive, practical and intensely human, desiring tangible results above abstract formulas and definitions.