singing-club, a non-sectarian form of amusement which the nearest town could not match. Through this singing-club the church developed literary and industrial branches, held picnics, established an orchestra, carried through a fair, supported a lecture course, and organized an inter-township school contest and annual athletic meet. These were new forms of religious activity; they gave the people a better quality of amusement than they could get in the nearest town, and the fact that the townspeople came out to their socialized church helped to show them how valuable it was. There is something interesting going on all the time; their imaginations are alive; and the man who rents his farm and goes to town is not so much envied as blamed.

"You'd think he'd do better by his boys than to leave them hanging around Main Street all the time."

"Look at how his land is getting all run down his renter don't manure it."

the way

"He may not have much to do; but I can't see what he gets out of living in town."

This was a new sort of comment, directly traceable to the fact that one little country church had based its teaching on the holiness of this world and made life interesting by feeding the socially hungry and cheering the intellectually faint.

On the June Sunday when I attended service at this church, the automobiles and the fine horses of these prosperous farmers and the town folks from six miles away filled the carriagesheds and monopolized the fence-posts. And the congregation, made up from a half-dozen old-line denominations, filled the flower-trimmed, newly painted church building to the very doors. No one had preached church federation; it had come about spontaneously!

Farther north, I found a young clergyman who had organized a baseball team in the neighborhood, on which he was pitcher, and which played every Saturday afternoon, to the joy of the whole county. In Wisconsin and Dakota there are

clergymen who have organized the people into coöperative associations for buying and selling, in order that through coöperative business they may have a daily practical illustration of the Golden Rule. In the country town of Pine Island, Minnesota, I attended a moving-picture show, run in the local opera-house by the board of directors of the Methodist church. As the pastor explained it, the theory was that the young people and the isolated farmers of the district must have the best recreation that could be supplied.

Such church activities are springing up in spots throughout the open country; but in many places it seems easier to develop a new institution to meet the rising demands of the farming population than to reform the stiff-necked churches directly. The young people who have left the churches of the old order to the generation that grew up in them who, like the Chinese, see more likeness than difference between Baptists and Presbyterians, and have not acquired religion through the revival meeting and mourners' bench, but have graduated into Christianity from the Sunday-school cannot be brought to see religion in sectarian terms. It is because the Young Men's and Young Women's Christian Associations serve the purposes of the rural revolution outside of denominational lines, that they are proving such valuable aids to the new reformation. The idea that the Christian exists in a sort of social vacuum no longer obtains to-day.

"It makes a great appeal to the girls," a worker in Red Wing, Minnesota, told me "the idea that by joining the Y. W. C. A. they come in touch, not only with the girls of New York and San Francisco, but of India and China, too."

The secretaries of the rural Y. M. C. A. declare that "the inherent organization germ of their work is social," and that their programmes include, not only Bible study and religious meetings, but also "practical talks, lectures, educational classes, agricultural institutes and contests, literary and de

bating clubs, boy scouts, athletics, gymnastics and aquatics, summer camps, hikes, educational tours, and conferences."

It is because the demands of the revolting farmers include these social satisfactions that can be had only after prosperity and a certain intellectual freedom have been attained that these extra-denominational associations are doing such effective work. They command secretaries of special training such as is generally outside the requirements for the ministry. The churches accept ministers whose preparation varies from a bachelor's degree supplemented by a theological course and an assistant pastorate to what is vaguely called "some personal religious experience." This may or may not be enough; but the Y. M. C. A. takes no such chances. The international secretary says, "It is not sufficient that the county secretary should be a successful evangelist, Bible teacher, or executive." The Association's aim is to provide nothing but college men, preferably graduates of the agricultural colleges. Is it not possibly because of this different training that the average salary of all ministers of all denominations in places with less than twenty-five thousand inhabitants is $573 a year, while the county secretaries can and do command, at the start, salaries averaging $1,400?

The leaders in the new reformation are reminding the church that since it has developed a paid ministry, society has also developed a utilitarian civilization and has grown to expect every adult male, parsons included, to earn his keep. They are urging the church to think, not in terms of one person at a time, but of the whole social body at once; to preach, not a religion of the individual, but a religion of the social order. They are meeting with opposition, as Wyclif and Hus and Luther met with opposition; but the future of the country church is with them, because they have made themselves an essential force in this vitally progressive rural revolution.

PROBLEMS OF RURAL SOCIAL LIFE1

THOMAS NIXON CARVER

No other problem is even second in importance to that of maintaining the native quality of the rural population. The rural districts are the seed bed from which even the cities are stocked with people. Upon the character of this stock, more than upon anything else, does the greatness of a nation and the quality of its civilization ultimately depend. If the native vigor, physical and mental, of the people should decline, nothing could save its civilization from decay. Not even education itself can permanently arrest such decay when the inborn capacity to be educated is disappearing. Every horseman believes in careful training as a preparation for racing, but no horseman, no matter how excellent his system of training might be, would expect to maintain or improve the speed of his stable if he bred mainly from scrub stock. Nor should any country, however excellent its educational system, expect to maintain the capacity and productive efficiency of its people if the most capable and efficient of them multiply least rapidly, and the least capable and efficient multiply most rapidly.

But what is really meant by capacity and productive efficiency in a people? There is a story of an aged savage who, having lived most of his life among civilized men, returned in his old age to his native tribe, saying that he had tried civilization for forty years, and that it was not worth the trouble. A great deal of the philosophy of civilization is epitomized in this story. To a savage mind civilization is never

1 Copyright. Reprinted by permission from Principles of Rural Economics, Ginn and Company, publishers.

worth the trouble, for the reason that taking trouble is distasteful to the savage mind. Only those races which have the capacity for taking trouble, or to whom taking trouble is not painful, are capable of becoming civilized. Civilization consists largely in taking pains. To some people it is too much trouble. They prefer to remain barbarians, even though they live in civilized surroundings. Other people have so much mental energy that they do not mind taking pains; in fact they rather enjoy it. They are the builders of our civilization. Individual genius was once defined as the capacity for taking infinite pains. The genius of a race or of a nation, and its capacity for civilization, may be defined in precisely the same terms.

Efficient agriculture requires forethought, planning for next year, and the year after, and the year after that; putting in a great deal of careful, painstaking work to-day, with no prospect of seeing a tangible result for years to come; looking after an interminable number of details day by day, week by week, month by month, and year by year, in expectation of returns so distant in the future as to lie beyond the vision of lesser minds. Only the men or the races which possess this kind of capacity are capable of efficient agriculture or of efficient industry of any kind. Whatever other admirable qualities the savage may possess, and he may possibly boast superiority over the civilized man in many respects, lacking these qualities, he will remain a beaten race. Similarly, whatever admirable and amiable qualities an individual of our own race may possess, lacking these he will be a beaten man. It is idle for either a race or an individual to complain, or to say that in some other kind of a world it would not have been beaten. This happens to be this kind of a world, and in this kind of a world it happens that success comes to those races which possess in the highest degree the economic virtues of industry, sobriety, thrift, forethought, reliability, knowledge of natural laws, and mutual helpfulness. These are the