HOW SHALL WE SECURE COMMUNITY LIFE IN THE OPEN COUNTRY?

It is generally agreed that one of the greatest insufficiencies in country life is its lack of organization or cohesion, both in a social and economic way. Country people are separated both because of the distances between their properties, and also because they own their land and are largely confined to its sphere of activities. There is a general absence of such common feeling as would cause them to act together unitedly and quickly on questions that concern the whole community, or on matters of public moment.

This lack of united action cannot be overcome by any single or brief process, but as one result of a general redirection of rural effort and the stimulating of a new or different point of view toward life. It will come as a result of a quickened agricultural life rather than as an effect of any direct plan or propaganda. When the rural social sense is thoroughly established, we shall be in a new epoch of rural civilization.

It is now the habit to say that this desired rural life must be coöperative. A society that is fully coöperative in all ways is one from which the present basis of competition is eliminated. I think that no one intends, however, in the common discussion of coöperation to take sides on the theoretical question as to whether society in the end will be coöperative or competitive; these persons only mean that coöperative association is often the best means to secure a given result and that such association may exert great educational influence on the coöperators.

Theoretically, the coöperative organization of society may be the better. Practically, a capitalistic organization may be better: it quickly recognizes merit and leadership; but if it is better, it is so only when it is very carefully safeguarded.

It cannot be contended that a coöperative organization is correct because the majority rules. Majorities show only what the people want, not necessarily what is best. Minorities are much more likely to be right, because thinking men and fundamental students are relatively few; yet it may be the best practice, in common affairs, to let the majority have its way, for this provides the best means of education.

It will now be interesting to try to picture to ourselves some of the particular means by which social connection in the open country may be brought about. It is commonly, but I think erroneously, thought that community life necessarily means a living together in centers or villages. I conceive, on the contrary, that it is possible to develop a very effective community mind whilst the persons still remain on their farms. In this day of rapid communication, transportation, and spread of intelligence, the necessity of mere physical contiguity has partly passed away.

That is, "isolation," as the city man conceives of it, is not necessarily a bar to community feeling. The farmer does not think in terms of compact neighborhoods, trolley cars, and picture shows. The country is not "lonely" to him, as it is to a city man. He does not search for amusement at night.

Hamlet life.

It is said that the American farmer must live in hamlets, as does the European peasant. The hamlet system that exists in parts of Europe represents the result of an historical condition. It is the product of a long line of social evolution, during which time the persons who have worked the land have been peasants, and to a greater or less extent have not owned the land that they have worked.

Some persons fear that the American farmer is drifting toward peasantry. This notion has no doubt arisen from the fact that in certain places the man who works the land is driven to great extremity of poverty, and he remains uneducated and undeveloped; but ignorance and poverty do not constitute peasantry. The peasanthood of the Old World is a social caste or class, and is in part a remnant of feudal government, of religious subjugation, and of the old necessity of protection. The present day is characterized by the rise of the people on the land; this movement is a part of the general rise of the common people (or the proletariat). If popular education, popular rights, and the general extension of means of communication signify anything, it is that we necessarily are developing away from a condition of peasantry rather than toward it, however much degradation or unsuccess there may be in certain regions or how much inadjustment there may be in the process (page 129).

In contradistinction to the exclusive hamlet system of living together, I would emphasize the necessity that a first-rate good man must live on the farm if he is to make the most of it. Farming by proxy or by any absentee method is just as inefficient and as disastrous in the long run as the doing of any other business by proxy; in fact, it is likely to be even more disastrous in the end because it usually results in the depletion of the fertility of the land, or in the using up of the capital stock; and this becomes a national disaster. I hold that it is essential that the very best kind of people live actually on the land. The business is conducted on the land. The crops are there. The live-stock is there. The machinery is there. All the investment is in the place itself. If this business is to be most effective, a good man must constantly be with it and manage it. A farm is not like a store or a factory, that is shut up at night and on Sunday.

The more difficult and complex the farming business becomes, the greater will be the necessity that a good man remain with it.

We must remember also that if the landowner or the farmer lives in a village or hamlet and another man lives on his farm, a social division at once results, and we have a stratification into two classes of society; and this works directly against any community of interest. It is not likely that the farmer who has retired to town and the hired man who works his farm under orders will develop any very close personal relation. The farmer becomes an extraneous element injected into the town, and has little interest in its welfare, and he has taken his personality, enterprise, and influence out of the country. He is in a very real sense "a man without a country." The increase of his living expenses in town is likely to cause him to raise the rent on his farm, or, if the tenant works for wages, to reduce the improvements on the place to the lowest extent compatible with profit. We need above all things to produce such a rural condition as will satisfy the farmer to live permanently in the country rather than to move to town when the farm has given him a competence.

I am not to be understood as saying that farmers ought never to live in town. There will always be shifting both ways between town and country. In some cases, small-area farming develops around a village; or a village grows up because the farms are small and are intensively handled. In irrigation regions, the whole community may be practically a hamlet or village. In parts of the Eastern states, small farmers sometimes live in the village and go to the farm each day, to work it themselves. But all these are special adaptations, and do not constitute a broad agricultural system.

In time we probably shall develop a new kind of rural settlement, one that will be the result of coöperative units or organizations, and not a consolidation about the present kinds of business places; but it is a question whether these will be villages or hamlets in the sense in which we now use these words.

The category of agencies.

My position, therefore, is that we must evolve our social rural community directly from the land itself, and mostly by means of the resident forces that now are there.

This being our proposition, it is then necessary to discover whether, given permanent residence on pieces of land, it is still possible to develop anything like a community sense. I do not now propose to discuss this question at any length, but merely to call attention to a few ways in which I think the neighborhood life of the open country may be very distinctly improved.

In this discussion, I purposely omit reference to public utilities and governmental action, because they are outside my present range. The farmer will share with all the people any needful improvement that may be made in regulation of transportation and transportation rates, in control of corporations, in equalizing of taxation, in providing new means of credit, in extending means of communication, in revising tariffs, in reforming the currency, and in perfecting the mail service.

To work out the means of neighborhood coöperation, there should be sufficient and attractive meeting places. The rural schoolhouse is seldom adapted to this purpose. The Grange hall does not represent all the people. The church is not a public institution. Libraries are yet insufficient. Town halls are few, and usually as unattractive as possible. There is now considerable discussion of community halls. Several of them have been built in different parts of the country to meet the new needs, and the practice should grow.

1. The mere increase of population will nec essarily bring people closer together, and by that much it will tend to social solidarity.

2. The natural dividing up of large farms, which is coming both as a result of the extension of population and from the failure of certain very large estates to be profitable, will also bring country people closer together. The so-called "bonanza farms" are unwieldy and ineffective economic units; and many farmers are "land poor."

3. We shall also assemble farms. The increasing population on the land will not always result in smaller farms. Most of the richer and more profitable lands will gradually be divided because, with our increased knowledge and skill, persons can make a living from smaller areas. The remoter and less productive lands will naturally be combined into larger farm areas, however, because a large proportion of such lands cannot make a sufficient profit, when divided into ordinary farm areas, to support and educate a present-day family (page 38). Contiguous areas of the better lands will be combined with them, in order to make a good business unit. As several farms come together under one general ownership, this owner will naturally gather about him a considerable population to work his lands.

The probability is that, under thoroughly skillful single management, a given area of remote or low-productive lands will sustain a larger population than they are now able to sustain under the many indifferent or incompetent ownerships. It is to be hoped that some of these amalgamated areas will develop a share-working or associative farming of a kind that is now practically unknown.

4. The re-creative life of the country community greatly needs to be stimulated. Not only games and recreation days need to be encouraged, but the spirit of release from continuous and deadening toil must be encouraged. The country population needs to be livened up. This will come about through the extension of education and the work of ministers, teachers, and organizations. All persons can come together on a recreation basis (pp. 173, 211).

The good farmer will have one day a week for recreation, vacation, and study.

5. Local politics ought to further the entire neighborhood life, rather than to divide the community into hostile camps. All movements, as direct nominations, that stimulate local initiative and develop the sense of responsibility in the people will help toward this end.

6. Rural government is commonly ineffective. It needs awakening by men and women who have arrived at some degree of mastery over their conditions. We talk much of the need of improving municipal government, but very little about rural government; yet government in rural communities is inert and dead, as compared with what it might be, and there is probably as much machine politics in it, in proportion to the opportunities, as in city government. Very much of the lack of gumption in the open country is due to the want of a perfectly free and able administration of the public affairs.[3]

The whole political organization of rural communities needs new attention, and perhaps radical overhauling. As I write these sentences, I have before me a newspaper in which a progressive surgeon expresses his opinion (which he has verified for me) on the question of supervision of health in a rural county in an Eastern state. He found the statistics too inaccurate and too indefinite to enable him to draw exact conclusions, but these are approximately the facts:

"No township seems to have deliberately paid its health officer, and but one town deliberately paid its poor physician. The others paid various bills for 'quarantine' and 'fumigating' and 'fees' and other misleading items. There was no way in which to distinguish between the care of the poor and the sick-poor except to guess and to figure on what I happened to know about. A——, the richest and largest township, has no health officers, and spent $200 for the poor in a population of 4000 people living in an area of 93 square miles. B——, the poorest township, with a population of 1000, and an area of 36 square miles, paid her health officer $28 and her poor physician $23.

"One township has 2170 inhabitants living in 51 square miles of territory, worth one and one-eighth million dollars. Its supervisor is paid $352.95 a year for a few days' work; its officers are paid $612.95. It costs $274.79 each year to elect these officers, and I understand each township is to spend about $5000 for good roads. The health officer that cares for these 2000 people over 51 miles of territory gets $42.53 a year, and the poor physician $34; while the sick-poor get helped to the munificent sum of $59.36, or two and one-half cents from each citizen. The health officers get almost exactly two cents a head for caring for the inhabitants over 51 square miles of land. The supervisor gets out of each inhabitant seventeen cents a year, the officers get thirty cents, while the sick-poor take from each citizen almost three cents. The discrepancy is too glaring to need comment. A community assessed a million dollars and probably worth two millions spends $40 a year on public health, and $60 a year on one-sixteenth of its population for sickness."

The physician proposes a county commission to take the place of the board of supervisors. He declares that the members of the board have outgrown their usefulness. "They should be junked along with other stagecoaches and a nice, new 60 h. p. county commission put in their place. The fact is that the system is wrong. Our 'government' is a survival of early times, and our science is up to date. They do not fit. You cannot expect supervisors who were useful in the time of Adam, when there were no cities, no problems, no roads, to serve in the twentieth century with its surgical treatment of degenerates, its germs and prophylactics, its preventive medicine and its scientific spirit. Supervisors could look after noxious plants and animals in the old days, and they could paper the court-house and eat fat dinners at the poor-house. They did fairly well at settling line fences, drinking sweet cider, and blarneying with insurgents. But they are out of place when it is a question of constructing roads of macadam, of building a tuberculosis hospital for an $18,000,000 county, and especially they are out of place when it is a question of dozens of defectives in the jails and thousands outside who ought to be in hospitals."

7. A community program for health[4] is much needed. The farmer lives by himself in his own house, on his own place. If a disease arises in his neighbor's family, it is not likely to spread to his family. Therefore, disease has seemed to him to be a personal rather than a neighborhood matter. There is the greatest need that the farmer possess a community sense in respect to disease and sanitary conditions. If the city is the center of enlightenment, it should help the country to get hold of this problem.

We should have a thoroughgoing system of health supervision and inspection for the open country as well as in the city. Health inspection should run out from the cities and towns into all the adjoining regions, maintaining proper connections with state departments of health. It should be continuous. It should include inspection of animals as well as of human beings. In other words, the whole region is a unit, one part depending on the other. The remarks of the physician, just quoted, indicate how great is the need of an organized health supervision for country communities.

We need meat inspection laws for meat killed and sold within the states, to supplement the inter-state law. We need community slaughter-houses in which all slaughtering of animals shall be under proper inspection. We need state milk inspection programs. It is not right that any large city should be compelled to inspect the milk throughout the state in order to protect itself. It is not right to the farming districts that such inspection should center in the city.

We must not assume that the farmer is specially guilty of sanitary faults. There are many such shortcomings in the open country, and I accept them without apology; but I can match them every one in city conditions. The fact is that the whole people has not yet risen to an appreciation of thoroughly sanitary conditions, and we cannot say that this deficiency is the special mark of any one class of our population. Persons ride along the country roads and see repulsive barn-yards, glaring manure piles, untidy back-yards, and at once make remarks about them. All these things are relegated to the rear in towns and cities and are not so visible, but they exist there.

I know that there are very filthy stables in the country districts, but I have never known worse stable conditions than I have seen in cities and towns. All progress in these directions must come slowly, and we must remember that it is expensive to rebuild and reorganize a stable. No doubt one of the reasons for the high cost of living is the demand of the people that pure-food laws shall be enacted and enforced, for this all adds to the cost of food supplies; similarly, we must expect a betterment in conditions of stabling to result in increased price of dairy products. In the cost of living we must figure the expense of having clean and pure food.

The farmer is much criticized for polluting streams; but when the farmer pollutes one stream occasionally, a city will pollute a whole system of streams continually. One of the greatest sins of society is the wholesale befoulment of streams, lakes, and water-courses. I do not see how we can expect to be called a civilized people until we have taken care of our refuse without using it to fill up ponds and lakes, and to corrupt the free water supplies of the earth.

If the countryman has been ignorant of sanitary conditions, we must remember that his ideas are largely such as he has derived from teachers, physicians, and others.

We cannot expect a man to develop within himself enough community pride and altruism to compel him to go to great expense for the benefit of the public; but he will gladly contribute his part to a public program.

8. Local factories and industries of whatever kind tend to develop community pride and effectiveness. Creameries have had a marked effect in this way in many places, giving the community or locality a reason for existence and a pride in itself that it never had before, or at least that it had not enjoyed since the passing out of the small factories. There is much need of local industries in the open country, whether they are distinctly agricultural or otherwise, not only for the purpose of providing additional employment for country people but to direct the flow of capital and enterprise into the country and to stimulate local interest of all kinds. It is not by any means essential that all the new life in country neighborhoods should be primarily agricultural.

Much has been said of late about the necessity of introducing the handicrafts in the open country in winter with the idea of providing work for farm people during that season. I do not look for any great extension of this idea in real agricultural sections, and for the following reasons: (1) because as better agriculture develops, the farms will of themselves employ their help more continuously. Modern diversified and intensive farming brings about this result. The present-day dairying employs men continuously. The fruit-grower needs help in winter for pruning and spraying. Live-stock men need help in feeding and caring for the animals. Modern floriculture and vegetable-gardening are likely to run the year round. (2) The conditions of American country life are such that skilled handicraft has not arisen amongst the rural people, and we cannot expect that it will arise. Skilled artisanship of this kind is not the growth of a generation, nor is it a result of the utilization of merely a few weeks or months of time. (3) It is very doubtful whether such handicrafts as are often mentioned could compete in the markets with the goods produced by consolidated factories, or could find a sufficient patronage of people interested in this kind of handicraft products.

I am not arguing against the introduction of handicrafts, but wish only to call attention to what I think to be an error in some of the current discussions. I am convinced that local industries of one kind or another will find their way into the open country in the next generation, and greatly to the advantage of the country itself; but the most useful of them will be regular factories able to compete with other factories. Their largest results will come not in providing employment for persons who temporarily need it, but in developing a new community life in the places where they stand.

9. The country store ought to be a factor in rural betterment. How to make it so, I do not know. The country store is the nexus between the manufacturers or the city jobbers, with their "agreements," on the one hand, and the people, on the other hand, whose commercial independence the jobbers may desire to control. The country merchant takes up the cause of the large dealer, because his own welfare is involved, and he unconsciously becomes one of the agencies through which the open country is drained and restrained. The parcels post—which must come—will probably considerably modify this establishment, although I do not look for its abolition nor desire it. Certain interests make strong opposition to the parcels post on the ground that it will ruin the country merchant and, therefore, the country town. I doubt if it will do any such thing; but even if it should, the end to be gained is not that the country merchant shall not be disturbed, but that the people at large may be benefited. No one knows just what form of readjustment the parcels post will bring about; but trade will very soon readjust itself to this condition as it has reacted to the introduction of farm machinery, good roads, the telegraph and telephone, rural free delivery.

The trader in the small town in some parts of the country is likely to own the people. He is almost necessarily opposed to coöperation and to any new movements that do not tend to enlarge his trade.

I wish we might also do something with the country hotel.

10. The business men's organizations, or chambers of commerce, in villages and country cities will not confine their activities within the city boundaries in the future. A wholly new field for usefulness and for the making of personal reputation lies right here. The business organization of one village or city should extend out into the country until it meets a similar organization from the adjoining village, and the whole region should be commercially developed (pages 122-123). A chamber of commerce could exert much influence toward making a better reputation for the pack of apples, or for other output of the region.

11. The influence of certain great corporations is likely to be felt on the rural readjustment. This is particularly true of the new interest that railroads are taking in Eastern agriculture. A coördination between railroads and farming interests will do very much for the property of both sides; and the railroads can exercise great power in tying country communities together. The Wall Street Journal comments as follows on the situation, after calling attention to the fact that the "Eastern trunk lines have already entered upon a campaign for the encouragement of agriculture":

"Thirty-six years ago the Pennsylvania state legislature made an effort to save the farmers of that state from the damaging competition of ruinously low rates on Western grain to Eastern mills and to the seaboard. The result was practically nil. Eastern farmers were left so completely out in the cold that thousands of them sold out and went West to raise more grain there, still further to handicap the Eastern producer. The widespread bankruptcy of the middle states farmers during the eighties was a consequence partly of cut-throat competition among railroads to haul Western grain to the East at less than cost, and partly the result of a general depression from which it took ten full years to recover.

"What is it that has brought the railroads to the farmers on terms of coöperation for the development of their common territory? It is the same thing which has served the railroads so admirably in the solution of their cost problems. It is science applied to reducing the expenses of transportation in the one case, and to the greater mastery of the resources of the soil in the other case. In this lies the possibility of increasing railway freight to and from rural sources. The coöperation of transportation and agriculture, in the East especially, is not wholly new, but it is highly significant.

"Nothing could be more encouraging than the service which the railroads are beginning to render in the better distribution of population over the land, by putting a premium on good farming and encouraging the young to find careers for themselves in rural industries."

12. Local institutions of all kinds must have a powerful effect in evolving a good community sense. This is true in a superlative degree of the school, the church, the fair, and the rural library. These institutions will bring into the community the best thought of the world and will use it in the development of the people in the locality.

Such institutions must do an extension work. The church, from the nature of its organization, could readily extend itself beyond its regular and essential gospel work. The high-school will hold winter-courses and will take itself out to its constituency. The library ought to occupy its whole territory (page 92).

Similarly, village improvement societies should organize country and town together, extending tree-care, better roads, lawn improvement, and other good work throughout the entire community contributory to the city. Civic societies, fraternal orders, hospital associations, business organizations (page 119), women's clubs and federations, could do the same.

13. The local rural press ought to have a powerful influence in furthering community action. Many small rural newspapers are meeting their local needs, and are to be considered among the agents that make for an improved country life. In proportion as the support of the country newspaper is provided by political organizations, hack politicians, and patent medicine advertisements, will its power as a public organ remain small and undeveloped.

14. The influence of the many kinds of extension teaching is bound to be marked. Reading-courses, itinerant lectures, the organizing of boys' and girls' clubs, demonstration farms, the inspections of dairies, orchards, and other farms, and of irrigation supplies, the organization of such educational societies as cow-testing societies, and the like, touch the very core of the rural problem. The influence of the traveling teacher is already beginning to be felt, and it will increase greatly in the immediate future. I mean by the traveling teacher the person who goes out from the agricultural college, the experiment station, the state or national department of agriculture, or other similar institutions, to impart agricultural information, and to set the people right toward their own problems.

15. The modern extension of all kinds of communication will unite the people, even though it does not result in making them move their residences. I have in mind good highways, telephones, rural free deliveries, and the like. The automobile is already beginning to have its effect in certain rural communities, but we have yet scarcely begun to develop the type of auto-vehicle which is destined, I think, to make a very great change in country affairs. The improvement of highways on a regular plan will itself tend to organize the rural districts. We must add to all this a thoroughly developed system of parcels post, not only that the farmer may receive mail, but that he may also have greater facilities and freedom to transact his business with the world (page 118).

16. Economic or business coöperation must be extended. There is much coöperation of this kind among American farmers, more than most persons are aware. Some of it is very effective, but much of it is coöperative only in name. It takes the form of milk organizations, creameries, fruit associations, poultry societies, farmers' grain elevators, unions for buying and selling, and the like, some of which are of great extent.

A really coöperating association is one in which all members take active part in government and control, and share in their just proportions in the results. It is properly a society, rather than a company. Many so-called coöperative units are really stock companies, in which a few persons control, and the remainder become patrons; and others are mere shareholding organizations.

Business coöperation in agriculture is of three kinds: (1) coöperative production; (2) coöperative buying; (3) coöperative selling. The last two are extensively practiced in many regions. Coöperative production of animals and crops is practically unknown in the rural communities in the United States, and we are not to expect it to arise in those communities to any extent under the present organization of society. Colonies organized on a coöperative basis may practice it within their membership, but it is doubtful whether persons who are well equipped to be farmers will enter such organizations for this purpose so long as it is so easy to make a financial success at independent farming.

There is a fourth form that should be mentioned, although it is not coöperation in the real sense, but rather a form of combination. I refer to movements to control the production or output of commodities, as of wheat, cotton, tobacco, maize, and arbitrarily to fix the price. This cannot be permanently accomplished with any of the great staples, and even if it could be accomplished, in my opinion it would be an economic and social error.

Very much has been said about the necessity of business coöperation among farmers, and the importance of the subject can hardly be overstated; and yet it should be understood that economic coöperation is only one of many means that may be put in operation to propel country life. The essential thing is that country life be organized: if the organization is coöperative, the results—at least theoretically—should be the best; but in one place, the most needed coöperation may be social, in another place educational, in another religious, in another political, in another sanitary, in another economic in respect to buying and selling and making loans or providing insurance. When the chief deficiency in any region is economic, then it should be met by an organization that is primarily economic. Some of the effective coöperation in the West, so often cited, is really founded on the land-selling spirit of the community.

In some parts of the United States, the financial status of the farmer is very low, but in general the economic condition is in advance of other conditions. The American farmer is prosperous,—not as prosperous as he ought to be, but so prosperous that he can conduct his own business without support or aid of his neighbors. Although he might gain financially by coöperation in any case, he nevertheless desires his complete freedom of action, even at the risk of some loss. The psychology of the American farmer is in the end the determining factor.

In other countries, this may not be so true, and particularly not when the farmers live under such a condition of peasanthood (or do not comprise a middle class) that no one of them in a community is able independently to buy his tools or his live-stock, or to secure sufficient funds to provide a small working capital, when both sales and purchases are very small, and when the entire community is practically subjugated by a political system. The big people are more likely to combine than to coöperate. Close coöperation naturally works best in a peasantry and under a paternal government; it becomes a means of bringing up the peasantry, of relieving them of oppression, and of giving them the rights that should be theirs as a part of their citizenship.

In Denmark, the coöperative movement has been one means of the salvation of the country, following the disastrous German war. The movement in some parts of the world is really a culture movement, having for a background the general good of society.

The American white farmer is not a peasant; he is not submerged in a hopeless political and economic slavery; he has his vote, his free school, his fee to hold property without let or hindrance, his full right to make the most of himself, his "rights" (pages 100 and 65). I think it will be possible for him to exercise these privileges and at the same time to share the benefits of coöperation; but coöperation is not necessary to win him these privileges. It is not the unit in his life, not the nucleus out of which all other agencies must evolve, or the leaven that will raise the lump: it is itself one coördinating part in a program of evolution. We do not have the problem of peasant proprietorship. For the most part, the American farmer has already won his economic independence, if not his just rewards.

We should not be impatient if our farmers do not organize themselves coöperatively as rapidly as we think they ought to organize.

Economic personal coöperation may be expected to thrive best in a community of small farmers. It is a question whether we shall develop the strongest leaders in a condition of more or less uniform small farms. There is much to be said in favor of rather large farming (say 500 to 1000 acres), for a business of this proportion demands a strong man. This does not mean landlordism, which is a part of a political and hereditary system, but merely large and competent business organization. Such farmers, if they are so minded, can accomplish great things for their fellows.

I am looking for some of the best results in coöperation to come from the establishment of field-laboratories and demonstration farms, to which the farmers of the locality contribute their personal funds in the expectation of an educational result. The best results to country life cannot possibly come by the government continuing to take everything to the farmer free of cost and without the asking. Disadvantaged or undeveloped regions must be aided freely, but as rapidly as any localities or industries get on their feet, they should meet the state part way, and should assume their natural share of the expense and responsibility. This form of coöperation is already well under way; and I suspect that in many localities that have been dead to all forms of coöperative effort, this idea will afford the starting-point for a new community life.

From this form of education-coöperation, it would be but a step to a neighborhood effort to introduce new crops and high-class bulls, to undertake drainage enterprises and reforestation; and to unite on business matters.

It is possible for a national organization movement to come out of the existing agricultural institutions in the United States.

We may picture to ourselves a perfectly coöperating rural society that will have all the means of its salvation within itself. Even if we accept this picture, we cannot say that the structure will rise out of one seed or starting-point, or that one phase of coöperation is of necessity primary and another final. Our theoretical structure will arise from several or many beginnings; it will be a complex of numberless units; whatever range of coöperation is found, by investigation, to be now most needed in any community, must be the one with which we are to set that community going.

17. In the end everything depends on personal gumption and guidance. It is not strange that we have lacked the kind of guidance that brings country people together, because we have not had the kind of education that produces it; and, in fact, this kind of guidance has not been so necessary in the past as it is now. A new motive in education is gradually beginning to shape itself. This must produce a new kind of outlook on country questions, and it will bring out a good many men and women who will be guides in the country as their fellows will be guides in the city. They will be captains because they will perform the common work of farming regions in an uncommon way.

I think we little realize to-day what the effect will be in twenty-five years of the young men and women that the colleges of agriculture in these days are sending into the country districts.

Community interest is of the spirit.

In conclusion, let us remember that everything that develops the common commercial, intellectual, recreative, and spiritual interests of the rural people, ties them together socially. Residing near together is only one of the means of developing a community life, and it is not now the most important one. Persons who reside close together may still be torn asunder by divergent interests and a simple lack of any tie that binds; this is notably true in many country villages.

Community of purpose and spirit is much more important than community of houses. Community pride is a good product; it produces a common mind.