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BULLETIN
OF THE
First District Normal School
Kirksville, Missouri

Rural Life Conference Number

Provided for by Act Approved March 19, 1870 
Located at Kirksville, Mo., December 29, 1870. 
Opened as First District Normal School Jan. 1, 1871

Vol. XI SEPTEMBER, 1911 No. 2
Published by the First District Normal School. Issued Quarterly.— 
June, September, December, March.

Entered June 25, 1902, at Kirksville, Mo., as second-class matter under act of Congress of July, 1894.



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Faculty 1911-1912

JOHN R. KIRK – President and Supervisor of Practice Schools
A. P. SETTLE – Dean of Faculty, English
E. R. BARRETT – Assistant Professor in English
MINNIE BRASHEAR – Assistant Professor in English
WARREN JONES – Assistant Professor in English
GOLDY HAMILTON – Assistant Professor in English
B. P. GENTRY - Latin
T. JENNIE GREEN – Assistant Professor in Latin
J. W. HEYD – German and French
H. CLAY HARVEY - Mathematics
W. H. ZEIGEL – Assistant Professor in Mathematics
BYRON COSBY – Assistant Professor in Mathematics
JERE T. MUIR - Civics and Assistant Professor in Mathematics
A. OTTERSON - Civics and Assistant Professor in Mathematics
MARK BURROWS – Department of Commerce
E. M. VIOLETTE – European History
EUGENE FAIR – American History, Ancient History
H.W. FOGHT – Rural Education and Sociology
JOHN R. MURDOCK - History Scholarship
CHARLES BANKS - History Scholarship
W. A. LEWIS - Agriculture
J. E. ROUSE – Assistant in Agriculture
J. S. Stokes - Physics and Physiography
W. J. BRAY - Chemistry
JOHN HOWE – Science Scholarship
L. S. DAUGHERTY – Zoology 
--- Domestic Science
OPHELIA A. PARRISH - Librarian
META GILL - Library Scholarship
LULA J. CRECELIUS - Library Scholarship
HELEN GRAY – Library Scholarship
D. R. GEBHART - Music, Military Tactics
J. L. BIGGERSTAFF - Harmony, Orchestra, Piano Tuning
CORAL G. SYKES – Assistant in Music
BERTHA DAKIN SMITH - Assistant in Music, Dean of Women
CORA REID - Drawing
GRACE LYLE – Drawing and Art Instruction
A. D. TOWNE – Manual Training
C. B. SIMMONS – Physical Education
LEOTA L. DOCKERY – Speech Arts, Physical Education
J. D. WILSON - Theory of Education
A. B. WARNER - Administration
SUSIE BARNES - Director of Practice Schools
MARIE TURNER HARVEY - Teacher Model Rural School
EUDORA HELEN SAVAGE - Supervisor Eng. and Arith. in Pr. Sch.
LAURA DOOLITTLE – Supervisor Hist. and Geog. in Pr. Sch.
IDELLA R. BERRY – Supervisor Primary Grades in Pr. Sch.
HARRIET HOWARD – Kindergarten Director
ADA COCHRAN - High Sch. Tchg. Scholarship
E. H. SALISBURY - High Sch. Tchg. Scholarship
ELSIE KIRK - Stenographer and Secretary to President
NAOMI MARGREITER - Stenographer	and Office Clerk

JOHN GILL, Engineer. WM. McKenzie, Fireman. ---, Campus Keeper. JOHN C. JACK, Head Janitor. J. M. SMITH, J. R. CROOKSHANK, JAMES WILLIS, EFFIE HICKMAN, Assistant Janitors. T. J. MCKASSON, House Carpenter.

NOTE: By custom of this Institution the order in which the names of Faculty members are printed has no significance. It is a matter of convenience.



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PHOTOGRAPHIC VIEW OF BUILDINGS.
ORIGINAL BUILDING, BALDWIN HALL, IN CENTER, COMPLETED IN JANUARY, 1873.
LIBRARY HALL, AT LEFT, COMPLETED IN DECEMBER, 1901. SCIENCE HALL AT RIGHT, COMPLETED IN MAY, 1906.
MODEL RURAL SCHOOL, MECHANICS HALL AND SCHOOL GARDENS AT THE REAR AND NOT SHOWN IN PICTURE.



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Rural Life Conference

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

PAGE.
Foreword - 5

I.—“Address of Welcome.” - 9
President John R. Kirk, State Normal School.

II.—“The Country Church Program.” - 12
Rev. Warren H. Wilson, Ph. D., Superintendent Country Church and Country Life Department, Board of Home Missions, Presbyterian Church in the United States.

III.—“Relation of the Rural School to Agriculture.” - 14
Professor E. C. Bishop, Schools Section, Department of Agricultural Extension, Iowa State College, Ames.

IV.—“Vitalizing the Rural Religious Forces.” - 20
Rev. Matthew B. McNutt, Plainfield, Illinois.

V.-“Why the Boys Leave the Farm.” - 24
Rev. E. F. Eastman, Special Investigator in the Missouri Rural Sociological Survey.

VI.-“The Religious Conditions and Activities in Sullivan, Adair and Knox Counties, Missouri.” - 32
Rev. Anton T. Boisen, Special Investigator in the Missouri Rural Sociological Survey.

VII.—“What Missouri Should Do for Her Women.” - 37
Miss Alice Kinney, President Missouri Homemakers’ Conference Association, New Franklin.

VIII.—“Farm Home Management.” - 40
Miss Hena Bailey, Department of Farm Management, Missouri College of Agriculture, Columbia.

IX.—“Boys’ and Girls’ Demonstration Work in the South.” - 43
Hon. O. B. Martin, United States Department of Agriculture, Washington, D. C.

X.—“Hindrances to the Health of the Household.” - 50
Dr. W. P. Cutler, State Food and Drug Commissioner of Missouri, Columbia.

XI.—“The Twentieth Century Rural School: What It Is and What It Is to Be.” - 57
Hon. E. T. Fairchild, State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Topeka, Kansas.

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XII.—“Modem Methods in the Country Church — The Story of my Eleven Years in the Du Page Church.” - 64
Rev. Matthew B. McNutt, Plainfield, Illinois.

XIII.—“Library Extension and the Country Life.” - 74
Miss Elizabeth Wales, Secretary Missouri Library Commission, Jefferson City.

XIV.-—“Recreation and the Rural Community.” - 79
F. M. Hansen, State Secretary, Country Y. M. C. A., Des Moines, Iowa.

XV.—“Forward Movements in Country Schools.” (Illustrated) - 65
Superintendent Geo. W. Brown, Edgar County, Illinois.

XVI.—“Good Roads and the Future of Our State.” - 90
Mr. C. O. Raine, Representing the United States Department of Good Roads, Canton.

XVII.—“The Role of the American Farmer.” - 93
President H. J. Waters, Kansas State Agricultural College, Manhattan.

XVIII.—“For Missouri.” - 104
Mrs. Edward M. Shepard, President Missouri Federation of Women’s Clubs, Springfield.

XIX.—“Infant Mortality.” - 110
Mrs. C. W. Greene, State Chairman Home Economics Dep’t. Federation of Women’s Clubs, Columbia.

XX.—“The Grange as a Factor in Rural Life Improvement.” - 118
Mr. N. P. Hull, Master of the Michigan State Grange, Dimondale, Mich.

XXI.—“The Teachers’ Part in the Improvement of the Rural School.” (Illustrated) - 120
Mr. Arthur Monahan, Bureau pf Education, Washington, D. C.

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FOREWORD

IMPULSES PROPHETIC OF A REHABILITATED COUNTRY LIFE.

When President Roosevelt lent his magic to the conservation of our natural resources, a great national problem was launched. When he placed his stamp of approval upon investigation in the open country, we all speedily came to know that we have an intricate and difficult rural life problem. A little later the investigation by the Commission on Country Life marked the beginning of a more thoughtful study of country life.

American country life has for some time been in a state of transition. The old pioneer farmer is passing with the cheap lands, and the dawn of a new era is at hand. A gradual rehabilitation is coming to life in the open country — a life which had gradually down through the years become sapped of its' best social satisfactions, as the farm population entered upon its period of “isolation,” due to the industrial call of the city and the beckoning of the last new frontier. The very air round about us seems prophetic of great things to come to pass. We begin to feel the stir of new things for rural life. Many are getting the vision and see the great task outlined before them. Soon the husbandman farmer will come into possession of his heritage; then the desertion of the rural community by the men who should furnish it intelligence and vigorous life will have reached an end. This new era will be marked by a new leadership in rural districts and by a harmonious and thoughtful co-operation in all questions of mutual welfare between city folk and country folk.

The Men Who Till the Soil Bear the World on Their Shoulders.

Those who labor close to the soil are in the last analysis the chief wealth-makers of the nation. The destiny of any people rests ultimately with the food supply. So, with us, agriculture is the fundamental human question. The rural life problem is, accordingly, in essentials, a problem of good farming; because from the open country must come the raw food materials that shall sustain our civilization. Good farming, on the other hand, lies at the root of all satisfactory living in the open country. A more scientific agriculture, yielding commensurate economic profits, will be the first guarantee that men will be content to remain on the farm.

But there is a second element to be kept in mind. All the riches in the world would not give us a permanent husbandry farming if the tillers of the soil were to remain deprived of the many human interests that have gradually become centered in urban places. Like the miners of precious metals, they would live out their period of privation, only later to abandon their holdings on the farm and move to town where men have common

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interests, where there are better social advantages, where the children can be properly schooled and the family furnished satisfactory privileges of the church. It is fair to assume that so long as the rural school remains in its present retarded condition and the rural church lingers in a state of coma, and the rural home is denied a wholesome, broadening atmosphere — that long will the average farmer allow the smallest economic pressure to drive him from the farm. A great writer goes even farther and says that modern urban life “has destroyed a rural society whose making has occupied mankind since the fall of Rome.”

The Great Problem of Rural Life.

But it is true that while rural society has suffered, “there still remain the land and the man who tills the land. There is still life under rural conditions, and there must always be.” The problem, then, is clear enough. We must take all that is left of the old rural society and reconstruct it in harmony with the needs of our twentieth century civilization. Or, to use the concise statement as expressed by President Butterfield: “The rural problem is to maintain upon our land a class of people whose status in our society fairly represents American ideals — industrial, political, social and ethical.”

Solution of the Problem.

An attempt to solve any one phase of the complex problem without touching the other phases is bound to meet with failure. The rural life problem must be dealt with as a unit. Thus, for example, it has proved impractical to attempt to better the religious conditions of a given rural community where the workers were unwilling to consider certain allied social and economic questions lying beyond the province of ordinary church practice. Students who would make headway with this composite problem must be prepared to consider at least the propositions which here follow., and which, according to our most eminent rural life students are the main agencies to be utilized in its solution:

1. The comparative isolation and barrenness of country life must be overcome (a) through a more satisfactory means of communication; (b) through greatly enlarged facilities for organized recreation of country folk, young and old alike; (c) by making woman’s life easier by substituting for much unnecessary drudgery a new and larger outlook on life, explainable in new home conveniences and labor-saving appliances; and (d) by crystallizing the whole countryside into a unity full of community spirit.

2. The entire school system must be reconstructed, (a) by enriching the course of study to the inclusion of a subject-matter with a farm flavor; and (b) by meeting the demands for carrying education into the farm home through various forms of “extension courses.”

3. Those who live in rural communities must become better organized than they are. These organizations are not alone to be for defensive buying and selling, but organizations are particularly needed of a social and educational kind.

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4. A new emphasis must be placed on ethical and esthetical idealism in rural communities. This will take root in a deep, sincere and intelligent religious life, and an intense love for the beautiful in nature.

Calling the First Missouri Rural Life Conference, September, 1911.

It is evident that if headway is to be made people at large—both in country and town—must come to comprehend what is at stake. And when this is accomplished the many rural life forces, as now existing or about to be brought into existence, must be federated, because without the co-operation of all these agencies no satisfactory solution can be reached. President Roosevelt’s commission urged “the holding of local, state, and even national conferences on rural progress, designed to unite the interests of education, organization and religion into one forward movement for the rebuilding of country life. Rural teachers, librarians, clergymen, editors, physicians, and others may well unite with the farmers in studying and discussing the rural question in all its aspects. We must in some way unite all institutions, all organizations, all individuals having any interest in country life, into one great campaign for rural progress.”

The First Missouri Rural Life Conference was called by the Kirksville State Normal School, working in co-operation with the Department of Country Church and Country Life, Board of Home Missions, of the Presbyterian Church in the United States. The primary purpose of the conference was to enlighten our own Missouri people upon the actual needs of rural life in our state and this part of the Middle West.

The Rural Sociological Surrey.

The National Commission was particularly emphatic in its insistence that the time has come for us to take stock of the exact condition and materials of country life. Such surveys should cover the “general economic and social status of the people and the character of the people themselves, natural attractions and disadvantages, historical data, and a collection of community experience. This would result in the collection of local facts on which we could proceed to build a scientifically and economically sound country life.”

The value of the Kirksville conference was greatly enhanced because it was able, in its local aspects, to utilize the fruits of just such a survey. The Presbyterian Country Church and Country Life Department, co-operating with the Department of Rural Education and Sociology in this Normal School, has just completed an interesting and accurate survey of Adair, Knox and Sullivan counties in Missouri. This diagnosis has brought to light many remarkable facts, many already known, some suspected, and a few feared. With such an accurate diagnosis it should not be difficult to prescribe the remedy.

Comprehensiveness of the Program.

It has been the aim of this first conference to bring before its audience every important phase of the Rural Life Problem, leaving to later confer-

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ences the elaboration of particular phases of especial local importance. The following addresses, all of which were given during the four days of conference by eminent students of rural life and by survey specialists, are herewith presented to the public in the hope of reaching a larger audience of workers and in the spirit of making a modest addition to the rural life material now available.

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ADDRESS OF WELCOME

PRESIDENT JOHN R. KIRK.

I welcome all delegates and visitors to this First Missouri Rural Life Conference. I am specially pleased that the conference can be held at this, the most aggressively ambitious normal school of the Middle West. Few people in New England or in the states to the north of us would call this institution a normal school. They would designate it as a teachers college. Ours is an institution in the making. We are in a transitional stage, constantly changing. A few days ago we finished reconstructing this delightful auditorium. Just to the south of this building and connected with this one by a short passage way, is our new Mechanics Hall, which invites your inspection. It will be finished in a month from this time. We have a new department of agriculture. Of all our departments it is closest to actual rural and village life. Already it has taught many practical lessons. A few days ago a practical farmer with a fat pocketbook saw our boys unloading a carload of Arizona lambs. He remarked that no one but a school teacher would bring such “onery” sheep into town. Our sixty-acre farm is but three blocks from this building. Several ambitious Normal School students live on the farm. They are educating themselves through this laboratory of real things. They are learning to do by doing. They are the best scientists we have. They believe that in about three months they will market the carload of sheep at a profit of $6.00 or $7.00 to every acre of corn land on the farm. They simply used the knowledge they had. They planted cow peas between the corn hills. The sheep are growing fat on the cow peas without touching the corn. Our boys will experiment with various breeds of chickens. Recently they bought a threshing machine for $25.00. It was worn out. In our Machinery Hall they will work several months on the threshing machine. We will furnish them one hundred dollars’ worth of raw materials. They will rebuild the threshing machine. They will make it worth several hundred dollars. Some time ago they purchased an old steam engine. They rebuilt it. That engine is now an efficient machine. They put up their own silo. They are building their own barn. They are reading more books and more agricultural journals than they would if they were not living and working part of each day on the farm.

We welcome our visitors because they are our kind of people. Most of the delegates to this convention are people who have done things. We ourselves are of that kind. We think we have more and better courses in college history than any college in the State of Missouri can offer. We have better library facilities than a typical college has. We are able to say similar things about english and about science and mathematics; but along

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with these things we try to offer the best concrete school methods and school management that ingenious men and women, educated in the best universities of the world, can offer. We believe that it is our function and our destiny to transform the public schools of northeast Missouri. The exercise in music which you heard a few moments ago means that we intend to send into every village and city and rural school of northeast Missouri a man or a woman who will unite and electrify, without formal discipline, all the boys and girls in each of the schools. That is why we pay $200.00 a month for twelve months of the year for a man to live with and reach our prospective teachers and stimulate their latent energies—energies which they and their parents and their relatives have heretofore not dreamed of.

We have our new Department of Rural Education, with a talented man at the head of it and a capable woman teaching a model rural school here on the campus, all the children being rural children, brought to the school each morning in covered wagons, their homes being from three to five miles away. A lady said to me the other day that she thought the head of our Rural Life Department and the teacher of our Model Rural School were great cranks, but I said to her: “We have about two dozen other cranks as bad as these that you happen to be acquainted with.” It is the crank that turns the machine a good deal of the time.

We haven’t anything completely solved. We have our ideals and our dreams. We believe that the rural school is entitled to just as good a teacher as the village school or the city high school. If I didn’t see, growing into great capability, some prospective Normal School graduates, anxious to go into rural schools and village schools, just as anxious to go into rural schools as some others are to go into city schools, I would not be putting my energy into the building and rebuilding again and again of this real College.

In welcoming our distinguished speakers, I venture to say that the time has gone by when any man in America can justify the dogma or opinion that the children can be allowed to live under a half educated person while in the rural school and in the grades until the last day in the eighth grade, and then just because they have become high school children, be placed under a fully educated person such as a university graduate is supposed to be. It is the doctrine of this Normal School, and has been its doctrine from the days of J. Baldwin, its first president, forty years ago, supported by our late Commissioner of Education, Dr. Wm. T. Harris, that the children of the elementary schools, including the rural schools, deserve for their teachers just as good scholars and just as capable men and women as children in the high school have. That is the doctrine that this school stands for today. We mean, through this struggle of ours, to send men and women into the rural schools that are scholars in the modern sense.

We mean by the Model Rural School house, — 300 feet from this platform — we mean through its sanitary system, its indoor toilet rooms, its perfect ventilation, its sanitary light, its adjustable seats and other furniture, its drinking fountains, its telephone, its stereopticon, its library, its musical

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instruments, its beautiful fireplace, its emergency hospital, its shower bath rooms, its domestic science and manual training apparatus, its gymnasium, its electrical generator, its gas engine, its water pumping system, its combined heating and ventilating apparatus, and garden nearby—we mean by this instrumentality—this concrete specimen on the campus with its genuine farm girls and boys—we mean to set the pace so that ultimately we may make it impossible for an ignorant person or a nondescript to secure a position as a teacher in a rural school. We mean to lengthen the time required for a Normal School diploma; we mean that the typical high school graduate shall live in the atmosphere of this beautiful place in elbow touch with the splendid men and women that constitute our student corps; we mean that the high school graduate shall spend with us about three years before getting our lowest diploma. We invite and urge our good, strong, ambitious students to stay and work longer.

We welcome this great conference because it seems to stand for the ideas that we are battling for. We respect every syllable and every item in the whole educational scheme that yields culture and power; but we are especially for the new educational use of the campus, of the garden, of the farm, of the laboratories, of our beautiful library, of art, of music; and all these great instrumentalities are for the making and the building of such character and capability in our prospective teachers that we may have greater prosperity and happier homes, culture and contentment, and constant exercise of initiative in every direction.

This is an agricultural region capable of unlimited development. Therefore we discover more than ordinarily good reasons for having this great conference with us. We have tried to make the conditions for your reception such as will harmonize with your great purposes. I therefore welcome all of our guests and visitors and speakers, and I sincerely hope that this great convention may be in every way successful and that it may be followed in future by many others, every one of which shall be greater than any former one.

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THE COUNTRY CHURCH PROGRAM.

REV. WARREN H. WILSON, PH.D.

The church and the school in the country are the eyes of the community. By them the people see and understand life. But when the community grows up the eyes need special treatment. If you go to your oculist at forty he will tell you you need glasses “because of your age.” That is the reason why the country community in a mature population requires special treatment for its church and school.

The first condition which affects the country churches universally is the change in the way the people get their livelihood. Farmers are speculating in land, and this keeps many of them restless and moving. The result is that the country churches are, many of them, closed because their people have gone away, and many of them are confronted with new churches built by newcomers whom they did not welcome into their membership.

My proposition is that the church must promote scientific farming in order to keep the farmer’s income abreast with the rising price of land; for so long as the farmer is increasing his income as fast as the value of land is rising, he and his son will be content to remain in the community. So that the churches, for their own sakes, need to preach the gospel of “better farming.” A great economist in the East is teaching that unless the Christian farmer is a better farmer for being a Christian, his church will die out:

Second, the churches in the country must expend their efforts upon a great number of persons who are poor. In America our poor are not paupers; they are the people who do not own land and do not own productive tools. These people are increasing in the country. In this section fifteen per cent of the farmers are renters. In many parts of the state more than half of the farmers are renters. They are the most influential class morally in the community, and the future of the farming population is with them. Therefore, the business of the church is to minister to them, to help them to understand their own life and to build up their character on a basis of successful, honest farming in that community.

Among this class who do not own land should be counted also the young men and women of the community. They also are on the margin of the community; they may come or go. If the church means business it must work for the youth and the children of the community. For the community and the church of the future will be built of this timber. For this reason I believe the church must have a policy of recreation, having urged that it teach a gospel of work, I am equally sure that it must promote a discipline of play. Work is the basis of religion and play is the school of morality. The country church should have singing, dramatic entertainment and outdoor

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Children Starting Home from Model Rural School, on Campus of State Normal School at Kirksville. The wagon carries the children to and from their farm homes several miles away, over some heavy roads. It has never missed a day on account of bad roads, thus proving that transportation of school children is feasible in Missouri.



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SOME OF THE CONFERENCE SPEAKERS IN THE BACKGROUND, WITH THE MODEL RURAL SCHOOL CHILDREN IN THE FOREGROUND.



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recreation so well organized that no other institution can compete with it. If it does so it will have deep anchorage in the life of the people through the service it renders to them. For the church which has a gospel of recreation will keep the young men and women in the community and will do a great deal to solve the labor problem in the country.

In the third place, the country church must promote the improvement of the country schools. I mean that the members of the church should do this and the church itself must have an understanding of the school situation in the country. I will not speak at length of this here where others are to treat it better than I can. I want only to put myself on record as favoring the doctrine of school improvement as taught in this place.

Fourth: The country church must pay its minister enough to live on. The great trouble in the country is that farmers do not pay their ministers a living salary. Nowadays the preacher should live wholly by the gospel as the farmer lives wholly by farming, and to this end the minister should have enough every year for the support of his family, for the education of his children, and for provision against old age. This means that a systematic financial method shall be used in country churches, and without it the gospel cannot be supported in the country as, under modem conditions, it should be. We need a community leader in the country to bear his part in the building up of country life, and a self-respecting leader must be assured, through the support of his people, that he will have enough to live on.

Fifth: The preachers must live in the country. This part of the United States has no country pastors. The ministers all live in the towns and preach only in the country. This is inadequate religious service. What is the use of complaining that the farmer and the farmer’s son are moving into the towns when the leaders of that procession are preachers? In Missouri the bigger the town the more preachers live there. These men are abandoning the Christian ministry; the work of a minister is to serve, not to talk, and the man who only talks is a very poor follower of Jesus Christ. One marvels at the patience of the farmers who have stood it so long. We need a consecrated ministry who will live out in the open country among the farmers and will “preach to their condition.”

The sixth factor in this program is that churches be federated. The time is past when the churches should fight. None of them any longer expects to convert all the people to their peculiar doctrines. A church that does not expect to convert the world to its peculiarities should drop those peculiarities and exalt the things which it has in common with other churches. This means that the churches must get together and agree upon some work in common. Above all, it means that they shall cease to contend. They may never be organized in one, and I do not expect it. but they must be animated by one spirit and recognize that in following one Master they have many purposes in common.

This program means that the country church is to build a new rural civilization and to serve the working farmer in the vital needs of everyday life. For him the country community is the Kingdom of God.

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AGRICULTURE IN THE RURAL SCHOOLS.

PROFESSOR E. C. BISHOP.

1. The Exodus from Country to City and from City to Country.

The Cause — The desire of youth for opportunity. Why farm life does not appeal to the farm boys and girls.

The call to the country and the call to the city are expressions of natural desire for change from the irksome, intensive work and confinement, and from monotony to that which brings rest, change, relaxation and new interests.

No youth should be forbidden his inalienable right to a choice of vocation and avocation. We have no more right to say to every farm boy and girl: “It is your duty to become a farmer and remain on the farm,” or to the city boy and girl, “It is your duty to remain in the city and follow the vocation of your parents.”

It is to the strengthening of our citizenship and to the good of our country that many of our farm boys and girls become residents and active participants in the affairs of our cities, and it is to the benefit of our country that many boys and girls brought up in the city become residents and participants in the rural communities.

But it is our duty to provide the youth with such knowledge of the fields of life-work open to him that he may choose intelligently, and that his choice may be based upon such knowledge that his after life will not be filled with regrets that he chose unthinkingly, to adopt the plan of life which he later found was not the one from which he could have enjoyed the greatest degree of complete living.

The home life of earlier days provided—yes, required education—both theory and practice—in such principles of agriculture as were necessary to the understanding of what farm life could and must include. The early rural school provided the complement or remainder of the education required for citizenship-making in accordance with the needs of the times.

The old time farming of early days has been developed through necessity, invention and education into the science and practices of agriculture. But the old time rural school is yet here in the same old form, with but little modification. It no longer provides a complement to home training. The home has gradually left to the school the training of the child in many of the old time phases of education and living.

The new agriculture requires more head, more brains, and more knowledge than muscle in proportion to the old time ratio, in order to produce an equivalent of success, interest and enjoyment in the farm home.

2. What Agriculture Includes — Agriculture means not only the study

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of farm crops, farm animals, soils and horticulture, but it  means, in addition thereto, every item of interest or information which is concerned in the maintenance of the farm home and the farm community.

Household management or domestic science, hand skill or manual training, social and economic problems that are concerned in living a complete life on the farm — all these are factors in agricultural education.

We cannot arbitrarily legislate agriculture into the public schools and hope to secure the best results from such action. Interest on the part of the pupil is the primary requisite in the acquirement of knowledge. The real teacher begins from that point where the interest of the child is aroused until he is anxious to know more of the subject which he is being taught. He must be taught in terms of his own life and associations. The teaching of agriculture, therefore, includes all of those phases of activity and information as are necessary to take the student in his surroundings and lead him to the truths that it is desired that he should know.

3. Means of Arousing Interest in the Study of Agriculture - Strange as it may appear, the farmer was not the first to become interested in the study of agriculture as a subject. He has not always been even willing that the subject should be taught in his school to his child. This has been largely because of the failure of such farmers to see, in the study of agriculture, that which will interest and benefit his child. There have been farmers who failed to see anything in farming except drudgery and physical exertion. Such farmers have discouraged the teaching of agriculture in public schools, and their children have been led to believe that the only road to enjoyment and release from the irksome monotony of undignified, arduous toil was to seek an opening somewhere away from the farm if they were to enjoy the good things of life.

The boys’ and girls’ clubs in nearly every state in the Union have had for one of their principal objects the stimulation of an interest in the farm home in the activities of that home. Through the county superintendent and the teacher boys and girls by hundreds and by thousands have been led to give particular attention to some line of ordinary farm and home activity, through which they may be led to think and to do those things which will result in a proper appreciation on their part and the part of their parents of the value of good thinking and systematic procedure in all the duties of the home and farm.

The result has been that where the boy became interested in raising better corn, better potatoes or better poultry, and where the girl became actively interested in making better bread and in fashioning articles of wearing apparel or ornaments for the home, the parents have generally appreciated the changed attitude of the child toward his home, toward his work and toward his school, and have demanded that more of such instruction be given their children.

This has resulted in the establishment of courses of study in agriculture, domestic science and manual training in progressive communities all over the country.

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High schools are establishing these courses for the training of their students who are to become teachers in the rural schools. The normal schools are maintaining the courses in these subjects for the training of all teachers who are sent out from such institutions.

Colleges and universities are providing courses for the training of experts to fill positions in normal schools and high schools for the training of a great body of teachers, who go out every year to begin their work in the public schools of town and country.

4. What, How Much, When and Where Shall Agriculture Be Taught in the Rural Schools? — As in the beginning of many other good things, the teaching of agriculture has been done in an intermittent, irregular way, while those in charge were experimenting and searching for the best way to do it.

But the results have been most gratifying. From our earlier experimentations we have been enabled to work out courses in agriculture which J provide the teacher with sufficient direction that agriculture can, in its elementary phases, be profitably taught in every school.

The teachers who early became interested in the teaching of agriculture learned that there were many phases of home geography and nature study which they could teach to advantage, as special subjects corelated very profitably with reading, language, geography, arithmetic and other branches.

The results of these early beginnings have fully justified the claim that agriculture is the one subject offering the greatest opportunity for the stimulation of interest and for profitable application to the child, to his work in all the other common branches of learning.

Through agriculture the child has learned to read, to write, to express himself, and to solve problems in terms of his own knowledge, interest and duty.

Education has become, through the incentive of applied agricultural knowledge, an enjoyable activity of the child, and the bond of sympathy, love and co-operation between the school and the home, between work and play, between duty and pleasure, and the child has been enabled to find himself an individual, responsible being, with a positive interest in all those things which he is associated with.

5. The courses of agriculture for rural schools do not contemplate the making of a specialist in agriculture of the teacher or of the pupils. The courses call for an investigation of the plant and animal life of the community. They call for a study of the economic relations of each of these plants and animals to the life of the child, and of the community.

The courses of study contemplate the searching for the best ways of doing and for the acquirement of some definite knowledge of the common things with which the child is associated in his home relations.

What to Teach — The courses of study in agriculture should be made elastic enough that they may be readily adapted to the local community. The work in agriculture should begin with the study of those

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things which are of most importance to the community, and the economic phases of the subject should receive large first attention.

Teachers should avoid taking up first the fanciful and unrelated subjects, simply as a matter of creating temporary interest. The work should begin with studying the useful, which in this part of the country would include corn, potatoes, weeds, insects, soil, rotation of crops, dairying, clover, alfalfa, knot tying, garden vegetables, poultry, the canning and preserving of fruits, bread making, sewing, spraying, aid to the sick, removing stains, the beautifying of the home, etc. All these subjects should, as they are taken up, form a basis for language work, arithmetic work, geography, orthography, reading, writing, drawing, and economics.

The teacher does not need to know everything about agriculture, in order to teach one thing. He is not teaching the practice of agriculture so far as it applies to holding a plow in the ground or milking a cow. The pupils get this practice at home, but the teacher can teach some things of the science of agriculture, some of the facts as related to the practice of agriculture, which will enable the child to get from his practice the greater degree of satisfaction, which comes from interest, success and enjoyment hi his work.

The proper teaching of one subject of agriculture can be made to vitalize the entire work of the school. It brings to the work of the child in school a motive which leads him to his very best effort.

The home child is trained when we develop, through his interest, activity which results in an increased desire for more knowledge and more activity, leading to the greater development of the whole child, to whom it brings the high degree of intellectual development, moral development, spiritual development and economic usefulness.

7. The Consolidated School — The consolidated school in which a number of rural districts unite and form a graded school and employ teachers, especially equipped to teach agriculture, domestic science and manual training, have in a great many communities enabled the children of such com¬munities to obtain the quality of education which places them on an equivalent basis, so far as educational privileges are concerned with their city cousins.

But there are many rural communities where the patrons refuse to give up the old-time, one-room rural school which served so well in its day, but which has failed altogether to. keep up with the rapid progress of the advancement in all other lines of activity and human interest.

In communities which refuse to change from the old order, the best we can do is to ask the teacher to take up the study of Agriculture to the best advantage possible, by eliminating from the other common branches all those parts which are simply technical requirements leading to nowhere, that the child has good reason to expect to go, and utilizing a reasonable portion of the time for the study of some of the phases of agriculture which are of greatest importance to the community in the school district.



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8. Special Winter Schools — In communities where the consolidated rural school is not a possibility, we yet have a means of united effort by which the big boys and girls of the farm, who are able to attend school only a short term during the winter, may be provided with a schooling which will bring to them just what they individually need at that particular time, in order that they may make the best use of the time they do have for education and at the same time get that education which will enable them to apply themselves with greatest profit to the duties of the home and the social life of the community.

This special winter school, as it has already been organized in a number of places in Iowa, provides a building and a teacher at some convenient point, so that the big boys and girls, who have finished the work of the eighth grade and cannot continue in a regular high school, and those of the big boys and girls who have been unable to finish the common school course may get just such work as their needs require.

The course in Language deals largely with the training by which the pupil learns to express himself in terms of good English.

The course in Bookkeeping includes the knowledge and skill in executing the ordinary business forms, such as notes, checks, drafts, articles of agreement, leases, the keeping of simple accounts, etc.

The course in Arithmetic will include the working out of problems applied to the farm and home. Such problems as the child is liable to meet in his everyday activities. How to measure hay stacks, how to ascertain the quantity of grain in a wagon box, bin, corn crib, pile or other form. Measurements pertaining to all the relations of home interests in the house and out-of-doors should constitute a very strong portion of the work in Arithmetic.

The course in Agriculture would include elementary instruction and laboratory practice in the farm crops, soils, milk and its products, farm animals, spraying, grafting, poultry, weeds, injurious and beneficial insects, common ailments of farm animals, and the best methods of doing all the work to be done in the farm life.

In some communities this would be a separate building erected at a point convenient to those districts uniting in the special school. It may be two districts, or all the districts of the township; the schools so uniting; maintain their regular course of study for the eight lower grades, sending] only larger boys and girls, as before mentioned, to the special winter school.

In one of these schools which I have in mind, the building provided by the districts united, which included all the districts of the township, was a simple one-room building attached to the school building, which is nearest to the center of the township. The special teacher employed is a young man whose education in Agriculture and Manual Training fits him especially to lead the young people in the study of Agriculture, as well as the other branches.

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This special winter school enables many ambitious and deserving boy and girls to obtain an education under conditions most favorable to themselves and to the community. It enables these young people to discover themselves, to discover new relations to their home work and interests, and enables them to gain an outlook which will lead them to the proper choice of future activity and to a realization of some of the best things in store for them, in their own home and in their own community, which, in turn, makes better citizens and a better country.

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VITALIZING THE RURAL RELIGIOUS FORCES.

REV. MATTHEW B. MCNUTT.

Thousands of country churches of our great Commonwealth have died in recent years! Thousands and thousands of others are in a dying condition. In the state of Illinois, alone, there are 500 abandoned country church buildings. The farmers are using them for hay barns, corn cribs, tool sheds, etc. The state of Missouri has, today, 1,200 vacant country churches, and this seems to be the story all over the United States. There are exceptions, of course, where the rural church is active and fulfilling its mission, but the rural condition is alarming. Country churches that were once flourishing and well sustained are now languishing and seem to have lost their hold on the people.

Our problem is how to bring these churches to life again.

The explanation that is commonly given of the decline of these churches; is that the original members have either died or moved away. But are there not just as many people in the community as ever, and more? Yes, but these are not religiously inclined or they belong to some other church society.

Now the life of a church ought not to depend upon any particular set of people. The reason for the existence of the church is based upon the needs of people. And wherever human beings are found the church ought to live and prosper if it is doing its real work.

Look into one of these dwindling and ineffective country churches, and we find that preaching and Sunday School on the Sabbath, with an occasional pay sociable between times, is practically all that is attempted. Many country churches do not even have regular Sunday preaching and Sundays School.

At best, the program for the average rural church is one of worship with the important part of work or service left out. The flock is fed—in other words—but not exercised. And herein lies the cause of the decline of the rural church in my judgment. "Faith without works is dead, being alone,” the scripture says, and worship without works is no less dead than faith.

Jesus, the head of the church, and our example, worshipped in the temple on the Sabbath day, as was His custom, and preached and taught the people, but He also "went about doing good.” His whole activity may be summed up in the three-fold service of preaching, teaching and healing. This three-fold ministry touches quite completely all that human needs require.

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It was the “going about doing good” that drew men to Him far more than His preaching or teaching. ’Tis true, some followed Him for the loaves and fishes, but, nevertheless, we read that wherever He performed His works of mercy “many believed.”

His teaching, in this regard, corresponded with His Practice. He said that He “came not to be ministered unto but to minister.”

“He came to seek and to save the lost.”

“The whole need not a physician, but the sick.” To this end He “dined with Publicans and Sinners.” When a dispute arose among His disciples concerning who was the greatest among them, He made the standard—efficient ministry. “He that would be greatest among you—let him be your servant.”

Again He said: “He that saveth his life shall lose it. But he that loseth it for My sake and the gospel shall keep it unto life everlasting.”

The idea that the farmers commonly get of the church is, that it is an institution to be served. The question is ever asked, “What will you do for the church?” until the church is really looked upon as a sort of a parasite; men can not see any practical good that it does. It is regarded as something apart from life.

Our Savior said that He was among the people “as one that serveth.” And if the church is to represent Him, it must be in the community “as one that serveth.”

You ask why the country church today must emphasize social service and organize work along practical lines when it used to fulfill its mission s mply by preaching? It is because conditions in the country have changed materially. In former days the farmer was confined to his own neighborhood. He had no way of traveling save on foot or in the lumber wagon. He made his own amusements and recreations. He was satisfied with the life which his community afforded. The simple life he lived was highly conducive to social service, but he was naturally prompted to it. When a man fell sick, his neighbors went and took care of him, taking turns in sitting up with him at night. If he died, his friends performed the last service of washing the body and closing the eyes. It was a very common thing for a farmer’s wife to go to her neighbor’s, taking her knitting or sewing, and visit all day, remaining for dinner and supper. In the winter time the farmer would hitch his horses to the sled and take his whole family to a neighbor’s to spend the evening. After supper the children would play games in the kitchen and the old folks would sit in the parlor and visit until bed time. Now the visiting is done up quickly over the telephone; a trained nurse takes care of the sick; the undertaker is called out to take charge of a corpse; a caterer from town comes to feed the bam raisers. A powerful machine husks the com, doing away with the husking bee. The horse and buggy or the automobile or the trolley takes the country folk to the amusement park to be entertained. So it is up to the country church of today to adjust itself to this new order and get into the game or it will be forsaken.

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A fellow minister in a neighboring state complained bitterly to me that the lodges and the secret societies were taking the people away from the church. Why? Because the lodges were ministering to the sick, caring for the poor and helpless, comforting the broken-hearted, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, hauling fuel to those that were shivering from cold in open hovels. “Inasmuch as ye do it unto the least of these, ye do it unto Me,” said the Saviour.

The rural church or other religious body in a community must show itself friendly if it would have friends. It must minister to the needs of the people, it must spend itself in helpful service, if it would commend itself to men—if it would prosper and live.

Here, then, is the principle, the rural church must lose its life if it would save it. It must be in the community as one that serveth.

But there is a country minister that says, “I knew all that before—, how am I to carry out this principle in every day life and practice?” This great normal school is noted in these rural life conferences for its insistence: upon practical, concrete examples and illustrations of what has actually been: done. So I will give some ways in which the pastor of a country church may make religion vital to his people and the church a real live force in the community.

He should make much of the anniversaries in the community and church
life.

It is the minister’s privilege to do the marrying. This ceremony is often passed off lightly and gaily without any realization of its significance. But it means the beginning of a new home—the most important institution in the land. The minister misses one of the greatest opportunities he has for doing good if he passes by this most sacred and solemn occasion without suggesting to this young husband and wife the importance of starting that new home right. They are in a receptive, sensitive state of mind and the right word spoken at such a time will do untold good.

The first anniversary of the wedding day comes. A letter from the pastor on this day will be a happy surprise and will reinforce his suggestions of a year ago. Try it.

Then when the baby comes, how delighted are the new father and mother! They will listen then to words of counsel as at no other time. A word fitly spoken at such opportune times is like “apples of gold in pictures of silver.”

Another crisis in the life of any home is when death enters and takes away a loved one. The minister should be on hand to speak words of comfort and cheer both before and after the funeral. The lonely days that follow the funeral are the hardest for the bereaved. A wise minister at such a time may endear himself to the hearts of people and win them to the Saviour and to the church by his sympathy.

And in sickness, too, a minister won a whole family to the church—a family that, indeed, had formerly been prejudiced against the church for

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three generations, simply by showing a genuine interest in them in their affliction.

In times of trouble, also, the glad hand is always a benediction. “Afflictions do not rise up out of the ground”—they are for a purpose—a good purpose.

A certain church rallied around a good family that had been “overtaken in a fault” and restored them completely, and saved a young woman from a life of shame.

When a church once gets a reputation in a community for helping the helpless, for befriending the friendless, for showing mercy to the poor, for rendering a cheerful, loving, helpful service to all in need, there’s no question about it becoming a church full of life—a church that will command the respect, the co-operation, and the support of everybody.

The pastor must train his people in the art of Christian helpfulness and service. Like priest—like people. Here is the great advantage of a pastor living side by side with his people in a community. He can then have opportunity to LIVE the gospel before them. And this is the most effective way of all of preaching it.

The church has been emphasizing to its own hurt the beautiful city described in the Revelation—the city with golden streets and gates of precious stones—the city with no pain nor sickness, nor crying, nor night. I believe with all my heart in this future, wonderfully great and grand city, but the more I see of life the more I am convinced that the way to the Holy City is through a new earth here and now.

“The Sweet By and By” seen by faith in a land far off is all very well—a great thought to contemplate. But it can not atone for bad sanitation and poisonous living conditions. It cannot avail for the violation of the laws of hygiene and health and for the breaking of the commandments.

An aged lady was suffocating and ailing in a dark, stuffy, ill-ventilated room, at the same time trying to console herself and others of the family, suffering from the same unwholesome conditions that by and by all these pains and aches would be taken away in “the better land.” Her pastor called on business, and sizing up the situation, had the courage to suggest to the aged saint that a little ventilation and common sense would bring health, comfort and happiness here and now. The suggestion was taken kindly and followed for a year, when health was brought to a whole sickly family.

A mother was killing her two weeks’ old baby by feeding it unboiled cow’s milk. Her pastor discovered it and showed her the proper way to prepare the food. The baby got all right and grew to be a strong, healthy, little boy.

I have emphasized the healing side—the curing side—but the saving process goes on no less truly on all sides of human nature, with the teaching and preaching as well.

Make the church minister to the people, let it lose itself in holy, practical service and it will be alive and thrive mightily.

This is the way to give vitality to all the country churches.

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WHY THE BOY LEAVES THE FARM.

REV. E. F. EASTMAN, Field Investigator.

Trailing the usual clouds of glory as he comes, a little boy is born on the farm. He is a chubby little rascal with fat arms and fat legs and pudgy little fingers and toes. His head is pink with promise; his eyes are the blue of the open sky; his lungs—well, he fills them with good country air and tries them out. They work finely. The experiment has such a fascination for him that he tries it again and again throughout the day, stopping only for refreshment. The days go by and the little man grows. It is not long before he is crawling on the floor, teasing the dog and trying to pick up the cat by the tail. A few days more and he is walking. Out of doors now, face to face with the God of the open air. Romping around the house and barn lot and out into the orchard with sisters and brothers—no boy in all the world has a greater opportunity to develop a strong healthy body. The horses and colts, the cows and the calves, the pigs and the chickens, the birds and butterflies and bees, the grass and the flowers and trees—these are his playmates; and the sunshine and the breeze, the hills and the river and the fleecy clouds—these are his nurses. And oh, how happy he is!

Look at him again when he is six years old. He is dressed in a pair of overalls and part of a shirt. His hat is on the back of his head. He is standing in his father’s wagon driving his father’s team down the lane, he puckers his mouth in an attempt to whistle, but he can’t whistle, for he has to smile—he is so proud. He is the proudest boy in America.

Three years go by, he is nine years old. Look at him again:

“Noon-time an’ June-time, down around the river!
Glean out o’ sight o’ home, an’ skulkin’ under kivver
Of the sycamores, jack-oaks, an’ swamp-ash an' ellum—
Idies all so jumbled up, you kin hardly tell ’em—
Tired, you know, but lovin’ it, an’ smilin’ jes’ to think ’at
Any sweeter tiredness you’d farly want to drink it!
Tired o’ fishin’ — tired o’ fun — line out slack an’ slacker—
All you want in all the world’s a little more tobacker!

Hungry, but a-hidin’ it, er jes’ a-not a-keerin’:—
King-fisher gittin’ up an’ skootin’ out o’ hearin’;
Snipes on the t’other side, where the County Ditch is,
Wadin’ up an’ down the aidge like they’d rolled their britches!
Old turkle on the root kindo-sorto drappin’
Intoo th’ worter like de don’t know how it happen!
Worter, shade an’ all so mixed, don’t know which you’d orter
Say: th’ worter in the shadder — shadder in the worter!

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Rural Sociology Club, Summer Term, 1910-1911.—Top Row, reading left to right: Emma Hesse, Fay Porter, Lizzie McReynolds, Lillie Montgomery, E. A. Wright, Ella Wisdom, Blanche M. Hoerrmann, Lenora Clapham, Nora Adlesperger, Rosa Conrad. Second Row: Leo Petree, E. A. Sparling, Bertha Fife, Sadie M. Walters, C. C. Cokerham, Tina Frazier, Sylvia L. Nichols, C. C. McClanahan, Mrs. C. C. McClanahan, Ethel Perryman, Lula May Bruce, Grace Hoyt, Mabel Neff, Darwin McGee, G. W. Davis, Noel H. Petree. Third Row. C. A. Smith, Myrtle Foster, Lucy N. Carr, Corinne Lyon, Nellie Proctor, Opal S. Meeks, Lawrence L. Lafrentz, Marie Turner Harvey, C. L. Gilson, Etta Lowry, Willa Newland, Ola Clapham, Agnes Nye, Beulah Carter, Minnie Fremgen, Nora Craghead, Ernest Hamilton, M. F. Cross. Fourth Row: Seaman Schrock, Vernie Bailey, Fannie McReynolds, Clella Farmer, Emory Gooch, Grace Temple, Arzetta Frazier, Harold W. Foght, Pearl Netherton, Theodora Netherton, Minnie Sawyer, Addie Porter, Allie Conrad, Olga Duncan, Lillie D. Tuttle, H. L. Shepherd. Bottom Row: Lois Bohon, Icis Edwards, Elizabeth Campbell, J. C. Williams, Ruth Pooley, Ovel St. Clair, Callie Thomas, Bessie Jones,



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When our use of this world is over and we make room for
Others, may we not leave anything ravished by our greed
Or spoiled by our ignorance, but may we hand on out
Common heritage fairer and sweeter through our
Use of it, undiminished in fertility and joy.

Rauschenbusch.

Courtesy of the Country Church and Country Life Department of the Presbyterian Church.



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Somebody hollerin’—’way around the bend in
Upper Fork—where yer eye kin jes’ ketch the endin’
Of the shiney wedge o’ wake some muss-rat’s a-makin’
With that pesky nose o’ his! Then a sniff o’ bacon,
Corn-bread an’ ‘dock-greens—an’ little Dave a-shinnin’
’Crost the rocks an’ mussel-shells, a-limpin’ an’ a-grinnin’,
With yer dinner fer ye, an’ a blessin’ from the giver,
Noon-time an’ June-time down around the river!”

Twelve years pass; look at him again. He is standing in front of the old home, a suit case in his hand, taking farewell of the old folks. Just outside the gate the hired man is waiting with the team to take him to the railroad station. He is the last of the children; the others have gone before him, two into the city and one to cheaper land in the West, and now he is going, too. His mother’s hard, cracked hands are arouiid his neck, her tears are on his cheek. Her heart is breaking, “Why, why must you go? Why must you leave me?” The old man speaks up in a voice that vibrates with an emotion he is almost ashamed of. “Son, you had better not go. I’ll give you a good job here on the farm. I’ll pay you twenty-two dollars a month.” The boy shakes his head. “Thanks Dad, I can’t, I’ve got to go.” And he takes his mother’s arms from around his neck, shakes his father’s hand, climbs into the wagon beside the hired man and away he goes toward the city. Father watches the wagon along the toad and out of sight in the distance, and the road seems like the road for the rest of the old man’s life—to pass on through the long afternoon and stretch away to the night. Mother’s head is bowed on the gate post and her shoulders are shaking with the sobs she can’t control. “Why, why must he go?”

That is the question we are to try to answer this morning. Why does the boy leave the farm? I believe there are five reasons and they must be laid to the doors of the three great institutions that have shaped the boy’s life thus far—the school, the home and the church.

The first reason is this: The school has prepared the hoy for the town rather than for the farm. When the boy was six or seven years old he was sent to school; he tramped a mile and a half every morning to a little one-room school building. That building was painted once every fifteen years, its roof leaked, it had no foundation. The weatherboarding was torn from it in two or three places. The spouting that ran down to the unfiltered cistern swayed and crooked itself in spasmodic curves from eaves to cistern top. The playground itself was an acre of hilly land that had been donated for school purposes because it was good for nothing else. It was overgrown with brush and quite uncared for. There was no attempt at beautification, not a flower bed or a garden of any sort. There was no apparatus for play. To be sure there was a rude baseball ground, but first base was in a valley and third base on a hill and between the two was a minature mountain system. Inside the school he took his place beside another boy, on the same seat. Around him were children of all grades, from first to eighth. The room was bare of

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decoration except for pictures cut from newspapers and magazines. It was without ventilation. The lighting was from two sides, which cast cross shadows on his books. His teacher was a girl whose preparation had consisted of a common school education and one or two years in high school or normal; she had never taught in this district before and probably never would again. She received a salary of thirty-four dollars a month. At the close of February a new teacher was employed for the Spring term, three months at twenty-five dollars a month. And what was the boy taught there? He was taught reading, writing and arithmetic, spelling, geography and history—all very good. But what was there in all this to prepare him for life on the farm? His history dealt with battle’s and sieges and cities. His arithmetic taught him how to keep books for the city. His geography was written around the cities. His readers were filled with stories of heroes who had left the farm and made good in the^ city. His teacher had been to the city a few times and when she wished to entertain her pupils she told them of the: wonderful things of the city. Until just a few years ago there was not a single course in the whole eight years’ curriculum that tended to keep the boy on the farm—no course that taught him that agriculture was as great a calling as any other, that the farmers make up the backbone of this country Nothing there that made him see the deeper significance of farming and its economic place at the head of all the professions. Nothing there to lead him to an appreciation of the beauty and the poetry in the farm. Nothing there to teach him how to make his father’s farm more productive. Nothing there to teach him about the life and the growth of the things he worked with and handled every day—corn, wheat, oats, hay and garden vegetables. And the school has prepared the boy for the city in another way, by being a poorer school than the city affords. He has been to the city himself, he has seen the city school building, built of brick or stone, clean, well-kept, provided with level playgrounds and playground apparatus. Each grade there has a room to itself, a teacher on a fairly good salary and curriculum that prepares the children for the life they are expected to live—city life. Can you blame the boy for wanting to go where people build such schools for the children?

The second reason is this: That the boy has not had sufficient opportunities for getting together with young people. The only opportunities he has had for such intercourse have been an occasional base ball game at the village, an occasional dance at some home or in a lodge hall, three or four picnics a summer, two or three ice cream socials given by the church in summer, and a few card games that he has had to sneak off to the bam loft to play. When the church, or the school or lodge, has provided him with a means of recreation, it has done so not for the sake of the boy, but for the sake of filling its own pockets. Neither home, nor school, nor church has seemed to think that the boy had a right to play, or to mingle with his fellows more than was necessitated by his everyday work. Neither school nor home nor church had provided any club or organization, literary, athletic or social, for the boy’s benefit.

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And the third reason is: The drudgery of farm life. Let me quote you from the letters of two prominent citizens of Knox County, who were born and raised on the farm and who left the farm for the city and who have written to me on this subject of drudgery. The first letter is from Mr. J. C. Dorian, Ex-Prosecuting Attorney of Knox County:

"The boy’s hour to rise,” he says, "was about four or four-thirty. Then feeding and milking until seven-thirty. Then breakfast. Then work in the field until eleven-thirty. Then after spending at least thirty minutes in caring for his team he had dinner, went back to work at one and worked in the field until seven-thirty. Then chores until about eight-thirty or nine o’clock, when he was given to understand that he must go to bed at once so that he would be able to do a good day’s work on the morrow. He was forbidden to go to any socials or entertainments of any kind during the week days in farming season for the reason that it interferred with his work and on Sunday all innocent amusements were forbidden because they were considered wrong. The boy was good for only one thing and that was the same thing the horse was good for — to work. If the horse showed signs of fatigue it was allowed to rest and the boy was not allowed to get the horse too warm; but it seemed that no one was interested whether the boy got too warm or not. If he complained about his lot and wished to spend some little time in innocent amusement he was told that work was good for a boy and was referred to some worthless bum as an example of idleness. Particular pains were taken to see that there was no season of the year when he was not supplied with plenty of work. The country school was a term of six months, the school house was generally the oldest and most unattractive house in the district, and the cheapest teacher they could find was employed. The six months term was entirely too long for him to be allowed to attend regularly so he was often not allowed to start until after corn gathering. Each morning during the school term he had to rise very early and do a half day’s chores before school time. After school he was supposed to be at home at once and do another half day’s work before bed time, but he had also to do the tasks which the teacher had assigned him, and neglect of which would involve a whipping.”

The second is from a prominent educator in this part of the state, who says:

"At home we generally arose about four-thirty a. m. We spent the hour and a half till breakfast in feeding, milking, and getting up the horses and harnessing them. Breakfast at six a. m. Six-thirty to eleven-thirty, work in the field with the team. In summer it was plowing with a walking plow (I never used a riding plow at home because it was thought it ‘pulled a little harder’ than the walking plow). In doing a day’s work plowing we generally walked from sixteen to twenty miles. Eleven-thirty a. m. to one p. m., noon. At least thirty minutes of this time was taken up in caring for the team. One to seven p. m. work in the field. Seven-thirty, supper. From supper until eight forty-five, or nine, we did the evening chores which were similar to the morning chores.

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“The boy when he began to use a team always got the ‘gentle one,’ and that meant it was the poorest team on the place. I remember my first three-horse team. One horse was twenty-four years old, blind and weighed 1,300 pounds; one was nine years old, a pony, and as lazy as they make them and weighed 800 pounds; the third was fifteen years old, had one eye and was a very free going, nervous mare. We plowed the first half day with difficulty and the longer we worked together the more we all realized we were not congenial spirits. The lazy pony shirked more every day and the one-eyed mare grew more and more nervous at being held back, while the big blind horse in the middle grew so confused that he didn’t know anything. We kept it up for three days until the furrows became so crooked that a snake could not follow them, then the boy behind the plow balked. Those three days were the most miserable I have ever spent—yet the team was ‘gentle.’

“At threshing time the boy always got to work in the dustiest place around the machine. * * * The boy generally stayed on the farm and did the manual labor while the father did the work that took him away from home. If the boy went to some social gathering in the evening, during the busy season, he was told that it did not pay to run around and the lesson was continued the next morning by making him get up just a little earlier than usual.

“In the fifteen years since I was twenty-one, much of this has passed away. Riding machinery is being used now, improvements have made threshing much easier and children are not raised as strictly now as they used to be. As I look back over the past I can see fault in my ‘raising’ and that was that I was never trained in actual business. I was never permitted to buy or sell any stock or to trade or traffic in any way; even swapping parcels at school was forbidden. My home training fitted me for a laborer rather than for a business man. I think this fault in a general way exists today.”

The professor adds in a postscript the statement that he does not wish to be quoted as stating that drudgery drove him from the farm, and that he doesn’t think that the drudgery of farm life will drive any but the most worthless fellows away.

And the fourth reason is: That the boy has little or no opportunity to get land of his own. Through all these years he has owned nothing of any value that was his and his alone. He has had a calf, a few pigs and perhaps a horse. He has had enough money to keep him in clothes and allow him an occasional trip to the home of a relative or to the city. That is all. He is almost of age now. For a year or two he has been “keeping company” with a little girl not far away. The only prospect the farm offers him for setting up for himself is the prospect it offers to the hired man, twenty-two dollars a month and whatever else is given to him as a wedding present by his parents. If he is content to wait until his father dies he will probably receive his share of the old farm. But can you blame the boy for wanting

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(Page 28a)



If we in this country maintain the
Fertility of out land, we shall have
A numerous, well-fed, and well-clothed 
people; if our land is allowed to
deteriorate, there will be a sparse and
hungry population.”

C. R. VanHise

Courtesy of C. C. and C. L. D. of the Presbyterian Church.



(Page 28b)



MAP OF MISSOURI
SHOW-ME COUNTIES SURVEYED



(Page 29)



to make good by himself, “to come through on his own,” to have that sense that what he gets he is earning rather than receiving it as an inheritance?

And the last reason is: That the city and the town offer him the things he misses on the farm. They offer him opportunities for getting together with young people, motion picture shows, parks, theatres, Y. M. C. A., gymnasium, foot ball, basket ball, bowling alleys and lecture courses; they offer him opportunities for broadening his mind and cultivating his manners; they offer him positions that pay what look to be good wages. To be sure the boy is often milled—the glamour of city life deceives him. He often gets into bad company, wanders away from the ideals his mother and father have taught him, takes no advantage of the opportunities for education offered and wakes up to find that he has simply exchanged his position as an agricultural laborer for that of a city roustabout. He finds fifty dollars a month in the city is no better than twenty-two dollars a month on a farm, and he is no nearer setting up housekeeping with the little girl back home than he was the day he left. But all this must be charged to the sins of the city and not to the credit of the farm.

These are the reasons why the boy leaves the farm. Mother’s tears and father’s offer of a job cannot keep him. These are the reasons why the old folks are left alone—why they turn away from the gate and look out to the orchard where the children used to play.

“The old farm home is Mother’s yet and mine,
And filled it is with plenty and to spare,
But we are lonely here in life’s decline,
Though fortune smiles around us everywhere;
We look across the gold Of the harvests, as of old—
The corn, the fragrant clover, and the hay;
But most we turn our gaze,
As with eyes of other days,
To the orchard where the children used to play.

O, from our life’s full measure And rich hoard of worldly treasure
We often turn our weary eyes away,
And hand in hand we wander Down the old path winding yonder
To the orchard where the children used to play.
Our sloping pasture-1 and are filled with herds;
The bam and granary bins are bulging o’er;
The grove’s a paradise of singing birds—
The woodland brook leaps laughing by the door;

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(Page 30)



Yet lonely, lonely still,
Let us prosper as we will,
Our old hearts seem so empty every way—
We can only through a mist 
See the faces we have kissed 
In the orchard where the children used to play.”

There is no panacea for the problem. Boys will continue to leave the farm as long as farm life is less attractive to them than town life; as long as the schools prepare for the town; as long as they have no opportunity for getting together with young people; as long as they have no prospect for owning land. For bringing about these changes we must look to the same great institutions at whose doors we lay the blame of the present state of affairs, the school, the home and the church. If the school is to prepare for the farm it must see to it that it is as good a school as the town school. Its teachers must be as highly paid, its building must be as good a building, its playground must be as good a playground and it must teach subjects that will prepare the boy to manage a farm and to take pride in a farm. The boy’s home must be an attractive home, attractive in its physical beauty and in its human relationships. Father must think about something besides “buying more land, to grow more com, to feed more pigs, to buy more land, to grow more corn, to feed more pigs.” He must look upon his boy as something other than a farm implement; when one of his cows comes fresh he must not think of getting more pigs for fear of wasting the milk on the children. His mother’s life must be an easier life with less of drudgery and more of pleasure, and more time to devote to the moral as well as the physical welfare of her family.

And the church. The church must put more emphasis on the life of the boy here and now. At present the country church is doing little more than holding meetings and taking collections. Ninety-two per cent of the country churches of Adair, Knox and Sullivan counties are open but three hours a month, except for weekly Sunday School. Ninety-nine cents out of every dollar that they spend is spent upon keeping up their own organization. I do not mean to belittle the service that the country church has rendered to the farmer, it has sought him through forests and across deserts. It has built innumerable little white churches on the country cross-roads for him to worship in. It has baptized his children, taught them, married them and buried them. It has striven to save their souls—striven earnestly and valiantly, sometimes heroically. It has done everything in its power to pave the farmer’s road to glory land; but it has paid so woefully little attention to his road to the nearest village. It has given great sums to alleviate poverty but given so little thought to the causes that make for poverty—the American system of tenantry, the robbing of the soil of its fertility, and the stripping it of its trees. It has pictured the beauties of Heavenly mansions and taken no account of the building in which men and women must spend lives here and now.

30



(Page 31)



It has been a faithful steward in caring for the Elysian Fields; but it has allowed the bluegrass fields and corn fields and wheat fields to be squandered with prodigal hand. It has made a glorious and untiring fight to teach the children God’s word in the Bible; but it has left God’s word in the rivers and hills, the grass and the trees, without prophet, witness or defender. The time is ripe for change. Let the country church take an interest in the every-day affairs of the farmer, his crops, his stock, his houses and yards and barns, his machinery, his roads, his market, his school, his lodge and his recreations. The spires of the little cross-road church may still point to the skies, but let its footstone lie on the commonplace work of the day. Let it preach the “worth of the native earth.” Let it look upon American land as holy land, to be guarded as a sacred trust from the Almighty for his children of future generations. Let it throw open its doors to the farmer’s boys, not three hours a month, but three hours a day. Let it offer them a chance to play, to mingle with each other and to broaden their lives in literary, athletic and social activities. Let it champion the cause of the young men and save them not only for Paradise, but for America and the American farm.

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(Page 32)



THE RELIGIOUS CONDITIONS AND ACTIVITIES IN SULLIVAN, ADAIR AND KNOX COUNTIES, MISSOURI.

REV. ANTON T. BOISEN, FIELD INVESTIGATOR.

Introduction — My task is to tell you as concisely as I can in the twenty minutes at my disposal, the main results of our investigation into the religious conditions and activities in Sullivan, Adair and Knox Counties, Missouri.

The Area Surveyed — The area surveyed covers 1719 square miles, all in a solid block (see map of Missouri), with the exception of about 250 square miles of hilly country covered with small oak and hickory, where the farms are generally small and poor, and the houses largely unpainted shanties; this region is characterized by prosperous farms and comfortable looking houses. The people are of the best American stock; there are scarcely any foreigners. The early settlers came chiefly from Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana and Illinois. The land is now worth, on an average, about $50 an acre and the average farm contains 160 acres. The land and improvements alone, therefore, are worth about $8,000, and machinery and live stock will bring the total capital up to more than $10,000. The average income may be estimated at $800, a fifth of which, however, goes to pay the farm mortgage. Most of the farms are operated by the owners themselves, only fifteen per cent being operated by tenants. With the exception of Kirksville, which derives much of its wealth from the students who flock to it, and of a few mining communities, in the northwestern part of Adair County, the whole population is ultimately dependent upon agriculture for its support. In general, therefore, the region surveyed is a prosperous agricultural community, and the population is an unusually homogeneous one, representative of the best American blood.

The Outstanding Results — There are four outstanding conclusions which have impressed themselves upon us in regard to the religious conditions in this region.

The FIRST CONCLUSION is that there is a deep popular interest in the church and in religion; this is in striking contrast to the conditions which were so familiar to us in New York City and also in other places which have come under my personal observation. Get on the train for a short trip and very often you will hear two men on the seat-in front of you discussing their church and its condition, or “Brother So-and-So’s” preaching; people talk of the church and of religion in the same matter-of-fact way that they talk of the crops or of the weather.

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(Page 32a)



WHO ARE IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOLS
83 Sunday Schools in Knox, Adair and Sullivan Counties, Mo.

MEMBERSHIP IN —

COUNTRY

Teachers: 145 = 7.4%
59% 41%

Adults
557 = 28.5%
55.4% 44.6%

Young People
14-21
652 = 33.3%
56.5% 43.5%

Children
602 = 30.8%

VILLAGES

Teachers: 167 = 8.7%
62.9% 37.1%

Adults
461 = 24.0%
55% 45%

Young People
14-21
516 = 26.8%
63% 37%

Children
779 = 40.5%

TOWNS (OVER 750)

Teachers: 187 = 6.8%
69% 31%

Adults 
612 = 22.2%
61% 39%

Young People
14-21
763 = 27.7%
63% 37%

Children
1193 = 43.3%

Males over 14.
Females and children under 14.

Diagram I.



(Page 32b)



RECORD OF CHURCHES
FOR THE LAST TEN YEARS.
Knox, Adair, and Sullivan Co.’s, Mo.

GROWING

26% 44% 30% 26% 

STATIONARY

8% 50% 30% 20%

LOSING

24% 53% 39% 8%

DYING

19% 65% 31% 4%

DEAD

11% 86% 14%

ORGANIZED WITHING 10 YEARS

12% 46% 46% 8%

COUNTRY CHURCHES
VILLAGE CHURCHES
TOWN CHURCHES

Diagram II.



(Page 33)



This impression which one gets from chance conversations is corroborated by the figures on church attendance and church membership, especially in the country districts which include the bulk of the population. One-fourth of the entire population are church members. Forty-two per cent attend church well, sixty-eight per cent more or less, and thirty-two per cent not at all. Of those who attend, a large proportion are men and a large proportion young people. With all its limitations, the country church, in this region, is getting hold of the men—it is getting hold of the young people to a degree which is seldom true of the city church.

The explanation of the great interest in the church in the country districts is to be found very largely in the importance of the country church as a social center. There are no competing institutions, no Granges, few ball games, no theaters, no women’s clubs. I was talking not long ago with a very intelligent seventeen-year-old boy, the son of a well-to-do farmer. I asked him what recreations there were for himself and his friends. He thought a minute and then answered, “Well, there is church on Sunday and then there is Sunday School and then—” but he had trouble in thinking of anything else. The boy spoke seriously and he didn’t know that I was a minister, either. His answer was really true. There is a sad lack of recreation facilities in most of the country neighborhoods, and church on Sunday is really a social event of great importance. In one little village I found that the young people actually attended prayer-meeting on Wednesday because, it was explained, they wanted something to do. It was noticeable, too, that the churches with the most vigorous social life, were the strongest churches, and the best moral conditions were found there. The strongest country church I found was one where for more than twenty-five years it had been the custom of the young people to go off together every Sunday after church or Sunday School to some one place for dinner and a good time, and also to meet together at some home once or twice a month, during the week. In that community I was told by two different men, whose word I think I can trust, that for twenty years there had not been a case of a girl going wrong, and that none of the young men or boys there had ever been known to be drunk.

The SECOND CONCLUSION is that most of this region is badly over-churched, the congestion centering in the villages, but extending, also to the country districts. Twenty-three villages, with an average population of 232, have an average of 2.4 churches per village. Four of them have four churches each. Including a liberal amount of country district as tributary to the village churches, this gives an average of 292 people—men, women and children—for each church. The country churches are still worse off; there is one church to each 11.2 square miles. This means that an average country church draws from a radius of about 1.7 miles and has a constituency of 218 people, including men, women and children. The cause of this over-churching is, of course, denominational divisions, and the result you all know. It is a weakening of the religious forces which makes effective work out of the question. (See diagram II.)

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(Page 34)



The THIRD CONCLUSION is that the country church in this region has no pastors, only preachers. Out of 83 country churches only three have resident ministers. Out of fifty-five village churches, only thirteen have resident ministers. (See diagram III.) Most of these churches have preaching only one Sunday in each month. Of the eighty-three country churches, ninety-two per cent have preaching only one-fourth of the time, none full time. Of the fifty-five village churches, seventy-seven per cent have preaching only one- fourth time, twenty-one half time and only two per cent (one church) full time. (See diagram IV.)

These are startling facts. The country minister in this region, therefore, is not a part of the country community. He has no permanent interest there; he is not a leader in its affairs. He lives in a nearby town or village, comes out and talks on Sundays and then goes away again. Most of his people see him only an hour or two a month and that in the pulpit. Such a condition of affairs is bad for both people and minister.

The people are deprived of competent religious leadership. The Sunday ; Schools, which take the place of the church service, during the remaining three Sundays of the month, are for the most part wretchedly conducted. Outside of three churches in Kirksville, we did not find a single Sunday School which used graded lessons; they all use the unpedagogical uniform lessons, and most of the teaching which we were able to hear was mere parrot work, question and answer taken from the lesson leaves. The church buildings, moreover, are for the most part neglected; they are usually well painted, but there is little attempt at beautification. The people are also deprived of the quiet leadership in community affairs which a wise pastor might be able to exert.

But if it is bad for the people, it is also bad for the minister. He is deprived of all executive functions. He becomes simply a preacher—all too often a “hot air artist.” He is tempted to become lazy. Two sermons a month is all he needs to prepare unless he have charge of one of the larger towns. He has lots of time to mind the baby and wipe the dishes. He is also very poorly paid. The average country church pays its minister only $115 a year, at the rate, therefore, of less than $10 a Sunday, or $460 a year. The village church pays $207 a year, at the rate, therefore, of about $12 a Sunday, or $600 a year. Many country ministers are, therefore, forced to eke out a scanty living in some other way. We found two country ministers who peddled spectacles; one who engaged in horse trading; one who published a newspaper; one who ran a jewelry store. Among the men whom we met were earnest and consecrated men; men who, for their faith, had made many great sacrifices; men who will be first to hear the “well done” of their Lord; but the efficiency of many of them, as could not well be otherwise under such conditions, is well summed up in the remark which one of them put at the end of a blank which he filled out for us. “I may have made mistakes,” he said, “but I have Did the best I could.”

The FOURTH CONCLUSION is that also largely as a result of the sectarian spirit which these denominational divisions foster, there has been an inversion


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(Page 34a)



THE THREE-HOUR-A-MONTH-MINISTER.

COUNTY CHURCHES

3 80 

VILLAGE CHURCHES

13 42

CHURCHES WITHOUT RESIDENT PASTORS

CHURCHES WITH RESIDENT PASTORS

TOWN CHURCHES

13 8

BASIS 159 CHURCHES IN KNOX ADAIR AND SULIVAN COUNTIES, MO.

DIAGRAM III.



(Page 34b)



WHY WE NEED THE
CONSOLIDATED CHURCH.

Country Churches
8% 92% 

Village
2% 21% 77% 

Town
35% 50% 13%

Total
5.7%
18.9%
75.4%

Churches with preaching full time.
Churches with preaching half the time.
Churches with preaching one-fourth of the time.

Basis – 159 Churches in Knox, Adair, and Sullivan Co.’s, MO.

Diagram IV.



(Page 35)



of the church’s ideals. The pagan ideal of self-aggrandizement and self-defense is substituted for the Christian ideal of service. Loyalty to the church is placed above loyalty to the Kingdom of God. The forces of the Kingdom are divided, oftentimes, into bickering factions. Meri become Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Disciples, but not Christians. They think they are working for their Lord, but in many things they are really actuated by the sporting spirit, the spirit which makes a man take sides with Jeffries against Johnson, or become violently Republican in a presidential campaign without knowing anything at all of the issues involved. Their eyes are fixed on their rivals, not on their Lord, and each church is engaged in a life and death struggle for the survival of the fittest. My colleague preached in one of these churches. They liked his preaching and urged him to come and take their church. “Why, if you come and take our church,” the leading elder said to him, “we can put it all over the Methodists.” This attitude is characteristic. This inversion of the church’s ideals is strikingly shown by the way the church’s money is spent. The reports of forty-three Methodist and seventeen South Methodist churches in the region surveyed, show that only one per cent of the money is spent on local benevolence, all the rest is spent on the church organization. (See diagram V.) The church tries to make the community serve it instead of serving the community. If it gives a social, the social is usually for the purpose of making money and no other way of ministering to the social needs of the community is attempted.

The inversion of the church’s ideal is shown further by the ideal of the average man about religion. Remark casually that there is little difference between the different denominations, and nine times out of ten the reply will be, “No, we are all going to the same place, anyway.” Religion is generally thought of as an Other-worldly affair, a matter of saving one’s soul in a life to come and the church is a sort of express train to carry one to bliss. Its the old “Ark of salvation” idea of the medieval Catholic. This other-worldly idea of Christianity finds expression in the hymns which are sung. They sing much of the blood of Jesus, but little of the love of Jesus or of the Christian spirit of service. Outside of perhaps half the town churches, all the churches, practically, use gospel songs, usually of the most objectionable type, and even the standard hymns which these collections contain, are rarely sung.

The inversion of the church’s ideals finds its corrollary in the extreme individualism of the people who compose it. The average country family is self-centered. There are indeed, many beautiful instances of unselfish service among neighbors, but there is little community spirit. There are no farmers’ organizations of any sort and it is very difficult to get the farmers to stand together. This individualistic tendency is strikingly shown by the small amount, which the average family contributes to the support of its schools and of its church and the keeping up of its roads. (See diagram VI.)

These, then, are the main conclusions which I wish to lay before you:

FIRST—There is a deep and genuine interest in religion throughout this region, and the church, especially the country and village church, has a great opportunity as a social center, a great need to supply.

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(Page 36)



SECOND—This region is over-churched. This is due to denominational divisions and results in the weakening of the religious forces and the inability to take advantage of the opportunity which is offered.

Third—The country ministers and most of the village ministers are preachers, not pastors. They live in town and only come out to talk on Sunday and then go away again. As a result of this, the minister’s development is apt to be one-sided and the people are deprived of competent religious leadership.

FOURTH—The churches are engaged in saving their own lives, they are not giving of themselves as they might, for the service of the community. The same spirit is shown also in the people themselves. There is extreme individualism and far too little of the spirit of Christian brotherhood.

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(Page 36a)



HOW ONE DOLLAR OF THE CHURCH’S MONEY IS SPENT

Based upon the reports of 43 Methodist and 17 South Methodist Churches in Knox, Adair, and Sullivan Counties, Mo.

Loeal Benevolences 1 cent
Massions and Christian Bords 7 cents
Sunday School 6 cents
Care of buildings 10 cents
Buildings and Repairs 25 cents
Supervision 7 cents
Preacher’s Salary 44 cents

Diagram V. 



(Page 36b)



CAN THEY AFFORD IT?

WHAT THE AVERAGE FARM –
IS REALLY WORTH.

Live Stock $2000
Machinery $400
158 acres $7900

WAS ASSESSED AT 
$1603 in 1910
$2400 in 1911

WHAT THE AVERAGE COUNTRY FAMILY SPENDS – 

ON ITSELF - $771.00
ON ITS SCHOOL - $13.72
ON ITS ROADS - $6.00
ON ITS CHURCH - $3.18

(370 families in Sullivan County, Missouri.)

Diagram VI.



(Page 37)



WHAT MISSOURI SHOULD DO FOR HER WOMEN.

Miss ALICE KINNEY.

We are all proud to boast that if Missouri’s resources are so wonderful that if she were walled in from the outside world no industry nor needs of her citizens would suffer.

She is able to produce from her soil all life-sustaining products, from her depths she can bring the richest minerals and unlimited fuel supply, and since cotton has been so successfully grown in her southern counties, our various textile mills can comfortably clothe us, to say nothing of her byproducts that add to our pleasure and wealth.

She has just closed a wonderful congress for the conservation of forest and waterways, but what is she doing for the conservation of the energies and resources of her most valuable assets—the mothers of her children—the women of the far inland homes, whose sturdy sons and daughters help form the backbone of the rising generations. Her welfare is of the most vital importance, far greater than the tiller of the soil whose ignorance chiefly affects outside affairs, but her ignorance causes neglect which imperils the life and health of all within the home.

The opportunities for qualifying herself to meet the great diversity of requirements has been, for the greater part, what she has created for herself during the experience of rearing and educating her children—the demand for suitable clothing, providing sanitary home conditions and yet endeavoring not to lose sight of the social, intellectual and esthetic self-culture.

In the face of adversities: what the woman of the rural districts has accomplished in the past stands as a monument to her struggles and final victories. However, there still remains the problem of widespread ignorance for us to promulgate some method whereby she can be reached and taught how to conserve her own energies and resources.

Some one has aptly said that when all other means failed it was dumped onto the schools, so I fear we must follow their lead.

In schools we find the leading string to the mothers’ heart and life through the child. The lessons of right living that are daily instilled into the little one’s mind by the faithful teacher is carried home to mother’s ears—simple lessons, but so far-reaching in their influence.

Pardon the digression, but we should like to ask if it be not possible to include in our normal training some course whereby our teachers would enter into their new work fully imbued with the missionary spirit of giving something not found between the covers of our text-books; the field is so great, but so few inspired workers.

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(Page 38)



Picture the great awakening that will follow such a teacher into a far inland school house; how she can gradually weave her ideals into the lives of her pupils and make them realize that they are blest by living in such close, touch with Mother Nature’s warm heart and by means of their little gardens they will learn to know how quickly she responds to their efforts.

Then the playground, for the play is equally as much of a necessity to the country boy and girl as to the city-bred child; true that they revel in fresh air and unlimited space, but the spirit of play is essential to every well rounded girl and boy. On the playground, under her supervision, they learn the richest lessons of life—how to accept defeat in a manly way and, above all, fair dealing in every game. Again, she infuses her forces into them as she skillfully trains their hands in the useful needs of home and life.

Now she follows the child into the home and interests the mother in what they are doing in the school, thus drawing the mothers to the school, where they meet to discuss ways and means of mutual helpfulness for the child and indirectly for the mothers’ own growth.

As the days go by the teacher unconsciously has impressed her personality upon all the homes of that little community; she has put into their- narrow lives a desire to live above their environments and to create conditions for themselves from the wealth of resources that abounds at their very doorway. Only a few such teachers and Missouri would cease to have her present rating of illiteracy.

The last few years Missouri’s wheels of progress have been revolving as they have not for fifty years, and with pride do we watch our highways develop, for it means that in a short time the byways will catch the inspiration of good roads everywhere, not necessarily rock roads but well drained and dragged, for an ill-kept or neglected road, full of mud-holes, will reflect; upon the farmers of the community, as ill-kept fences and fields do today| upon the individual farmer. .What a glorious vista opens before us when we realize our long cherished dream of good highways everywhere, to palace and hamlet alike; every inland home will be quickened by the touch of the outside world; every little child will come into its natural heritage of equal opportunities for all; consolidated schools will rise as if by magic. In every neighborhood the efforts of the farm-home management in behalf of our women; will be felt. Circles will meet and discuss easier and more helpful ways of saving tired footsteps and weary hands, thus having time and strength to look outward to the beauties of social farm life and broader needs of home and state. From these small circles are being sent out some of the strongest, working forces of the state today for the uplift of the woman on the farm. To best conserve these undirected efforts some central organization has been found in other states most helpful. Often the Farmers’ Institute fosters the best organized efforts for the betterment of farm conditions, but in Missouri the State Board of Agriculture has this subject in hand and the institute is a part of its working force.

After the inauguration of farmers’ week in Columbia this board realized that they were not meeting all the needs of the farm when only the outside

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(Page 39)



problems were considered and that the most vital part of the real home was being overlooked. This demand was met through the combined efforts of the State Board of Agriculture and the Domestic Science Department of the University, with the hearty co-operation of many interested women over the state who stood ready to follow their lead and thus was formed the Home-Makers’ Conference, which organization meets annually during farmers week, the first part of January. Thus the husband and wife could come to Columbia together. While he discussed the operations of the field, the improvements or reductions in the amount and value of the crop, she obtained helpful instructions that enabled her to overcome home environments, to exert her influence not only within the domestic circle, but in the social life of family and community. This conference has grown steadily with only a few years’ experience. At each annual meeting expert advisers give suitable demonstrations, to which is added the interchange of the varied experiences of our women in attendance—a most valuable part of the session.

With each meeting broader fields of usefulness open before us, and as we impatiently await the day when throughout our entire state there will spring up from the influence of this central Home-Makers’ Conference many local circles, which will send us women to help plan for still greater growth.

At this next meeting we hope to offer a day nursery for the mother’s comfort, and the tender care of the little ones.

The plan for serving a light luncheon, at a small cost in the conference building, is under consideration. This will enable all during the noon hour to meet informally. But the plan that lies nearest to our hearts is the hope of offering a scholarship to some girl on the farm for the short course of eight weeks in the Home Economics Department of the State University. This course, in addition to the usual studies of this department, will offer dairying, horticulture and poultry husbandry, which, if elected, will take the place of a part of the usual studies.

What does this mean for our girls? An opportunity to gain knowledge whereby they can become a producer, yet remain under the protecting shelter of the farm home and thus probably saved from the pitfalls of the alluring city, where they go to earn a precarious living.

We wish it were possible to so interest every woman’s club in the State in this movement that would lead them to offer scholarships to the girls who are hungry for this help and who would make good by putting into execution this knowledge. When we think of the various organizations and men at large who are doing this and more for the boys, can we not do as much for our girls?

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(Page 40)



FARM HOME MANAGEMENT.

Miss ILENA BAILEY.

The Missouri Rural Life Conference indicates that Missouri is not so slow as her sister states would have her be, and sounds another note of progress for the advancement of the rural community. Another note of progress previous to this was the establishment of the Department of Farm Management at our College of Agriculture one year ago. While as in Missouri this work is being carried on in other states in co-operation with the U. S. Department of Agriculture, the work in this state is along somewhat different lines than are being worked out elsewhere.

The specialist in agriculture has for some years been glad to assist any farmer who consulted him, but he has met the general farmer’s problems from only one viewpoint. He is of much assistance to the farmer, but usually he is not able to meet all the problems of the average Missouri farmer. The Department of Farm Management aims to see these problems from the farmer’s viewpoint. Those in charge of this work are as much interested in the farms under their direction as they are in their own.

The plan under which we are working is about as follows: A farmer wishes assistance and writes the Department to that effect. He becomes a member of the Missouri Farm Management Association. This entitles him to such assistance as they can give by correspondence and a visit, whenever possible. If the farmer’s interest continues, members of the Association may become co-operators. This entitles them to still more assistance in planting and marketing crops, buying and selling live stock, purchase of implements, and other work and transactions. If the farmer makes good as a co-operator he may become a demonstrator. This insures him a visit from Mr. Doane, who is in charge of this work at Columbia, or one of his assistants. On the first visit they walk over the farm, inspect the soil, drainage, fences, live stock, machinery and improvements. A map of the farm is made. They talk over with the farmer plans for the future and the two agree as to the plan to be followed for the next two or three years. Generally one demonstration farm is installed in a county. Each fall a demonstration meeting is held on this farm. We have recently held three of these meetings, which consist of short talks by men from the College of Agriculture, a picnic dinner and a walk over the farm to see the growing crops. If you could hear the talks made by the owners of these farms at these meetings, you would not doubt the benefits financially and otherwise which they have received. The Government or the College of Agriculture furnish no financial assistance to any farmers; neither does the farmer pay one cent for their assistance.

Since people must have food, and the farmer must raise it, both vegetable and animal, farming is a necessary occupation.

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THE COST OF THE CHURCH
KNOX, ADAIR, AND SULLIVAN, COUNTIES, MISSOURI.

I. FOR EACH MAN WOMAN AND CHILD
IN COUNTRY – 69¢
IN VILLAGE – 98¢
IN TOWNS - $1.45
OVER 750

II. FOR EACH CHURCH MEMBER.
IN COUNTRY – 2.94
IN VILLAGE – 3.92
IN TOWNS – 5.42

III. FOR EACH FAMILY BELONGING.
IN COUNTRY – 8.84
IN VILLAGE – 11.74
IN TOWNS – 16.34

IV. FOR EACH CATHOLIC FAMILY
16.86

DIAGRAM VII.



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Alfalfa, an immigrant which is putting
Nitrogen into American soil, and helping
To “build up the former desolations,” was 
Originally a Persian crop carried to Greece in an 
Ancient invasion, from there it went to Spain
and was brought to this continent by Cortez.

Courtesy of C. C. and C. L. D. of the Presbyterian Church,



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Today the farmer is leaving the farm to get the advantages of city life, and because he can make more financially and with less labor in town than he has been able to make on the farm by the methods of farming he has been using. He will be willing to stay on the farm if it can be made profitable and if the comforts and conveniences in the home and school keep pace with his agricultural progress.

The aim of Farm Home Management work, which was begun September 1st, 1911, is to help the woman in the farm home in the same way that Farm Management helps the farmer. The work is on the same general plan. The woman on the average Missouri farm orders the trees for the orchard, puts up the fruit, and keeps watch of the diseases and insects. She also plans the garden, gathers the vegetables, and battles against the striped bugs on the cucumbers and the worms on the tomatoes. The garden and the orchard on the average Missouri farm do not contain as many varieties nor furnish as good a quality of food products for the farmer’s table as they should. We believe that crop rotation, location, drainage and selection of varieties are just as important in proportion to the area occupied, as are other crops on the farm.

The lawn, if there is one, is another part of the farm which the woman manages. The farmer will do the seeding and tree planting, but it is the woman who plans the arrangement and sets out the smaller plants. We are not suggesting that woman should dig the potatoes, hoe the weeds or spray the trees, but we do hold that she is usually the manager of these portions of the farm land on the average Missouri farm and we believe we can help her to get larger and better returns from them.

The same is true of the dairy when it consists of from one to three cows. The flower bed and the poultry house are distinctly woman’s work on the average farm. They give her a chance for exercise in the open air, enlarge her interests, and the former gives her an opportunity to express her love of the beautiful.

Missouri is a great poultry state, but yet the loss to the state each year is considerable. While many women are very successful poultry raisers, we believe that the average Missouri farm can, with the same expenditure of energy and time, get much larger returns from poultry. We aim to assist the farmer’s wife in getting a better market for her poultry products, in selecting stock, raising poultry, and in building the poultry house.

The place in which we can be of greatest service will be in the planning of new houses or in the remodeling of the old ones, so that they will be well located as to drainage, relation to other buildings and neighboring farms; the rooms well arranged for lighting, heating, ventilating, and in relation to other rooms of the house; the installation of such modern conveniences as water, sewerage, heating and lighting systems. We will also assist these women in the refinishing of woodwork, walls and furniture, as well as in the purchasing of floor coverings, draperies and kitchen conveniences. The laundry problem is a large one in most farm homes, and several

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farmers’ wives have already asked us to plan some way to make this work easier for them.

In one house which I visited a few days ago, the front door was on the east and the drive on the west so that about forty feet of unnecessary traveling was done in every trip from the drive to the front door. This was easily changed by cutting a door in the west side. In another instance, each bedroom had only one window and only by opening the door of each could any cross ventilation be secured. Fortunately, the house was so built that a half window could easily be made in another wall in each bedroom so that more light and air were secured without much difficulty. In the same house, the work was lessened by using a room for dining room instead of bedroom. On one farm we advise a complete water system with gasoline engine, while on another we advise a simple cistern pump.

While the farm has always been famous for its heavily laden table, we know it is possible to have more variety in successive meals and less in any one meal. This will mean a saving of labor for the farmer’s wife, and good appetites for the other members of the family to say nothing of the improved health of the household, and with this the saving of money for' doctor’s bills and time spent in ill-health which could be used in productive labor.

In most instances, we do not advise new but try to make the best use of the old. Our business is to make the most of what the farm has on hand. If the farmer is successful, he must make the farm produce enough to pay for improvements.

The farmers on demonstration farms practice good farming and are an example to their neighbors year after year. Many who have no faith, in scientific agriculture are convinced when shown what can be done by practicing it. The same is true of the farm home. The people on these farms are usually leaders in the church and school in their community. In this way those who are attending this Rural Life Conference are united in the work of making the most of rural life, because we often deal with the same people.

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BOYS’ AND GIRLS’ DEMONSTRATION WORK IN THE SOUTH.

HON. O. B. MARTIN.

With the advent of the Mexican boll weevil into the great cotton belt of Texas there came demoralization among the farmers and business men which threatened to become a stampede. Conferences were called by the leading public men in that State to devise plans to prevent a general exodus of labor, loss of confidence by the business men and credit by the farmers. With the arrival of the critical hour of this threatened calamity there arrived also a man who was equal to the emergency. Dr. Seaman A. Knapp, then of Lake Charles, La., who had had wide experience as an agriculturist, not only in this country but in other parts of the world, came forward and proposed a plan which has since attracted the attention of the entire country and of the world. He suggested that with a simple appropriation in each county he could employ a successful farmer who was a leader of men to take definite instructions to the people and show them how to make good cotton crops, even in the presence of the boll weevil. A limited amount of money was subscribed in a few counties and the agents were employed. Dr. Knapp outlined the instructions by giving a few fundamental principles of good agriculture, and he also epitomized the knowledge that the scientists had gathered from the study of the life history of the boll weevil, and from this knowledge he deduced a few simple rules for the men to use in conducting the fight against the pest. Of course, it was necessary in planning a simple system of good farming for him to give instructions also in regard to producing a few other staple crops which were necessary to produce food stuffs for the people and for the farm animals in the stricken district.

The work immediately attracted the attention of Secretary Wilson of the Department of Agriculture, and he brought it to the attention of Congress with the result that an appropriation was made to aid in the work. In a few years the General Education Board of New York, seeing that a great plan for the training of farmers had been devised, asked to be allowed to aid the work in the other cotton states which the boll weevil had not reached. Both Congress and the board have continued to increase their appropriations from year to year until the Farmers’ Co-Operative Demonstration Work extends very generally over the Southern states. In addition, state legislatures have made direct appropriations and have authorized county authorities to give aid. The result is that the work has received cordial and substantial help from every state in which it has been introduced.

During this year nearly one hundred thousand farmers signed agreements to work part or all of their farms according to the instructions of

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the demonstration work. More than six hundred agents are at work visiting these farmers and seeing that the instructions are carried out. In thousands of instances yields have been doubled and quadrupled and the cost of production has been laid down to the minimum. In fact, one of the prime purposes of the work, as announced by Dr. Knapp, is to “double the yield and halve the cost.” The instructions call for better drainage, deeper and more thorough preparation, better seed, better spacing, more intensive tillage, more horse power and better implements, improvement of the farm stock, the production of food, and the keeping of accounts. It can be readily seen that when a circular of instruction is sent out on one of these subjects, seed selection for instance, and it is immediately emphasized and impressed by six hundred agents with one hundred thousand farmers co-operating, that some results will necessarily be accomplished along this particular line.

A few years after the adult farmer began to get good results by following Dr. Knapp’s instructions, ambitious boys began to ask to be enrolled as demonstrators. They were anxious to follow the examples of their fathers. They wanted to do the manly thing. It was soon suggested in several places that the boys be organized separately so that they might compete with each other. This was the beginning of the Corn Clubs in the Southern states. This was in 1908. In 1909 a systematic effort was made to organize the boys with the result that more than 12,000 boys enrolled and planted one acre of com apiece. In 1910 the enrollment was 46,225. During this year some notable records were made. Several boys grew more than 175 bushels of com to the acre. One hundred boys made an average of 133.7 bushels. The boys in all parts of the South made such fine demonstrations by follow¬ing instructions that they had a very perceptible influence on farming in general.

The demand soon arose for some work among the girls. It was planned that Canning Clubs should be organized. Each girl was to plant a little garden consisting of one-tenth of an acre. Her main crop was to be tomatoes, just as the boys had specialized on com. She was to put in a few other vegetables, and was also to be allowed to can surplus fruits after she had learned the fundamental principles of the work. In 1910 these clubs were; organized in four counties in two states. In 1911 the organization was extended into eight states with a membership of 3,100 girls. Reports have been received from a great many of these girls already. One girl has put up more than 1,000 3-lb. cans, of tomatoes from her little garden. She has also put up ketchup, pickles, chow chow and other products. Many others, report more than 750 cans each.

It is not simply a question of quantity, but in grading the records of the work of the boys and girls the following points are to be taken into consideration: Yield, showing of profit, written history showing agricultural knowledge, and an exhibit showing the quality of the crop. In 1910 public spirited people from the Southern states contributed more than $40,000 worth of prizes to the successful boys. They are showing the same liberality towards the work the girls are doing. The most conspicuous awards have

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been the diplomas given to the boys by the Secretary of Agriculture and by the governors and superintendents of public instruction in the various states, for “excellence in agriculture.” A new departure in awarding prizes has also been made through the generosity of Senator Owen of Oklahoma. He gives $1,000 to be awarded as follows: $500 to forty boys from the county making the best records, $300 to the one coming second, and $200 to the one coming third.

The objects of the Boys’ and Girls’ Work are as follows:

(1) To teach the principles of agriculture and horticulture in a definite and practical manner.
(2) To teach love of the soil and plant life and show communities the value of their lands.
(3) To dignify labor and make it intelligent and effective.
(4) To give purpose and direction to youthful lives at the opportune time.
(5) To impress the value of individual ownership and earning.
(6) To help the family by having all of its members contribute to its support.
(7) To show the value of healthy rivalry and co-operation in producing and marketing crops.
(8) To train farm managers and home makers.
(9) To vitalize school work.
(10) To develop manhood and womanhood.

In many places the clubs have been conducted long enough for these objects to become results.

Teachers and school officers have given active co-operation to the conduct of the Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs. In fact for many of them it has been a solution of the problem of teaching elementary agriculture. They have found it was impossible with text books alone to carry out the statute or the regulation which has required the teaching of elementary agriculture in the schools. If the boys in a state had never seen a game of base ball played, and if the teacher were to try to teach them to play base ball by giving them instructions from a book of regulations governing the game, she would find it an almost impossible task. On the other hand the boys go out into the field and learn to play by playing. The same principle obtains in Reaching agriculture. The boys learn the elements by applying them.

It is a part of the general outline of the club work to have the boys and girls begin with one plant. A great deal of agriculture or horticulture may be learned while a boy or a girl is mastering the study of one plant and its environment. In fact, it is the natural and logical way to do the teaching. It is easy afterwards to learn other plants by contrast and by comparison.

We find also that it appeals to the popular mind to take something definite and specific and then achieve a great many notable records in the different counties and states. If we were to generalize and try to organize “agricultural, horticultural, or domestic science clubs”, the effect on the indi-

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vidual or the public mind would not be at all the same as that caused by the Corn Clubs or the Canning Clubs.

Teachers do not need to be alarmed by the expression “Scientific Agriculture.” Dr. S. A. Knapp once said that, “Agriculture consists of one-eighth science, three-eighths art, and one-half business methods.” It is easy to get the fundamental principles of the science. It is not difficult to show and teach the art of the doing, and teachers should be systematic enough to impress good bookkeeping and business.

Some of our greatest agricultural writers have written books on soil which make us love our native land more and more. The wonderful response which our Southern soil is giving to the efforts and activities of the farmers should increase this love. The next few decades will cause a still greater appreciation because people in other parts of the country and of the world are finding out that these lands located in a section which has great germinating power and a long growing season must bring higher prices. The Corn Club boy who starts his bank account and makes an investment early in life in farm lands will live to rejoice in such action. It is inevitable that prices shall advance. There is a great reservoir of high prices in other parts of the country. Prices in the South will advance somewhat on the same principle as water seeking its level.

The teachers who take an active interest in the clubs and who actually take part in the work lend the powerful influence of the teacher’s office to dignify labor. It is easier also to get a boy to do some honest and wholesome toil if he realizes that a hundred more boys in his county are doing the same thing. In the clubs there is a certain enthusiasm in numbers and in the elbow touch. There is a tendency also for the boys to work together and exchange work, especially when they are using improved implements. The healthy rivalry that is encouraged by prizes, recognition and honors, leads to a study of methods and principles which in turn must mean intelligence and efficiency.

It has been said that the principal difference between a saint and a sinner consists in a “cost of paint and direction.” It is a great opportunity to have something to do with giving purpose and direction to the lives of thousands of young people betwen the ages of ten and eighteen. There is some danger of drifting at that age. Purposes are formed and lines of life are cast. These purposes and lines are limited and circumscribed by the environment and horizon. If you can extend the horizon and encourage health, vigorous study and work, you may affect a whole life. That life may affect a whole county, or state, or nation.

It has a fine effect on a boy or girl to be able to own something, especially if it has been earned or won by the individual. I taught in a school once with a young lady whose father had furnished all the money she had ever needed. At the close of her first month’s work she came to me with her salary in her hand and said: “Mr. Martin, this is the first money I have ever earned. I feel that it is worth more than any I have ever had.” We urge parents to let the boys and girls have the products of their own little

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farms and gardens. We want each one to start a bank account. It’s a very valuable part of the child’s education. It is a good business for the parent also because when the child appreciates the value of a dollar, he will not be so wasteful. If he has some money of his own, he will not require so much from his father and mother. We do well to teach thrift.

In some families the song which says, “Everybody works but father,” might be changed to read “Nobody works but father.” I mean in that part of the work which produces revenue. It is a great luxury to visit a country home where the garden, poultry yard and the dairy practically support the family and leave all of the field crops to go to the credit of the family bank account. I read an article only a few days ago in a county paper, written by one of our club boys, who told how much money he had made in raising pigs. He went into the pig business because he had some com. After telling how many pigs he had sold at five dollars apiece, he subtracted from his income his own expenses for clothing and pocket money and still had a nice little bank account. Some of our girls have been doing some similar things with their canning work. In addition, every time they put a dozen cans of vegetables or fruit into the pantry they have saved at least a dollar for the family. It means more money for education, for comforts and for convenience. There are enough surplus products going to waste in the South to make us a wealthy people. I believe that our boys and girls are going to turn the trick and show to the nation and to the world what can be accomplished along this line. I know they will do so if they are properly encouraged by their teachers. There is a disposition everywhere to give cordial recognition and encouragement to these young workers. A Southern state legislature passed a bill giving a girl a four years’ scholarship in the Normal and Industrial College because the girl put up more than five hundred cans of tomatoes from her own small garden. In addition she made ketchup, preserves, pickles, etc. This scholarship is worth at least five hundred dollars, and the girl’s name was mentioned in the bill, which is quite a distinguished honor.

We are getting some fine results, not only because public spirited people in the South gave prizes last year to encourage individual effort in the various counties and states, but we are getting some fine results by stimulating county and state rivalry. One of our boys who won the prize trip to Washington last year from his state was heard to remark that he hoped that a boy from his county would win the trip next year if he did not succeed in getting it himself. The label used by the girls in their Canning Club has the effect of a co-operative trade mark. Wherever this label is seen on a can, it will stand for the girls’ work. The motto is “To make the best better.” The advertising which comes from such a label and such a purpose enables the girls to find good markets for their products and, having found them, excellent products will retain and increase them. The Boys’ Corn Clubs have found it easy also to sell seed com at a high price, because the combined efforts of so many boys naturally bring the matter to the attention of the public.

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In one of the best farming counties in the South last year a boy made 177 bushels of corn on an acre at a cost of twenty-three cents per bushel. One of the largest farmers in the county asked him to become his managers and told the boy to name his own salary. Similar instances have occurred in a great many places. Stephen Henry of Melrose, La., who made a hundred and thirty-nine bushels of corn at a cost of thirteen and a half cents and won the governor’s gold watch, an automobile and various other prizes, at the national corn show, has supervised the preparation and planting of five acres! although he was in a high school seventy-five miles away. As soon as school was out he took charge of the work. He sold his corn last year for three; dollars and a half per bushel. If he can get two dollars this year and make a hundred bushels per acre, as he hopes to do, he will take in a thousand dollars, which is not bad for a boy whose main business for the year is getting an education. The girls in the canning clubs, who grow one-tenth of an acre of tomatoes and who devote considerable attention to the study of canning, do not learn any less about housekeeping than the other girls. In fact they begin to take more interest in all of the matters which pertain to home making. The main thing is to give a boy or a girl a desire to learn. After that it is easy.

The wise teacher will make the methods and conduct of this work a basis for school work. Some of the best essays I have ever read and some of the best speeches I have ever heard have been by the boys on the subject of “How I Grew My Acre of Corn.” Elmer Halter, of Conway, Ark., the boy who won the prize trip to Washington from that state in 1909, spent the; whole year of 1910 working on his essay. It was pronounced by the professors in the Agricultural College of Arkansas as one of the best papers on corn production that they had ever seen. It was published by the Bank of Conway and distributed by the thousands. The work of the girls, with the tomatoes and with other fruits and vegetables, will naturally bring forth some language and composition work which will be even more attractive. It can be beautifully illustrated. Instruction in the whole course of study can be vitalized and strengthened by a little correlation work in any of these lines. Teachers who take an interest in the clubs and encourage their pupils to become leaders in corn production or in the preparation of food for the table and market soon attract attention and receive recognition from the people. I have known of several instances where a teacher would receive numerous offers at increased salaries because of her success in this line of work. Do you wonder at this? It is perfectly natural. The teacher is snowing the pupils how to be producers and how to increase the wealth of the community. The patrons are perfectly willing to share such wealth, but if the school does not do such work, does not in itself point the way to production and profit, how can the teacher expect on increase in salary just because she asks it, or because the teacher’s association may agitate it by resolution?

The county superintendent in a Georgia County was very anxious to enroll a certain boy in the Cora Club. The boy failed to come out to the

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meeting. The superintendent wrote him a letter, but did not hear from him. The next thing he did was to get into his buggy and go to see the boy. After talking with him very frankly for awhile, the boy finally told him that he did not care to join the Corn Club because he did not expect to be a farmer. He was going to town. The superintendent asked what he was going to do when he went to town. The boy dug down in his pocket and pulled out a dirty little old advertisement from an Atlanta paper, which read something like this: “Automobile College; course completed in three weeks; trains boys to be expert chauffeurs; diplomas awarded.” This boy, who had a good home, backed by a good farm, was deliberately purposing to spend his life in driving people about on the streets, day or night, or to become the lackey boy of some nabob of high finances. The situation roused the superintendent and called forth the best that was in him. He made such a strong appeal that he changed the boy’s purpose. He succeeded in getting him into the Corn Club. He was a vigorous boy with plenty of red corpuscles. He went into the contest with zest, won some prizes and made some money. He is farming several acres this year, and expects to take an agricultural course and then make more out of that farm than his father ever did. Who knows but-that day’s work of that superintendent meant the salvation of a life. It is quite probable that if that boy had gone to the city, he would have drifted into temptation and degradation and ruin. After all, the supreme purpose of our work is to develop manhood and womanhood. We want to multiply such instances by the thousands.

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HINDRANCES TO THE HEALTH OF THE HOUSEHOLD.

Dr. W. P. CUTLER.

It would be impossible for me to cover this subject very completely in the time given, and I am only suggesting a few hindrances that are well worthy of our consideration at this time. Some I shall treat more in detail than others, as will be observed. Briefly stated, hindrances to health are found in—

1. Imperfect ventilation; especially, the sleeping room.
2. Lack of running water in the house.
3. Lack of sewer or imperfectly constructed outhouses.
4. Flies, or dirt—which amounts to the same thing.
5. Too much physical and not sufficient mental or intellectual exercise
6. Improper foods.

No person’ who awakens in the morning unrefreshed, is either mentally or physically able to perform successfully the duties of the day. It is a curious fact that most farmers—notwithstanding plenty of ground—build little farm houses with small, poorly lighted, poorly ventilated, sleeping’ rooms, many keeping the windows closed tightly in the winter time to conserve heat. The human body is constantly giving off impurities in the way of gases, which, unless ventilation is complete, have of necessity to be either re-absorbed or breathed into the lungs to be distributed again in the system instead of pure air, so necessary to burn up waste and energize the human frame. The poison re-absorbed, confuses the brain and makes one stupid leaving headache and distaste for work. By way of experiment, if you do not believe this is true, at night when you go to bed, sleep with your face to the wall, even in a moderately well ventilated room, and observe how unrefreshed you will be in the morning.

Of all the back-breaking experiences causing physical disability and breakdown is the carrying of water from an outside well or cistern up two or three steps, emptying the same into a sink or washtub, saying nothing about| the family washing to be performed and cooking for a threshing crew the same time, this performance being multiplied by several trips while cooking, also, carrying armfuls of wood up the same steps several times a day. The wonder is that our women-kind are ever willing to live on the farm, or ever have the physical ability to do so. The stoutest woman with one year of this kind of experience is a chronic invalid, with little hope for relief. The curious part of all is that this thing is permitted to continue on the part of the husband, who thinks nothing of buying a first-class mowing machine or cultivator, while the mother of his children is permitted to

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Become a chronic invalid through carelessness—I will not say careless indifference.

A partial solution of some of these difficulties is in having running water in the house. Inexpensive water systems are possible and interesting. For example—the hydraulic ram. Any man with a spring or creek on his place can install a hydraulic ram, which with a tank solves the difficulty of running water in the house. The air-tight tank in the cellar or in the ground near the house into which is pumped water—power furnished by the gasoline engine, treadmill power or hand power of the farmer—is also a solution. The fact is, that if the farmer will look about him on his place he is sure to find some convenient and inexpensive means by which he can get water into his house. Perhaps some farmers object to the presence of running water in the house because it appears to be too much of a luxury. As a matter of fact, it is the greatest economy possible. If for no other reason, it saves doctors’ bills. When one has running water, the next step is a bath room, and certainly the farmer needs the bath room more than any other class. Who so sweaty and dusty after a day’s ploughing? A good bath will make a new man of him and fit him for the next day’s work. In these days of physical culture, it seems almost a physical impossibility to do without a bath room, either the tub or shower—and for sanitary reasons, I prefer the latter. Running water in the house, of course, means running water in the barn; and running water in the barn means concrete floors or tight wood floors ready for the flushing, which especially the production of clean milk demands. What is there in this world that engenders the self-respect of a man or woman more than a clean body! And where can a busy man find the cleanliness necessary without a simple or inexpensive shower bath somewhere in the house?

Where would the flies come from if it were not from the manure pile at the barn or the imperfectly constructed outbuildings. With running water, sewer connection is absolutely necessary. Having these conveniences, no outbuildings are necessary and all excreta is carried away.

Who can calculate the diseased breeding and filthiness of the so-called house fly? Talk about a slimy serpent! The trail of the fly across the piece of bread in the hands of a child or the bath of a fly in the cup of milk exceeds in opportunities for disease any dozen agencies which may be mentioned. You can go into any home at this time and see how quickly the housewife will apologize if flies are present. She is ashamed of their presence and well she should be.

Scientists have called this filthy insect the “typhoid fly” because of the facility with which they carry this disease. Its home is in filth, and it must actually carry the filth in which it dwells. Who has not seen a baby’s face and hands covered with flies? The fly feeds on the diseased sputum of the human body, on typhoid dejecta, and refuse of all kinds. Its hairy feet and legs carry about particles of these vile feasts. Not alone does the fly deposit disease germs from its feet in the milk, water and other foods, but disease germs are taken into the fly’s body as it eats and remain alive in

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the intestines of the insect and are rejected in the specks of the fly excreta to remain alive for some days. It has been shown scientifically that both the tuberculosis and the typhoid baccili in the specks have actually given the disease from nine to fifteen days after it was voided by the fly.

Notwithstanding this knowledge, these frightful insects are allowed to infect meat exposed by the butcher, the candy on the counter of the confectioner, raw berries and other fruits, the milk pail, the kitchen utensils, and the food on the table. It has been demonstrated that the fly was the prin¬cipal carrier of the typhoid fever which attacked 20 per cent of the United States soldiers in the Cuban war and furnished 86 per cent of the deaths. Note the following, taken from the report of a state board of health:

“In front of a grocery, boxes of blackberries were exposed for sale. They were slightly gray; dust and swarms of flies were present. On the sidewalk, within six feet of the berries, some poor diseased mortal had spat, and this sputum was circled with flies. A moment’s observation showed that they flew back and forth, not only between the berries and the sputum, but also between the berries and the gutter filth and street manure. But, most wonderful, people purchased those nasty berries and ate them raw.”

In the matter of infant mortality, who shall say to what extent the fly is responsible for the bowel troubles, diphtheria, scarlet fever, and other diseases? Oh, that the farmer and his wife would realize the danger of the breeding places and do away with the outhouse and the manure pile at the barn. If the farmer would only remove the manure frequently from the barn and spread it on the field, this breeding place would be gone. No house is perfectly built today without screens, without the swat-stick and every possible means to get rid of our great enemy.

One important measure of destruction to the fly has been overlooked. If one will put a solution of formaldehyde in a saucer, keep all other water or moisture out of the room, the fly visiting this saucer for a drink will die.

Then there is the dirt from the street. What is the composition of dirt? A microscopical examination shows that it is chiefly made of sand, particles of straw, hair, decaying animal or vegetable matter, epidermis from the skin, finely powdered horse manure, sputa from the human being, and most anything else that can be ground up. This dirt is deposited upon any kind of food exposed. Investigation has shown that from 50 to 100 pounds of dirt are deposited in the average store or exposed shop window in a year. Sugar has been found to contain an average of five grains of dirt to the pound; dried fruit, nearly six grains of dirt to the pound, currants, ninety grains.

The speaker on one occasion, in Kansas City, took, by means of a sterile knife blade, a very small scraping from a quarter of beef hanging in front of a prominent butcher shop, placed it on sterile cotton in a sterile bottle, and presented the same to a bacteriologist for examination. Result: Seven different kinds of pus germs, which had undoubtedly come from the catarrhal sputa of individuals; the Coli germ, which undoubtedly came from powdered manure deposited in the street; and innumerable other germs not to be mentioned. Also, on one occasion, culture dishes were

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exposed in a street car with a most frightful result in the variety of germs secured. Preserved fruits, candies and meats are especially liable to contamination by flies and dirt. The careful housewife bearing these things in mind will see to it that she does not buy groceries from a store where perishable foods are not protected from dust and flies, or where the inside of the store is not kept clean, with a large emphasis upon the “CLEAN” It would be an easy matter to regulate grocery stores, confectioneries, bakeries, etc., if the good housewife would do her part. The fact is, that no grocer could afford to keep a dirty store if the housewife declined to purchase from the man who ignored common decency in the matter of cleanliness.

Another matter in this connection which is of great importance as a possible source of danger — but one almost entirely overlooked — is the pet animal of the household. The fur of what might be called clean dogs and cats must more or less come in contact with many things which we may not care to have touch our food. Now and then a good housewife will decline to permit these animals in the parlor, for fear of soiling the furniture, but allows them free access to the kitchen. What shall be said of the judgment of such a one, when we realize that the chances are great that these animals will leave much loose hair and dirt, which may find its way into the utensils or the food itself? If this is true of food, what chance has a child in handling these same pests?

We all have hatred for rats and mice and cockroaches and other vermin, and we are not as careful as we might be in getting rid of them. A few years ago the speaker, in Kansas City, was called upon to investigate the death of an old lady. Briefly, she was taken quite ill after eating some oatmeal for breakfast and died.

Upon investigation, a. dead cockroach was found in the oatmeal which the old lady had eaten that morning. Underneath the ice chest was a saucer of poison — chiefly arsenic — and in the same were several dead cockroaches. As the symptoms and cause of the old lady’s death pointed to arsenic, the conclusion was that the cockroach had partaken of the contents of the dish under the ice box, and found its way into the oatmeal.

No resident of a farm can have good health in a real sense without properly balancing the physical and intellectual. When the time comes that self-respect is engendered by the improved sanitary conditions here urged, then the ethical and intellectual side of life will be considered, and more time will be given to magazines—not the frivolous ones—and the flower beds and the green lawns. More entertaining will be done for friends from the city, as well as in the country. Entertaining will become more a matter of study, consequently more enjoyable. One difficulty, to my mind, in the intercourse with friends and neighbors in the country, lies in what might be termed “too much hospitality.” People get in a habit of coming at any time which suits their convenience and not the convenience of the hostess. While the hostess does not complain, this necessarily leads to extra work. One can be just as hospitable and be a little more formal, as to have it understood that friends can come in at any time. This is especially so where the hostess

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does her own work. After all, the conventions are not the worst thing in the world, and people who are accustomed to the science of right living, recognize conventions as necessary to a proper consideration of others’ rights.

This brings me to what is probably the most important of all the hindrances to the health of the household—improper foods. The food laws of the nation and states have created in the mind of the food manufacturers and purveyors a sort of new conscience, or revised conscience, in that his consumer is no longer an impersonal one. Hitherto, when he manufactured his goods, it was because he was in the business “for his health” and expected a profit. His consumer was someone he would never see or hear of, and consequently his rights or health concerned him little. If his factory was ill ventilated and unsanitary, or if the goods which he packed were not of the best, or if they required a preservative in order to keep them from fermenting—thus saving him time and cost of coal in the sterilization—he was little concerned. But these laws and their enforcement have given him a new viewpoint. He finds it now a good point to proclaim that his goods are made in a well-lighted, sanitary factory, of selected material, and so well sterilized that no preservative is necessary. I speak now of the better class of manufacturers, or the ones at least who believe that there is more money in putting up good foods than not.

The time was when some canners of vegetables and fruits thought nothing of having dirty floors, constantly wet during the packing season; no toilet conveniences; approaches covered with rotten vegetables or fruits; slovenly hands, and, in fact, a general unsanitary condition. I am glad to say that this and like conditions in candy and other factories do not generally exist in Missouri, at least at this time.

The words “Absolutely Pure” have no value whatever on a can or package of goods unless the conscience and reputation of the manufacturer are behind it. It does not pay, under any circumstances, to buy a bargain in foodstuffs. If your grocer at any time offers you a bargain in candy, dried fruits, or in any other kind of groceries, decline the same with thanks. It never pays to buy cheap food. Remember that to sterilize and put up wholesome food in clean packages in a sanitary and ventilated factory is to spend money in the production. This means an additional cost for the production, and it is well worth your while to buy the best if you desire to keep your family up to the standard.

There is a class of grocers who make it a practice of purchasing a lot of canned goods and putting the same on the market, advertising it very extensively. Recently, in one of the cities of this state, a food inspector of this department found a man whose whole stock was made up of junk—selling canned raspberries as low as five cents a can. These raspberries were “swells,” as it is termed in the trade, meaning that the top of the can was pushed upward because of the presence of gas inside, due to the fermentation of the goods. On examination by the chemist, it was found that these goods were not only spoiled of themselves, but were poisoned by the action of the excessive acid acting upon the tin on the inside of the can, forming

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a salt of tin to poison the consumer. While the cooking of the contents of the can with water and sugar might relieve the sour taste, it could not by any possibility remove the poisoned tin in the fruit.

Some little time ago it was found by this department that it was the practice of some wholesalers to have returned to them fruits and vegetables in cans if the same were blown or swelled after leaving the packing company within six months. Credit for same was allowed to all dealers who had purchased such goods from the jobber or packer. These goods were supposed to have been destroyed. It was found on one occasion that the jobber—when these goods were returned and when he had received credit from the packer—quietly removed the label, punctured the can, letting the gas out, soldered up the hole and put the label back. These goods are always sold at a lower price, and are not fit to be used.

Again, it was found that another filthy practice is the re-doping—as it is commonly called—of dried fruits, such as prunes and raisins, which have been on the market and become dirty, filthy, wormy and buggy. These dried fruits, it is said, are placed in a large tub, and a mixture of a very dark and cheap molasses and water, with a little sweet oil, is thrown over them. This mixture is placed in a barrel, which is then shaken and turned, giving the questionable fruit an appearance of being better than it really is.

One day an inspector of this department called up with the information that a man was offering tomato catsup at three cents a bottle and that he had 100 bottles of the same. What should he do? “Get a sample.” The examination by the chemist of this sample revealed the fact that some tomato pulp, more pumpkin pulp, was the base of the so-called “tomato catsup,” same being colored with aniline dye to make it red; sweetened with saccharin; flavored with a synthetic or a chemical flavor, and spiced with the sweepings of the floor of the spice mill, manifestly, since grit and dirt were found in the bottle. It was my pleasure to pour about twenty gallons of this stuff into the sewer. But it was cheap, and was selling because of its cheapness. As I remarked before, it does not pay to buy cheap food.

Some time since an inspector of the department picked up some imitation chocolate, which proved to be made of common grease and earth. This is used to make a cheaper chocolate, and is commonly sold on the street comers.

Cheap candies are, to my mind, the lowest value for money that can be found. With the inferior raw materials, coal tar dyes, and synthetic flavors, it is a marvel that children can eat them at all without getting sick. It only shows how tolerant Nature is after all. The wonder is that we are not all of us sick all the time when we consider some of the things we have had to eat.

A flavoring extract which costs five cents is not worth for food purposes the price of the bottle alone. A vanilla extract cannot be put up and sold for five cents. No vanilla extract can be sold for less than thirty-five cents an ounce to the consumer, and this higher priced article is worth several times the other one.

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There was a time when the confectioners used an icing made of chalk and sugar, colored with aniline dye and flavored with a synthetic flavor. No one would pretend to say that chalk is digestible or that the aniline dye made it any better food.

I have seen a bottle labeled “Strawberry Extract” and the same selling at five cents a bottle, a teaspoonful of which contained enough aniline dye to color a baby’s woolen dress a bright scarlet. When these imitators and cheap purveyors get to putting drugs into their products, they do not seem to know where to stop.

It would be a good thing for every housewife who buys foods to closely read the labels to see whether the product is labeled imitation or not, whether it shows a preservative used or not. Because, if it does, it might be a wise thing to let that particular product alone. It seems nowadays as if it was impossible to sell a pecan without polishing it up with some kind of dye or coloring matter. Perhaps the dealer is not alone to blame for this, because the average housewife in buying foods unfortunately buys largely by the eye, rather than by knowledge. Hitherto, it seems always to have been easy to chop up a lot of beef trimmings, good, bad and indifferent, treat them with sulphite of soda, and put them on the market for sale. This drug gives the meat—no matter how bad it may be—a fresh odor and a bright color. It might be full of ptomaines, a dangerous poison, and you would not know it, because the danger signal has been removed in that the bad odor had been destroyed. And if you want a good case of indigestion, just try eating & little sulphite of soda. If you see on a label, “Preserved with Boric Acid” on any foodstuff, put it down and say, “Not today, thank you!”

I found something new a short time ago in what was a label on a bottle, “Golden Hen.” It proved to be starch, colored yellow with an aniline dye, and was used by bakers as a substitute for eggs. Put in a cake, it made the cake a pure yellow, just as if it had lots of eggs in it, and egg price were charged for the cake. The housewife who bought it was getting aniline dye instead of egg.

The time was when pepper sold very cheap and because the housewife demanded a cheap pepper. If you see that same pepper now you will find it labeled, “Pepper Compound with Ground Cocoanut Shells” or “Olive Stones,” as the case may be. When one buys pepper nowadays—the real thing—they have to pay for it.

The food laws have been accused of raising the price of living. This is so in a sense, in that if you get pure goods you have to pay for them, and you can get more pure goods now than you ever could. But it is no reason why it should raise the cost of living, since pure foods go farther than impure.

I have found jellies labeled “Strawberry” made of strawberry pulp, timothy seed and glucose, and colored with aniline. If you buy this today it will be labeled, “Imitation Strawberry;” and you need not be deceived.

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THE TWENTIETH CENTURY RURAL SCHOOL: WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT IS TO BE.

HON. E. T. FAIRCHILD.

The one laggard in the educational procession today is the rural school. Our universities, colleges and normal schools have attained a degree of excellence and efficiency unparalleled in the history of our Nation. The denominational institutions, the high schools, and even the village schools, all report remarkable prosperity and increased activity. The great wave of prosperity that has made the past decade the most marvelous in the development of material resources has also found expression in the educational field. Every true friend of education rejoices because of this fact, and because of the many evidences of increasing advantages to the youth of our country.

These institutions, including the high schools and village schools, have reached a condition where their future prosperity is practically assured. They have acquired a momentum that is bound to carry them forward surely and efficiently. The people are fully aware of the value and worth of the work being done by this type of schools; it is a most pleasing situation and one of which we all may well be proud.

The progress and development of the high school has indeed been marvelous. It would seem that each town and city is vying with every other in an endeavor to possess the best buildings, the best equipment and the best teachers. In many states practically every high school instructor is a college or normal school graduate. The courses offered are constantly increasing in number and, it is believed, in efficiency. Hence, today the instruction offered in these schools is broader and more diversified than that afforded by Harvard sixty years ago. Most satisfactory progress has also been made in our graded schools. Better methods, better books and better teachers are the order of the day. In the material betterment of the high school and the grades no more striking evidence is found than in the kind and character of the building's. In St. Louis is a single high school building costing, together with the grounds, one million dollars, a sum probably greater than the cost of all the school buildings of Missouri fifty years ago. In this school is to be found every convenience, every modern thought for conserving the health of the pupil and for contributing to his moral, ethical and mental welfare.

However, there is a phase of our school work that has not felt this forward impulse. I refer particularly to the rural school, it is the deliberate judgment of our best educators and closest observers that no such

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progress as we have described is to be found in the common or country school. While all eyes have been turned to the high school, to the college, and to the university, the welfare of the rural school has been sadly overlooked.

While there are undoubtedly many excellent schools in the country today, and while many most capable and experienced teachers are working therein and doing their best for the children under their charge, yet the fact remains that a large per cent of the teachers of this class are inexperienced, and many are most indifferently equipped. Much has been hoped because of the marked increase of salaries in the rural schools in recent years, yet statistics do not indicate that with large salaries have come better teachers.

Again, the average age of teachers in rural schools is continually lessening. In one county in eight years the average age has decreased from 23 to 20 years. While we have no recent statistics on the subject, it is probably true that the average age of teachers in the country schools is today even less than 20 years. Again, probably more than one-third of the teachers engaged in the schools of the country districts this fall are wholly inexperienced. In some counties fully 50 per cent of the teachers are engaged in their first school work.

These conditions, together with others that may be mentioned, are deplorable. It is not enough to know that the graded schools and colleges, which afford a training to but a small per cent of the nearly 20,000,000 boys and girls of this nation, are prosperous and growing stronger every day. What we need, and must have, is a system of education and facilities that insure the very best character of foundation work. The thousands of boys and girls who are now, many of them, being offered very indifferent educational opportunities, must have the same chance that is granted to their city cousins.

The type of school that afforded a sufficient education to the children of a generation ago is no longer sufficient. Progress in every phase of human endeavor has been so rapid, methods of business have been so radically changed, competition has become so keen, that the boy of today who is to become the business man of tomorrow must have a decidedly wider and broader and more liberal training than that of our fathers.

In fifty years marvelous changes have taken place in the economics of rural life. The sickle, the flail, the crude machinery of every kind, has given place to the modern reaper, the thresher, the riding plow, the devices of every sort for efficiency and comfort on the farm.

The railroads have so modified relations and changed conditions that there is but little likeness left to the “good old times.”

Standards of living have changed utterly. The enforced simplicitv and bareness of yesterday have given way to the comfort and plenty of today. Luxury then seems but poverty now. The increase in population in fifty years from 31,000,000 to 92,000,000 in 1910 has rendered imperative a new system of tillage. Farming is no longer a mere matter of industry and muscle. It is a new country life that faces us today.

Everything relative to the farm and farm life has been improved. Agricultural experts are daily solving problems related to the farm. Our

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agricultural colleges, through their farmers’ institutes, their wheat and alfalfa and corn trains, their lectures on the science of dairying, their valuable suggestions as to soil fertility and the conservation of moisture, are making the problem of farming not alone interesting, but vastly more profitable, and it is the boy and the girl of today who must be fitted by training and by opportunity to take up this ever-increasing problem.

Have our country schools kept pace with this marvelous march forward? All the benefits of which the farmer has taken advantage have tended to make better his financial standing and interest, his social standing and interest. The great question then is this: Would it not pay as an investment to bring the school up to the same high standard of efficiency that is being enjoyed in the modern up-to-date farm? Is it not absolutely necessary that the farmer’s children be educated in harmony with these many improvements? Is it not necessary to his future standing, financially and socially, to keep up with modern advancement at school as well as at home?

The proper education of the farm boys and girls cannot be neglected without finally bringing ruin upon the farming communities. If these advantages are not provided, they will drift away early into other callings. If the right kind of schools are provided for the country boys and girls, they will remain at home until they receive their general education, and then if they have gifts in other directions it will be time enough for them to seek special schools.

The old-time country school, as many of us remember it, has gone, never to return. The large attendance, the male teacher in the winter, the pupils ranging in age from 6 to 21, are no longer in evidence. In its place is the small school, and too often the old-time “good teacher” has gone to the city. The ambitious scholar follows him, often taking the family with him. Says the Illinois School Report:

“Thinking men have long since discovered that if this emigration to the cities for higher education is to continue, the country as well as its schools will be sapped of its vitality, and this thought has taken form in the expression that ‘the country child is entitled to as good educational privileges as the city child, and this, too, without breaking up the family home,’ and that everything short of this is unfair to the child and unprofitable to the community.”

It is the small school that constitutes the greatest weakness of the rural education. In Kansas, which may be taken as typical of the other states, the figures are most startling! Of the 8,603 districts there are seventy-eight having an enrollment of five or less, 474 between five and ten, 1,049 between ten and fifteen, and 1,316 between fifteen and twenty—a total of 2,917 with an enrollment of twenty or less. More than one-third of all the districts have an enrollment of twenty or less.

In the matter of average daily attendance, there are 286 schools having five pupils or less, 1,343 having between five and ten pupils, 1,889 between ten and fifteen, and 1,808 between fifteen and twenty, or a total of 5,326

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schools in this state having a daily average attendance of twenty or less, or 62 per cent of the whole. In addition to all this, there are 170 districts not maintaining schools, presumably because the schools are so small that they find it cheaper to send to other districts.

In these small districts a cost of $50 to $100 per pupil per year, based on the average daily attendance, is not uncommon in almost any county in the state.

If through consolidation or otherwise these rural schools could be brought to have an average attendance of, say thirty-five pupils, the number of teachers required therein would be one-half the number now employed.

But the financial question, however important, is not the most important consideration. The fatal weakness in these small schools lies in their size. It is impossible that schools so small as many of these are should do the best work. With but a handful of pupils no teacher can secure the best results. The pupils themselves miss the incentive and inspiration that comes of numbers.

As soon as the boy and girl are free from the operation of the com¬pulsory attendance law, they too often leave the school simply because they find so little to attract. In these small schools it frequently happens that there is not a single scholar above the age of 12 or 13. Or, if the pupil holds out until the age limit, he probably will find but one or two in his grade.

To undertake to study under such conditions with enthusiasm or profit is most discouraging. As a result the pupil goes more and more reluctantly to school. His parents finally give up the unequal struggle, or, at a time when the child most needs the restraints and friendly service of the home, sends him to town. It is not the young child that suffers so much because of the small school; it is the boy or girl of 14 and over, who, because of the depressing surroundings, because of the lack of incentive, drops out of school.

Further reports show that the chances of these smaller schools getting a good teacher are very small indeed. In Iowa we find that for 1901 more than one-third of all teachers were inexperienced. The larger and more attractive schools naturally secure the most experienced teachers. It is further true that when a teacher once demonstrates her ability, she is called to the village or city school, so that the great army of inexperienced teachers usually find their training in the country.

But the tragedy of it all lies in the fact that less than 25 per cent of the 10,000,000 rural school children in the United States are completing the grades. This, too, in the morning of the twentieth century! A century that promises to be the most complex, the most strenuous and the most democratic of all the ages.

Surely there is a great deal of misplaced sentiment displayed in connection with the little district school. In the process of educational evolution these schools had a place—an important one. But we are living under a new civilization, and new conditions require new methods.

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The rural school of today, then, is accomplishing much; but its efficiency is greatly lowered and its influence distinctly retarded for the following reasons: Small schools, short terms, poorly trained teachers, frequent changes of teachers, even when they are efficient, lack of proper buildings and adequate supplies, lack of courses of study calculated to appeal to the interest of the pupil and which meet their present needs. Indifferent and infrequent supervision is also responsible to a considerable degree for the retardation, the arrested development, of the rural school.

What, then, is the remedy? The answer in many instances is obvious. For better teachers higher requirements must be demanded. To meet this need in Kansas the legislature provided, at its last session, that after 1917 no one in the state may apply for a certificate to teach who is not a graduate of a four-year accredited high school or its equivalent. It has also made provisions for state aid to such high schools as shall establish and maintain normal training courses. One hundred and sixty high schools are now offering such courses and more than 2,000 seniors are this year engaged in a serious study of how to teach. These pupils in another year will become teachers in our rural schools. For longer terms the same state has provided by law for a minimum term of seven months and state aid for weak districts. For longer tenure and a wiser and more uniform administration of school affairs, a larger unit of school organization should be adopted. With the county as the unit and a single board in charge of all the school affairs of the county, a tremendous forward impulse would be given our schools and much wasted energy conserved.

City government by commission is rapidly extending and has proved to be the most efficient, the most speedy, the most economical, and perhaps the most satisfactory, disposition of a vexed public problem that has yet been tried. Certainly it is a decided step toward centralization, and is at wide variance with the usual conception of popular government; nevertheless, results show that it is the best type of popular government in that the interests of the people are securely guarded, and inefficiency and extravagance are largely eliminated.

It is this principle that we would apply to the management of our schools. No system, as a whole, could be devised that is more extravagant, more wasteful or less efficient in securing direct results than the system in vogue in this country with relation to the management of our schools. We have an army of over 500,000 teachers, managed by another army of over 2,500,000 officers—a condition of affairs that insures extravagance, represents a vast amount of wasted energy, and renders certain a disastrous lack of unity and co-ordination.

Modern rural school buildings of the splendid type found here at Kirksville must become the rule. Buildings that in their convenience and appointments are no less attractive than the best home. The problem of supervision must be attacked, first of all, by selecting only well trained, competent county superintendents. This can be accomplished only by completely divorcing the office from politics and making it the best paid educational

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position in the county. In addition there should be added, as in Oregon, an assistant supervisor for every twenty schools. Then, and then only, we hope for a rural school comparable in efficiency and helpfulness to the city school.

The one certain remedy for the existing evil of the small isolated school is consolidation or centralization.

Classification and organization are the keynote to every successful modern enterprise. The reason that the graded schools are superior is that the work of instruction is put upon a thorough basis of classification. In the one-teacher school the teacher must take all the pupils through all the grades, with the result that there is no opportunity for specialization, and with the further result that the recitation is so short as in many instances to be almost valueless. The average number of recitations in a country school is from twenty-five to thirty. Twenty-five recitations per day, with time taken out for movement of classes and recess, means an average period of not more than eleven minutes. It means that many of the recitations are indeed but little more than five minutes each. In our city schools the recitation period in the grades is from twenty-five to thirty minutes, and in the high schools from thirty-five to forty-five minutes.

In the consolidated school with two or three teachers, the recitation period is thus made relatively and definitely longer, but best of all there comes the larger attendance, with the incentive and the inspiration that is always born of numbers.

Again, there is afforded in such schools frequently an opportunity for one or more years of high school work, thus keeping the boy and girl still longer under parental care.

The two strongest advantages growing out of the consolidated school are, first, that it attracts and holds a larger number of pupils, and an older class of pupils; second, that there is opportunity, not alone to teach textbook facts, but to take up such subjects as will acquaint the child with its environment—to lead it to know and understand something of the laws of nature, and of the principles that govern and control agriculture. The best physical laboratory in America is the well-regulated American farm. Here the boys and girls study nature at first hand; here they observe the growth of life and plants and animals; here they breathe pure air and become familiar with the beauties of the natural world; here they make character. To have added to all these natural advantages the high school, without the limitations of town life, is an ideal situation.

Finally, the course of study in these schools must be redirected and reorganized by the introduction of courses in agriculture, manual arts, domestic science and household arts and commercial subjects.

The foundation upon which the American government is builded is the equality of men, and if a system of universal education is to serve its highest function it must be compatible with that principle. It must recognize the truth that the first duty of every school is to the community that supports it; that education is not for the few, but that education is for all.

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The rural school of the future will be a consolidated school or a township school. There only teachers of approved ability will preside. The school house will be “homey” in appearance as well as modern and sanitary, a building erected within the means of the district and yet one to which the farmers and their wives and children will point with pride. It will be the social center recommended in the declaration of the National Education Association as follows:

“The school buildings of our land and the grounds surrounding them should be open to the pupils and to their parents and families as recreation centers outside of the regular school hours. They should become the radiating centers of social and cultural activity in the neighborhood, in a spirit of civic unity and co-operation, omitting, however, all activities and exercises tending to promote division or discord. They should give opportunity for continuation schools, and for industrial, horticultural and agricultural training, as well as for the education of adults through lectures and through school and college extension classes.

“To safeguard, however, the integrity, privacy and hygienic security of our schools (which are, in reality, the homes of our children during a large part of their waking hours), so that the more subtle elements residing in the educational atmosphere of a well regulated school may be preserved, and the children guarded against the unsanitary conditions eventually following in the wake of promiscuous gatherings, the buildings during such use, and the persons thus using them should be subject to medical inspection whenever and in whatever manner required.”

In many instances the school house will be supplemented with a second building, which shall contain a business office, library, hall and kitchen. A place for the meeting of farmers’ organizations, of women’s country clubs and social gatherings of all kinds. In time a third building will be added—a home for the principal of the school. This will enable the principal to become a permanent resident of the community. He will be will qualified to give practical information to the farmers as well as the children. Five acres or more will be set aside for school gardening and experimental farming methods.

Here will be established a real rural high school, not a city school set down in the country. Courses of study will be offered that constantly recognize the environment of the child. It will be a school that expresses the best co-operation of all the (social and economic forces that make for the welfare of the community. The home, the church and the school working together in complete harmony. A trinity that will make all things possible.

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MODERN METHODS IN THE COUNTRY CHURCH.

REV. MATTHEW B. MCNUTT.

More than half the people of our great nation still live in the country. And until some short cut is discovered for producing food, the agricultural regions will continue to be peopled. These millions must be supplied with the Bread of Life. The country church, therefore, has and will have a mission for years to come.

The methods employed in the country churches today are, to a greater or less extent, either those transplanted from the town and the city or they are methods that were in use fifty years ago—the one class of methods is as ill adapted to the modem needs of the country as the other.

Perhaps the country church of the past was all that was needed in its day or was as good as the country people could then afford. But the new era of scientific farming and the introduction of the modern comforts and conveniences into the country homes have brought a new demand for and made possible better things for the rural churches.

What the country church needs is to work out its own problems from the country point of view. It needs to devise appropriate methods and to evolve and build up a type of life fitting into the needs of the country people as we find them today.

A great deal depends upon the methods employed in doing any kind of work successfully, though the mode and manner has not everything to do with it. I am not a crank on methods. It goes without saying that without God we “can do nothing,” no matter how good the methods. However, without placing any limitations on the Almighty, I believe that God can dispense his grace more advantageously and effectively through common sense methods and a first-class equipment than he can through slipshod methods and a poor equipment. He can and does sometimes use the weak and foolish things, but he certainly does not prefer weak and foolish things to serve him rather than the strong and wise.

The Jews brought to the altar of sacrifice the firstlings of the flock-that which was without spot and without blemish—and the custom was significant. It teaches us that all church work should proceed on the principle that nothing is too good for service in the kingdom of Christ. From nothing, nothing comes, is as true in the kingdom of grace as it is anywhere else. It has been said that “Order is heaven’s first law.” If that is true, then, if earth is to become heavenly, the business of earth must be done “decently and in order.” The country church has yet to learn the value of modern methods and the superior advantage of a first-class equipment.

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AN IMPORTANT FEATURE OF THIS RURAL LIFE CONFERENCE WAS AN EXTENSIVE EXHIBIT GATHERED FROM MANY PARTS OF THE COUNTRY. THE ONE ABOVE REPRESENTS THE WORK OF PAGE COUNTY, IOWA, MISS JESSIE FIELD, SUPERINTENDENT



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Exhibit by Adair County, MO., L. B. Sipple, Superintendent.



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I do not know that I can serve you any better today, than to tell you of some experiments which I have been conducting in a country church the last ten years. And I hope I can do it modestly without seeming to exploit myself. So many men deal in generalities and in speaking and writing on the country church that it may be refreshing to you to hear a description of some country methods in actual operation.

Ten years ago last spring I went directly from McCormick Seminary to Du Page Church—a country field thirty miles west of Chicago and six miles from the nearest railroad. It is surrounded by no town or village—the church and manse stand alone on the open prairie.

It is one of the oldest churches in Illinois. The people are an average country folk of Scotch, English, Irish and German descent. The congregation was then worshiping in a frame structure built half a century before. It was the old type of church architecture—one room, boxy, straight board seats, small plain glass windows and with scarcely any furnishings.

The church and manse lots, enclosed by the remnant of a wire fence, were veritable weed patches. North of the church stood some old tumble-down sheds, the sight of which made every passer-by shudder and think to himself, “Surely the Lord hath deserted this place.” The manse had the same neglected appearance and everything about the place reminded one of a man who had gone away on a long journey and had forgotten to leave any one in care of his abode.

One of the elders, a farmer, had been preaching for three years, or until he died. The last minister had resigned with $400 back on his salary, which amount the church borrowed to pay the debt.

No one had united with the church for five years. A club house had been fitted up in the neighborhood to house an organization that called itself “The New Era Club,” but whose chief object and amusement turned out to be dancing, though its original promoters had hoped for it something better. Many of the young people of the neighborhood, including church members, were spending evenings there. The dancing element from the surrounding towns had also begun to frequent the place.

The only service the church attempted was to open the doors on Sunday for preaching and Sunday school. Collections were taken once a year each for missions and ministerial relief, and this was practically the extent of the benevolent work.

Two-thirds of the Sunday, school teachers were members of one family. The three elders were also trustees, and each taught a class in the Sunday school. One of these elders was also Sunday school superintendent, Sunday school treasurer, church treasurer and treasurer of benevolences.

All this very discouraging situation existed in the midst of a thrifty and prosperous community where the public roads are paved with gravel, with free delivery of mail, good substantial houses and barns, thoroughbred cattle and all the modern farm machinery in the market.

This run-down condition of the church was not a reflection upon the church people of the community nor upon those entrusted with the leader-

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ship at that time. They were good, earnest, conscientious men and women. No one knew better than they that the affairs of the church were not going well and none deplored more than they the sad and apparently hopeless situation. Had they not been of the right kind of stuff the church would doubtless have disbanded years ago, as many such churches have done. None were more anxious than the Du Page people that the church should grow and prosper, and as a rule they have been ready and willing to adopt the new plans and methods, and are still among the most loyal and efficient workers.

The condition of this church at that time was not exceptional. Other; country churches were and are still in the same plight. Some people were saying the country church has outlived its usefulness, and that was and is true of the old type of country church. Many such have given up in dispair and disbanded. Many others still exist at the same dying rate. What was the matter with this country church? What is the matter with that type of country church? My diagnosis of the case is, simply, a lack of vision, and the want of adaptation to the new needs.

The Scotch elder that was preaching at Du Page was a very good preacher, they said, an able Bible scholar, and a man of rare and charming personality. His predecessor was a good preacher, too, according to reports, but the methods of both were inadequate. There are many good preachers failing in the country today for the same reason. They lack adequate conception of the needs, they fail to see the possibilities of country life.

There was a time when preaching and an occasional pastoral visit was all that was demanded of the country parson, and the people were thought to perform their part when they went to church and paid the minister's salary. But it is not so now. What was to be done?

Jesus, the Head of the Church, once said, “I came not to be ministered: unto, but to minister.” Believing, therefore, that he intended his church to be a ministering church, I began at Du Page with the idea that religion has to do with the whole man—body, mind and spirit; that it deeply concerns his social life, his business life, his education, his amusements, and everything else that pertains to man’s well-being.

I was brought up in a country church and the idea I got of it in my boyhood was that the church is a sort of a Sunday affair, which dealt; exclusively with men’s souls and good clothes. It was also a place of long faces, for if there was any hilarity among the boys at “meetin,” we could always depend upon the hazel brush being brought out when we got home; a place where dead men’s bodies were carried, as the funerals were invariably held in the church. Well do I remember also how fearful I was of the preacher, when, clad in his long black broadcloth coat, he would make his annual visit to our home. Two men I greatly feared in those days. One was Mr. Matter, the preacher, and the other Mr. Turney, the butcher. As boys and young men we never associated our good times with the church or the minister—except the annual union Sunday school picnic which was really a delightful occasion. The church did not seem to have

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much to do with our daily lives, or our occupations and amusements. It demanded nothing of us, apparently, but to go to church and sit still. Our companionships were outside of and independent of the church. It was the day of the husking-bee, the apple-cuttings, the sugaring-offs and all those most delightful, wholesome and interesting neighborhood pastimes in which old and young alike engaged and with such pleasure and profit. What a pity they have gone out of date! It was before the day of commercialized pastimes—the amusement parks, the public dance halls, the cheap vaudevilles and the like. It is alarming how rapidly these modern creatures are creeping in upon the country people in these days of the trolley, the automobile, and the horse and buggy which every young man on the farm now possesses—even the hired man. It is far easier now for the country people to get into the world current than it was forty years ago.

But coming back to the old type of country church, it did not seem to offer us much but a long, dry sermon on Sunday—and it was dry to the boys and girls—hard, straight-backed seats, a book from the Sunday school library in which the good boy and girl always died and went to heaven, and those delightful annual visits by the pastor!

Now, I love that dear old country church of my boyhood days, back in the hills of Pennsylvania, and I like to think that it did me a great deal more good than I realized either then or now. It might have done worse. And it is furthest from my purpose to speak disparagingly of it or of the dear people who were its leaders. I love them every one. It perhaps served its day. But the point I am making is that that type of country church will not meet the needs of the country people today.

With these recollections of my childhood and the church, I resolved first of all, when I went to Du Page, that I would get next to boys and girls; that I would make that old church a great center of attraction. Notice I did not say the great center. I do not believe in the church attempting to do everything or trying to do things that might better be left to other institutions. But I would make it a great center of attraction; a hub of joys, of happy memories and associations for that entire community. I determined, with God’s help, to make it an indispensable institution to every man, woman and child within its reach.

One of the good old Scotch elders, they called him “Uncle Dan,” — one of the dearest and best of men — put his arm around me one day, it was a way he had of greeting everybody, and he said very seriously, the tears rolling down his cheeks: “Our young people have got to dancing and they are being wooed away from God and the church. How are you going to I deal with them?” 

I said, “Uncle Dan, I know from experience that young people will dance if they have nothing better to do. I propose to give them something better.”

“Well,” he continued, “just before you came here our session passed a rule that there was to be no dancing by members of the church, but I fear there is going to be trouble when we come to enforce it.”

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I replied again, “Uncle Dan, it is impossible to shut off a stream entirely unless you give it some other outlet.”

I set to work, first, and organized an old-fashioned singing school. It might have been anything else just as well—a class in scientific farming, animal husbandry, domestic science, or nature study. I chose the singing school because I had some knowledge of music. The idea is to have something that will afford a point of contact between the leader and the people, and also to get everybody interested in doing something. The singing school met one night in the week, in the church. There was some good musical talent among the young folks and this new enterprise proved to be a great hit. Out of it grew a good strong chorus choir, a male quartet, a ladies’ quartet, an orchestra and some good soloists. Besides, it improved the singing in the church and Sunday school a hundred percent.

We began at once to observe all the special days—a dozen or more. This kept our musicians busy. And the first thing we knew the young people and many of the “outsiders,” as they were called, were taking part in these special services. They just couldn’t keep out. And, of course, the fathers and mothers had to come to hear their children sing and play and speak, and likewise the doting grandparents, and the uncles and aunts and cousins and sweethearts all had to come.

Next we started what we called a gospel chorus. We got some live new song-books and went singing around from home to home. At first some of the people were a little shy of the gospel chorus, but soon they were vying with each	other to see who would secure these Singers. The chorus went to the homes of the aged who were too feeble to	come to the meeting house. It sang for the sick. It sang in the homes of those who never heard any other music.

An athletic association already existed. We encouraged the boys in their field-day sports. Two or three baseball teams were organized. We played successfully many of the surrounding towns, including Chicago. We never challenged the clubs but we did challenge a team from The Fullerton; Avenue Presbyterian church, Chicago, and beat them on our grounds one Fourth of July, 20 to 0. The pastor of the church had come along with his boys, and he kept insisting that we must have some professional players from outside, but they were just the husky farmer lads.

The church building was not suited for social gatherings, so a series: of sociables was planned at the different homes. These were not the money, making kind; they were sociables indeed. The older people often attended and engaged in the play with the young folks. Refreshments were served free. At these gatherings special attention was given to strangers and to the backward boys and girls, and a few of us always had upon our hearts those who were not of the fold of Christ. They grew to be a sociable lot of folks, I tell you! They became well acquainted. And such fellowship! Such friendship! Such companionship! And all centering around the church.

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The women of the parish had long had a missionary society. One of the mothers said to me one day, “Pastor, don’t you think it would be a good thing if we had some kind of a little social circle for our girls? They are just aching for something to do.” I said, “Yes, let us have it.” She invited them to her home one afternoon and nine responded. They had a delightful time and they called themselves “The Girls’ Mission Band,” deciding to meet thereafter once a month. In these little gatherings were combined the devotional, social, educational work, and club features. After the program they would sew and make garments for the poor of the city. A meal is always served at these meetings by the hostess. The “Band” grew and so did the girls. When they became women they changed the name of the Band to “The Young Women’s Missionary Society,” which now has nearly forty members. As the young women marry, they are transferred to the Women’s Society.

A similar work was begun for the young men. It is simply the young men’s class in the Sunday school organized, and is called “The Young Men’s Bible Class.” It has upwards of fifty members. This class meets every Sunday morning with the Sunday school for Bible study and is taught by the pastor. Besides, it meets the first Tuesday of each month for fellowship, fun, business, devotions, and for literary and social purposes. Much has to be combined in one meeting, because it is difficult for people to get together very often in the country.

This class, and the Young Women’s class have become the strong right arm of the church. We are now selecting our teachers and officers for the Sunday school and church from there.

The young men conduct a lecture course, not for pecuniary profit, but for the sole and only purpose of furnishing wholesome entertainment for the community. We have had some hundred-dollar attractions. The entire community patronizes this lecture course without exception and regardless of creed. The Catholics and the German Lutherans attend. People from the surrounding towns are frequently seen in the audiences, driving sometimes ten miles or more.

Another enterprise which the Young Men’s Bible Class has introduced and supported is a bureau of publicity. The boys invested in a small printing press. They, with the assistance of the pastor, do all the church printing and issue a local church paper.

This class has developed some very good speakers and singers. Under its auspices open-air gospel and song services are held in a grove in the summer time and in the public schoolhouses in winter. These meetings have been a great blessing to the young men as well as to those to whom they minister. In the pastor’s absence on Sunday his Bible class has frequently taken charge of the service, three or four of them giving short gospel talks.

You are wondering what became of the dancing? Well, they forgot all about it in about two years, and there has not been a dance in the New Era Hall for over eight years. The building stands idle and is crumbling

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to ruin. The pastor never mentioned dancing in the pulpit or to a single individual in private. It was simply starved out.

Our Sunday school is well organized and graded and has three hundred members including the Cradle Roll and the Home Department.

The pledge system of finance has been introduced for the local work and for benevolences as well. Our ideal is a pledge from every man, woman and child. We have devised an envelope for making payments which answers all purposes. A financial secretary keeps an account with each individual and sends statements at the end of each quarter if necessary. We have found that the pledge system is a great improvement over the old way of taking collections once a year for the “Boards.” This church in the last ten years, in addition to building a $10,000 edifice, remodeling the manse, making other improvements, and increasing the minister’s salary forty percent, has given to benevolences $5,270, as against $6,407 in the fifty years preceding.

As a rule the various societies in the church are not made money-raising institutions. The system of raising money by sociables, fairs, and other devices has been almost entirely abolished.

As an ideal we are working towards the entire support, ourselves, of both a home and foreign missionary.

The Sunday school and the morning preaching services the only meetings held on Sunday. A Sunday evening service is not adapted to the conditions in this community at the present time, and we do not attempt it except on special occasions. Nor is there a mid-week service held for the same reason.

The cottage prayer-meeting is the best for the country, dividing the parish into groups of twelve or fifteen members each, and each having its own leader, organist and chorister. The leaders may form the pastor’s cabinet. The various business plans of the church may be talked over at these meetings.

There have been no evangelistic services in this church by professional evangelists for ten years. Formerly, this was a favorite method. Such distinguished evangelists as Moody and Sankey, and Majors Cole and Whittle have conducted meetings in the Du Page Church. And these were successful, too. But there is not another ten year period in the history of the church that shows as many accessions as the last decade.

The one by one method as illustrated by the Master and by Andrew and Philip, has been used. A great deal of the evangelistic work is done through the Sunday school. Every class is a personal work class. The teachers are encouraged to lead their pupils in personal work.

Great care is taken to press the claims of Christ and the church upon the young. The parents co-operate with the pastor in this work of dealing with the young. This is done through pastoral visitation and through pastoral letters. Occasional sermons are preached to the children, and a Christian training class is conducted for those who are about to enter the church. There have been few communion services when there was not

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Somebody to unite with the church, and between communion seasons members have been received. There is scarcely a person in the parish between the ages of ten and twenty-one years of age who is not a member of the church.

This church has learned the value of inspirational meetings. Two principal ones are held each year. One takes place on New Year’s eve, when the whole community, old and young, gather at the church as one family to watch the old year die and to welcome in the new. This is no common “watch service.” The evening is planned to overflow with good and interesting things.

The other great inspirational meeting is held at the close of the church year. It is an all-day meeting, and the whole countryside turn out to help round up the year’s work. The ladies serve a banquet at noon, free of charge. There is always good music on these occasions and two or three good participants from outside supplement the home talent. These big meetings are a great uplift to the country people. They promote friendship and good fellowship, and the dead-level gait always receives a severe jolt.

Other inspirational meetings are held for particular organizations in the church. The Young Men’s Bible Class held one not long since, attended by one hundred young men.

Eventually this church outgrew the old building, and it rose up and erected a new one, costing, including furnishings, $10,000 in money and the equivalent of another thousand in hauling which the farmers did gratis.

Practically all the money was subscribed before a shovelfull of earth was moved for the foundation. No offering was taken at the dedication for building purposes or for furnishings. Every person in the community was given opportunity to help build the new church. And all responded heartily. The Catholics and German Lutherans contributed to the building fund and helped to haul the materials.

The new structure is Gothic in design and is built of brick. The interior is finished in red oak. A handsome fresco in water-colors adorns the walls, with panels of burlap below and surbase molding. This with the beautiful art glass windows gives the interior a most pleasing and homelike appearance. The floors are covered with cork carpet. The main auditorium has a bowl-shaped floor and seats three hundred people. The assembly room of the Sunday school apartment, which is separated from the auditorium, by accordion doors, has an additional one hundred and fifty sittings. There are fourteen rooms in all, including a number of classrooms, choir and cloak rooms, toilet, pastor’s study, vestibule, kitchen, dining hall, cistern and furnace and fuel rooms. The building is heated with hot air furnaces and lighted with gas. A system of water works supplies water wherever needed about the building.

A library has been started which already has a thousand volumes. It is proposed to put in a line of reference books. A number of study courses are being planned in scientific agriculture, civil government, sociology, nature study and domestic science.

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There is a prevalent idea among the country people that the young folks must go away from home to get an education. When they get it they seldom come back to the farm. A very large percent of the country boys and girls never complete the eighth grade in the common schools. They think their opportunity for getting an education is past when they leave the public school to work on the farm, if they think about it at all. We are seeking to revive the “fireside university” and to teach the country people the possibilities of home study. It is not the purpose of the church, in doing this to become a knowledge imparting institution, but rather to create an atmosphere of research in the community, to foster the spirit of inquiry and investigation of truth, and to afford occasion and opportunity for such investigation.

To sum up the principles underlying these methods: Make the church a ministering institution. Let it be many-sided. Let it seek to serve the whole man, body, mind and spirit, rather than the spirit alone. Let it seek to make this a new earth by teaching the people to do all things to the glory of God. Let them know that honest toil is sacred, that innocent amusement is holy, and that these are also ways of praising and glorifying God as well as the Sunday devotions. Let the Church seek to discover in men their talents, and then encourage and help them in their development. Distribute the responsibilities as widely as capacity for efficiency will warrant. Lead everybody into doing something useful for somebody else. Make the church to minister to the whole community rather than a particular body in the community, the aim being, not to make Presbyterians or Baptists or Methodists or Catholics, but to create an atmosphere in the neighborhood to breathe in, which will help Presbyterians to be better Presbyterians, Baptists better Baptists, Methodists better Methodists, Catholics better Catholics, and all better men and women—an amosphere that will inspire the higher thinking and nobler living.

Let there be as much preaching of the gospel as ever—and more—for the gospel of Christ is still “the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth,” but let there be more of the spirit of Christ in ministering to men. Make it easy for people to do right, and as hard as possible for them to do wrong.

There is plenty of good solid work to be done in the country church. “The harvest truly is plenteous but the laborers are few.” It is astonishing how few men the Lord seems to be calling to our country churches. I say it reverently. How many ministers are preaching in the country churches because they love the work and realize its importance? Too few. A great many ministers are staying in the rural churches not from choice, bu. from force of circumstances. They are old and almost worn out, or they are sick, Or have missed their calling and imagine the country folks will not know it, or if they are young and they feel too inexperienced to tackle a city church. So they practice awhile to the farmers until they learn their business and the Lord calls them to a larger (?) sphere of usefulness in some city.

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The country needs ministers of strength and vigor in body and in mind, who choose the rural work first of all because of its importance and because of the great need, and who come determined to stay it through.

Here is a work that calls for dauntless courage, the brightest talents, and the most heroic and self-sacrificing spirits. Let no minister of the gospel be afraid or ashamed to take charge of a country church and “be buried from the world,” as some have put it.

And if any one undertakes such a work, let him stick to it. The hope of the country church is the long pastorate. And let no one engaged in this work be keeping his head up in the air all the time, looking around for a bigger place. The chances are the man who does that is not big enough to fill the place he has. Magnify the work! Make of the little church a big church,—large in helpful ministers, great in discovering and utilizing opportunities for service, wonderful in seeing and realizing the possibilities of country life. Whoever does this will be doing one of the noblest and one of the most needed service for his country and for mankind.

Colonel Roosevelt has well said: “In the last analysis the man on the farm is the man upon whom our whole civilization rests. The growth and progress of the country depend upon him. I want to see conditions keep favorable for him and for his wife.”

Does a mother feel that her sphere is narrow or that her work is in vain when she rears noble sons and daughters for her country? It is the supreme prerogative of the country ministers to shape the early lives of presidents, statesmen, preachers, teachers, missionaries, and business men, and to conserve the physical strength and the moral intellectual vigor of the whole human race by leading the country people in truth and righteousness, and it is one of the biggest businesses on earth.

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LIBRARY EXTENSION AND COUNTRY LIFE.

MISS ELIZABETH WALES.

"Recorded thought is our chief heritage from the past, the most lasting legacy we can leave to the future. Books are the most enduring monuments of man’s achievements. Only through books can civilization become cumulative.”

Given a prominent place in a newspaper of large circulation this quotation, from the doorway of a great library, went the round of our state on a morning not long since. What a wonderful impetus I thought would be given to every library effort if each worker could but vitally believe it. Those who love the city say when questioned, “Oh, but you have so many opportunities there,” and is it not true? But is it not also true that for many cities opportunities are simply a constant trickle through the mind of unrelated experiences and events; a series of distractions which so crowd each other as to leave no time for consecutive thought. Thus it frequently happens that our strongest thinkers come from the country where there is perhaps less of opportunity and more individuality. Can we obtain for that individuality, the wider, wider range of activity, and the deeper culture which makes it possible? Accomplish this and we shall give to the intelligence, the grit and, yes, the stoicism of the American farmery the carrying force, which will make him a power in the national life.

What now is the duty of the library worker in this field? Shall we endeavor to build for the country community beautiful stone buildings, to equip for the country dweller quiet reading rooms where the homeless wanderer may pass a peaceful hour in poetic pursuit of the charms of literature? Verily not so. In spite of the Weary Willies and their ilk, the city and not the country is the home of the homeless.

The library in the country should be unpretentious, but, like the church and the school, it may be the center of social life. Clubs, grange gatherings, entertainments, debates and township meetings, exhibitions and even theatricals may be arranged. But the librarian of a country library must know and love the country and must make a constant effort to place before its people books, as education, recreation and inspiration.

We hear much in these days of the “decadence of the home.” Many little activities have been removed to the factories. The loss from the home life of the mechanic arts has done much to lessen its attractiveness to young and old; this seems to be an economic necessity, let us try what we can do to replace small tasks with the record of large achievements.

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If our books are to accomplish the enlivening of country life they must be found in the hearts and homes of the people.

It is with this idea in view that the progressive states are establishing departments for the circulation of books among country communities. These communities are not connected with any city government, the national government is perhaps vital, but distant. Their welfare is bound up with that of the state. It is, therefore, logical, economical and just that the state which compels every child to learn to read, shall make some provision for the proper use of this accomplishment. If we do not this, we may forever deplore without result the devitalizing effect of the cheap novel and the criminal degradation of penny dreadfuls. “Don’t read that!” we exclaim in horrified accents, when we had better say “How would you like to read this one?” In the farm homes in which we find a prejudice against reading, we usually find upon questioning that it is by no means unreasonable, considering the kind of books piled in the dark closet under lock and key.

Granting then that the state is to offer this privilege to its country citizens, the machinery of the system must next be considered. After watching the results of work in older communities, our Middle Western states have settled upon rotating loans as affording the most lasting benefits to the greatest number. Under this arrangement, books in great variety are purchased and owned by the state; from this collection groups of books are loaned to groups of people, for a specified time; one set when returned may be immediately replaced by another, thus keeping a supply of fresh reading constantly at hand. It is, you see, an open proposition. A banker in a small town recently said to me, “I don’t see what objection there could be coming from us.” Nevertheless, the agent of the Free Traveling Library has to meet and conquer two adverse opinions. One man will think (if he’s frank he will say it), “This looks too good, must be a gold brick in it somewhere,” and another will remark quizzically, “So the city folks think we ought to read books?” These two complaints must be handled separately; both arise from a doubt of sincerity, but one man fears your disinterestedness, the other your over-solicitude. To the first we say it is too good to be true, if it had to produce commercial profits, the profit accruing to the state is just that which is returned from the school fund better and broader citizenship. Here is our agreement: “Promise to care for books and that a suitable place shall be provided for keeping the books; that they shall be freely loaned and that we will be responsible for the safe return of the books in good condition.” When a group of your citizens sign that your part is done. The Missouri State Library Commission ships you a locked box filled with fifty interesting readable books, you pay the railroad for bringing it just as you would for a box of soap. This done the quicker you open the box and send the books into the homes of your people the better. Three months or six months you may keep them and then exchange for another as interesting. Having converted this doubter, we leave him looking at our books and turn to the other. City people, (we say) is it

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not a well known fact that the majority of legislative members come from the country? This department is a legislative creation, an apportionment of a part of your taxes to your benefit. Sixty-four counties and 152 different places, last year, took advantage of this offer of the state; is there any reason why your country, your community should not do so. Again here is the agreement, do you notice that it requires the signature of seven responsible citizens? This is not going to be forced upon you; you are going to decide that you want it, and convince six others that the people need it. And he does, sometimes.

There you have an outline of library extension through the Free Traveling Library. We believe that as conditions are at present, it is the most practical means of supplying the stimulus of books for the country districts of Missouri.

Yet there is another way. The library law contains a clause, which allows country and town to combine their efforts for the good of both. (See No. 8198, Rev. Stat. 1909.) This law says in effect that any county having within its borders any incorporated city, which has a public library, may arrange for its use by the county. To make this law active you must develop and use an ancient Anglo-Saxon privilege, the right of petition, Some groups of people interested must secure the support of fifty county citizens and fifty town citizens in a union petition for action by the county court. The court can then arrange for service from the library already established and appropriate therefor annually any sum not exceeding 3 per cent of the annual county revenue. No method of rendering this service is designated; in one county books might be deposited in every school house throughout the county; in another, transportation facilities might be such as to allow of personal borrowing from the central point; while another might find house to house distribution possible by means of a library wagons In a county with a consolidated school the hack which collects school children might also distribute library books.

From one of the traveling libraries comes the word: “I didn’t stamp the cards every time the books went out, because we live so far apart that we exchange with each other. Mr. A. took his book to Mrs. B. and got hers, and took it on to Jennie C., who had the book he wanted. Sometimes one of us would be driving to town and we would stop and change books at almost every house, but I always knew where the books were.” This surely was a good solution of the circulation problem. It emphasized the value of co-operation already recognized in the sharing of the responsibility of the library agreement.

What will the books themselves do for the country man or woman? Just a moment, what have they done for us? You say to me New Zealand, has the most successful scheme of industrial arbitration, France and Denmark the finest system of intensive farming, Russia the most atrocious chain of political prisons in the world; whence comes this knowledge? Ever been to New Zealand? To Denmark? To Russia? Not one in a hundred of us. Again you remark, “Oh, Champ Clark may not be Demosthenes, but he’s

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a convincing orator all the same”; or you say, “These accounts of the eruption of Mt. Etna read like the old accounts of Vesuvius, don’t they?” Again, where did you get your standards? Did you ever hear Demosthenes? Talk with the younger Pliny? Some of us think air ships dangerous out of all proportion to their possibilities; it is well for us to remember that it was once supposed that an engine capable of drawing enough of a load to compensate for the cost would of its own weight become immovable. But you say these things are mere matters of culture; general information. That is what we want—intensive farming of the individual.

Our library boxes go out to places where the individual counts. One correspondent writes, “It has given a world of pleasure and comfort to a few families who were starving for something to read, has helped a widow living alone to pass pleasantly hours which otherwise would have been barren indeed; has brightened the days of a young man and his wife living far from any town; he would read every book if he had time; is a source of exquisite pleasure to my mother, who is 89 years old. She is deaf and not very strong and the books keep her happy and interested, when she rests from her painting, which she does beautifully. We lead a very busy life, with no time to visit so reading is our recreation.” Another: “The club met at our house today, and they tell me the time is up on our library box; there are so many that we still need to read! I did so enjoy the ‘Fishers of Men,’ it was splendid, and ‘Ben Hur!’ I never had a chance to read that before; you can’t think what a blessing the books are to us, so please send us another box!”

But is this matter of culture all an idle dream? Is it not well that we know in our own day the progress of life in wide and varying lines? Should we not know that there is a well defined law of supply and demand? A man unfamiliar with the principles of that law it was, who worked up stock in a canning company in an isolated district. There was plenty of fruit, so much that it went to waste, so the cannery started; it bought up fruit and saved it from waste in nice tin cans; but when selling time came there was no market for lack of transportation. Of course no farmer is going to sell his tomatoes at 50 cents a bushel and buy back the same at 25 cents a can! (Indeed, they tell me they couldn’t sell them at all for 15 cents a can!) Think of the nice, ripe red country tomatoes with the red checked labels, gathering dust in the store at Cross Corners while the helpless city folk pay 35 cents for a pure food label. The worst feature of the case is that commercial enterprise will long languish in that community.

Here is another incident which occurred not 100 miles from the capital city of our state. An enterprising young teacher had arranged a pie social to buy books for his school library. The interest was great and all the school district was there. A party of young toughs from a neighboring village got wind of the affair and being in a convivial mood set out to break it up. They arrived just as the program was about to begin, and declared their intention of taking a prominent part, in unmistakable terms. The

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teacher was plucky but soon saw his only hope was “to hold them down” until help could be secured. “Boys,” he said, “you may think you can stop this thing, but it is going to come off if it takes all night.” Meantime the messenger secretly dispatched, rides at top speed to the nearest town, flings himself into a group of men at the courthouse, panting, “They’re shooting up Lost Marsh School House! Anybody know where the sheriff is?” Then there was a scattering; another tearing ride through the night, a brief argument, and the five seated themselves peacefully beside the sheriff’s posse and stayed through the program, which ran from eleven till two, instead of eight to eleven. By the time the county finished up their case, fines were! paid amounting to $160.00. What a school library that would have bought Now what did they do it for? Excitement! They were some drunk, but they knew a sheriff when they saw him. Had they any associations of memory? with a library? Let the hills which shut in Panther hollow answer.

“Only through books can civilization become cumulative;” Carved in enduring stone on the face of a monumental building, these words of Missouri’s most honored librarian will be read hereafter by countless thousands. We may bend our ear to the future and hear them as they go, the passer by, the loiterer, the earnest student, eager childhood, impetuous youth and grim old age; the massive steps ring and the stately halls echo to their footsteps as they ceaselessly come and go. The softer soil of the country road gives back no echoing tread, yet here, too, unnumbered though sands pass and repass about the business of the nation. No magnificent buildings, indeed, receive them, but from the small box of books in the general store, may emanate an interest as vast and as transforming in its final influences.

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RECREATION AND THE RURAL COMMUNITY.

SECRETARY FRED HANSEN.

In the future when we write the story of rural regeneration and uplift we will need to write several chapters on recreation. In those communities where a constructive piece of work has been done we find that there has been a recognition of the true value and the necessity of recreation in character building and in community building. We do well, therefore, in a Conference of this kind to put ourselves on record as believers in this most important phase of life.

What I shall have to say today concerning rural recreation shall deal both with the element of social life and the element which we usually call play life. The subject of recreation is very closely allied to that of health, but we will not deal with that phase of it in this address only to say that proper recreation will improve health conditions in rural communities. It would hardly be possible to separate the social element and the play element in country life. The two are always closely associated, or in other words the emphasis in rural recreation is on having a socially good time rather than on the development of skill and star plays. I remember being present at a country ball game where the score was 19 to 38. The game started at 3 o’clock and was called by the Empire on account of darkness. Several of the fielders had never played ball before and did not know what to do with the ball when they got it. Last week there occurred in a rural community where I am acquainted a ball game the score of which was 21 to 19. The newspapers reporter said to me, “Shall I put in that awful score?” and I answered in the affirmative. There wasn’t, as the scores would indicate, a great amount of skillful handling of the ball but there was a splendid social time on the part of the players and more fun for the spectators than if it had been a 0 to 0 score. These illustrations indicate what I mean by the fact that the social and the play element are very closely allied in rural recreation, and the same should be true of the recreation of town as open country, whether in organized games, country parties, or celebrations of any kind which bring country people together.

The need for a development of recreational activities in the country is evident everywhere. Each year there come to the office with which I am connected from small towns and country communities literally scores of calls for the Young Men’s Christian Association to come out and develop the play and social life of the young men. These calls usually come in connection with some great religious awakening where those who have the community’s welfare at heart realize that the leadership and the type

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of social and play life will determine whether or not the decision to do right shall amount to anything. A short time ago there came into my office a principal of a rural school. There had been a religious revival in his community. It was a prosperous country community where practically all the farmers owned their own farms. He told me the story of how the year before the boys had asked for some time during week days to play baseball and had also asked for a place where they might skin a diamond. The reply of the fathers was that they were too busy to give the boys any time during the week for such foolishness as baseball and that they could not possibly let them have a piece of ground on which to play ball. I have tried to feel kindly towards those fathers but I cannot help but feel that if one of them had wanted a place for his hogs to root he would have found it mighty quick. Of course it would have been too bad to have taken an acre or so of the 320 or 640 just to let the boys play ball. Well, the outcome of the matter was that not getting any time for recreation during the week and not having any place in the home community where they could play the boys sneaked off to a rougher community where Sunday baseball was the popular thing and there had their recreation. The result was that through the companionship and the Sabbath desecration the ideals of this group of boys were lowered considerably; in fact, it was a demoralizing proposition. The professor who called on me said that they had fears that unless the fathers would grant time and place for recreation the decision of the boys to lead Christian lives would soon be forgotten, as they found rougher companionship on a Sabbath day in order that they might have a little recreation. I have said about this case a few times that these fathers did not use as much sense about raising boys as they would about raising hogs. At any rate this illustration shows the need, the necessity of some time, a place and also leadership for rural recreation. I shall not give a lot of other illustrations which I have in mind which show the same condition of affairs. I have often heard the remark from country boys “All we do is work”; “There isn’t any social life in our community” “I wish they would have some parties in our neighborhood”; “I don’t ever get to go any place because we have to work so long and hard.” And then I have heard many a father say, “You don’t need to organize ball games for my boys. They get all the exercise they need in the field.” The sad thing here is the lack of appreciation of the fathers of the place of play life as a distinct craving and as a need in the life of the young.

What is the result of the present condition of rural recreation? The incident which	I have just used concerning the bad influences which came from a denial of play life might well be mentioned as one of the bad results. I have heard it said by play authorities that the natural craving of young people for experience is so unsupplied in the country because of a lack of social and play life that illegitimate means are often taken to supply this hunger, and not only illegitimate but unhealthy means are often sought. Here is a father who complains that his boys were continually running to town and then here are the parents in town complaining

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that the young people find some very questionable means of amusement and recreation. These are only evidences of the fact that country young people must have recreation and that if time and place and proper leadership are not provided that they will take things into their own hands or, as is very often the case in the country, their social and play life will be entirely neglected.

The attitude of country people towards this question of recreation, especially the attitude of the fathers and mothers, has made in many cases an antagonism between the parents and the children. A denial of what the children can feel in their very make-up to be a natural craving has made their spirit bitter. We find in those country places where recreation has been neglected some prematurely old people. I think one of the most pitiable things in country life is to see a young man or a young woman come to maturity without knowing how to play or without any social ability. I think of them as only partially prepared to enjoy life or to fight the battles of life. They can never maintain the spirit of youth nor can they be at ease wherever they may go in the world as can the ones who have learned the value of recreation and have made it a part of their lives. I have in mind a Christian worker who was asked to take up a work which had to do largely with play life and social life in the country. His reply was this: “I can see the need, and I was raised in the country, but I never learned how to play and feeling that that has been left out of my life I do not think that I would be a successful leader in promoting that very thing.”

Leaving out recreation in the country only emphasizes the monotony of country life. It furnishes another argument for those who wish to be where things are going on and those who wish to satisfy a natural impulse, to get away. While there are a lot of things which contribute to the sending of the country youth to the larger centers, I feel safe in saying that an absence of the social and the play life is one element. We must have rural recreation if we are to satisfy the hunger for experience and for development along these lines.

The absence of recreation in the country has made of a lot of our country people selfish individualists. There have not been the opportunities for getting together to know each other and to understand each other. This has made for a selfish spirit and for misunderstandings and jealousies as well. There has been no community spirit developed where recreation has been left out as this is one of the best means of uniting a whole community or, as the college professor would say, of socializing a community. I went to a community social affair a few months ago and one of the ladies of the community told me after the affair was over that she had met quite a number of people that evening for the first time and she had lived in the same community with them for several years.

We are ready now to discuss briefly the true value of play in the country community. Is it truly a time-killer, as some would have us believe, and are its effects mere theory? We shall see. Recreation puts a better

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Spirit into the country community. I know a country community where the fathers of the boys are friendly to social and play life and encourage it. The young people are invited into the homes for social occasions and they are given time for their play festivals, their ball games, etc. In this community the fathers of the boys are as enthusiastic players almost as are the boys themselves. This is a much more pleasant spirit than is the case where the fathers are continually begrudging the boys time they use for social and play life. It is also true of this community, like every other community where the social and play life has been organized and developed, that a community spirit has grown up. The families which are represented in these recreational activities make a community where people work together and where we approach the nearest to complete social-ization that I have any knowledge of. Generally in such communities a pride comes to be taken in the accomplishment of individual members of the community and of the community as a whole.

The development of recreation makes country life more attractive, more satisfying, and maintains the spirit of youth in the country longer. My home country community happens to be one of those country communities where the recreational life is very highly developed. They have a group of play activities and social activities which have brought the community into the limelight. It is a significant tiling that very few of the young people from this community have left to make homes elsewhere. I think there were either ten or eleven of us who went to college. Of these all went back to live in the home country community but three. I have heard expressions over and over again from those who have left to make their homes elsewhere that they would like to get back where there is something going on and where there is the spirit that there is in that community. Now whatever others may think I know that baseball, track athletics, play picnics, social literary meetings, competitive hunting contests, etc., have been a large element in making that community a very, very attractive place in which to live, and let me say also in this connection that for several years that community has won more prizes at the state corn show than any other community in the state and has for three successive years won the state com judging contest. This will show that even though they take time for play and recreation that their work does not suffer. I have often said that if country people would take time for recreation they would do just as much work and be a whole lot better satisfied.

Not the least important of the influences of play life in the country community is the fact that it satisfies the natural instinct to play and have social life in a consructive rather than a destructive manner. It is made the means of the up-building of character rather than the stunting or tearing down of character. I could give you some figures here today to show that in those communities where recreational life has been properly organized and properly directed there has been much less social impurity than in those communities where people have existed more as individuals and without proper and legitimate means of recreation.

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It is very likely that some of you have thought of the fact that in some places, especially in our towns, has the social life been the means of stratifying society into cliques and sets. In this case the social life does not need to be created like it does in the open country, but it merely needs re-direction along healthier lines. The development of community occasions where all would need to work together would help bring about a proper status of affairs.

Before I close I wish to present a few facts which ought to be kept in mind. In the first place we should emphasize the fact that high ideals should dominate. By this I mean that emphasis should be placed upon clean sport and clean social life. I mean also that Sabbath desecration should be shown to be unnecessary as well as poor policy. We should keep in mind also that it is better to set a whole community to play and to be involved in recreation than to have a few stars who do all the playing and probably get all the benefit. The greatest good to the greatest number should be the motto of rural recreation. While all work and no play should be done away with, we must also keep in mind that the business of playing and recreation can be overdone. We should be as quick to denounce the motto of a whole lot of fellows, especially in our small towns, who probably play ball all summer and find nothing to do in the winter. Their motto, “all play and no work,” is as pernicious and even more so than the doctrine of all work and no play.

We need to keep in mind that a campaign of education to prove the value and the necessity of recreation in country life is necessary. I was talking with a man just this week who could not see that taking boys out to summer camp or organizing their play life had anything to do with building up their character. He did not appreciate that one of the strongest influences on the boy life of his town came through the association with other boys on the playground and out in the open where they could do as they pleased. I remember of several fathers taking their boys out of Bible Class in the winter time when they heard that there was to be a Bible Class base ball team the next summer, and even some of the old folks who missed a lot of life because they did not learn to play and to have a good social time cannot see why it is necessary to give the young people now an opportunity for these things.

I also want to call attention to the fact that the element of rural recreation will depend a lot upon the development of the trained leadership. We ought not to expect that some of the ideals and some of the possibilities will be realized unless leaders are provided. One of the men who is associated with me in the rural association work in Iowa told me of being invited to a country party recently. He said that when he arrived the house was full of young people, but they were all at a loss to know what to do to have a good time. Finally the lady who was the hostess persuaded this man to take charge of things and show them a good time. This he proceeded to do with the result that they had such a good time and learned so many new games that this leader is now swamped with invitations to be present at

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country parties in that community. We need leaders in school, in church and in all phases of rural life, to lead in recreative activities.

We not only need leaders, but we need a definite program of action. We need some organization or a group of organizations which shall take hold of this proposition and block out a program for community recreation. We are in need of games which are especially applicable to the country and of games which spring up from rural environment. We need some one to be a prophet of rural recreation and give us a list of country games and of social occasions which shall be generally applicable to country conditions. I was just wondering how many of those who are gathered together for a conference like this could set up for a year or even for a month a program for a village or open country recreation which would command the attention of the whole community and which would meet the end for which it was organized. I cannot say today what organizations will be called upon to foster such a campaign or to train such leadership, but I believe that the church with its allied forces such as the Young Men’s Christian Association and the school are going to be large factors in bringing about such a campaign. I hope that as those of you who are gathered together for this conference go back to your places of work that you will not forget to preach in a sane, common-sense manner the gospel of rural recreation as a builder of character, as a builder of community spirit and as an element in making country life attractive and worth while.

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FORWARD MOVEMENTS IN COUNTRY SCHOOLS.

SUPT. GEO. W. BROWN.

The teacher must realize that no course of study can be constant; that as society adjusts itself to new conditions brought about by material and spiritual development the school must assist society in interpreting these new conditions.

There was a time when all education with reference to material things was given in the home because of the forced contact with material things. The father and mother who opened a farm in the western wilderness, by the very force of circumstances, gave training to the sons and daughters of their household that would enable them to battle successfully with life, because the next generation only moves a little farther westward and enters conditions similar to those which surrounded their parents. In those days the one thing which the home could not do for the children was to teach them “Reading, Writing and Arithmetic,” hence the predominence of the “Three R’s” in our early course of study.

As this phase of development passed away, society again adjusted itself, organizing the course of study about Mind, Method and Matter. This era might be called the “Three M’s.”

We are now approaching a period when three other features seem to appeal to society as worth developing in the public schools, that is, Hand, Heart and Head. Strangely, our education has become in the reverse order, the head or mind being developed exclusively in our schools. The time now approaches when the school must emphasize all three of these features.

Agricultural Education is a part of the great movement known as Industrial Education. From the nature of its subject matter, Industrial Education separates itself into two distinct classes:

First, that phase in which the youth and the adult overcome, shape and fashion for use and beauty the products of the mineral kingdom and inanimate portion of the vegetable and animal world.

The first attack of primitive man upon his environment was for the purpose of obtaining food, clothing and shelter. The fundamental history of the race issues from man’s exertion to secure these requisites. The sense experiences obtained by these impelling struggles have exerted, are exerting and must continue to exert a mighty influence upon the bodies, minds and souls of men. We now look backward a long distance through time and space from the steam trip hammer so delicately adjusted to exhibit more than human accuracy to the rude club used by primitive man to protect himself from wild and savage beasts. The sweat of primitive man’s face

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should begin in no other manner than the attack on his material barriers for the purpose of self-preservation. Man was thus forced to battle for self and selfishness. The principles underlying man's struggles to make use of these material surroundings are enduring, yet the method of applying these principles must be constantly adjusted.

This adjustment of the same principles to new demands of society may be made clear by the following:

Several years ago the energy of some factories was devoted to producing heavy freight wagons. The advent of the railroad compelled a change toward light carriages, and now this same energy is devoted to making automobiles, while some of these same factories are experimenting with airships. Many of the same principles are differently applied in all these means of transportation.

That our heathen ancestors should make their gods of stone, wood, hay and stubble is explained in no other way than this forced contact with material things. Does it not explain why many of us too often make our goal solely the accumulation of this substratum? As every clod may climb to a soul in grass and flowers, so man must anchor all the higher visions of a life of service upon these stocks and stones.

This phase of life which is hurriedly delineated must find a place in our public school system. Our present generation is recognizing the value of our boys and girls being permitted to come in sense contact with material things. No useful and usable life can hope to find rest upon any other foundation. Children must be made proficient in the manual arts without regard to the wealth of parents or probable position in society at maturity.

The second division of Industrial Education is that phase of human endeavor that works with and directs the evolutionary development of plants and animals that they may be more serviceable and beautiful. Such is agriculture in its highest conception.

The manual arts in giving discipline and culture must deal with inanimate material that has fixed laws of resistance but none of co-operation. The sculptor, with chisel and hammer, may superimpose his ideal upon the block of marble, yet Luther Burbank with all his constructive faculty of seeming creation often finds his power resisted by the growing plant.

In manual arts the time element rests with the power of man and his tools or appliances. A man with the proper use of tools may make a perfect wedge in a few moments; yet an entire season must be used to hybridize a plant.

Both of these phases must be emphasized, yet, he who stops with the first can never reach his full fruition. With power to almost annihilate time and space, man too often looks upon himself as a self-made man because of his ability to make the material world yield to his nod and call. Feeling that he is self-made, such a man is too often inclined to worship his creator.

In agriculture man is dealing with animate beings in whose fiber and tissue are written myriads of unfolded and unappropriated possibilties. The agriculturist must, more than the craftsman, take into consideration the im-

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portant factor of time. The production of an ideal ear of com will require many generations. The agriculturist is indeed a full partner with Divinity; The keynote of the crafts is change, while of agriculture it is growth. Man says to one, “You shall”; to the other, “We will work together.”

An ideal realized in the crafts should be preserved for the use of all future generations, yet the realized ideal of the agriculturist must pass away in order that a higher form of life may appear in conformity to law. “Except a corn of wheat falleth into the ground and die, it liveth alone, but if it die, it brings forth much fruit.” The agriculturist does not thwart law, but walks hand in hand with Divinely appointed decrees. For these reasons, agriculture must assist in furnishing one of the fundamentals of all truly educated persons.

Upon the Manual Arts and Agriculture must rest the social studies, reading, writing, arithmetic, etc. That these foundation studies might be the more rapidly disseminated seems to have been the origin of writing, reading, etc. Agriculture in its true relation lies above the crafts or manual arts and below the social studies. To be well educated, man must master the fundamentals of all and find his vocation at the tip of the many ramifications from anyone. Having shown the proper relation of agricultural education, some time should be considered as to why there is a demand for it as a part of the course of study for children of this generation.

This is an age which is characterized by a reaction from books to things, from creeds to deeds, from dreaming to acting. Mankind cares for virtue in its abstractions, but is trying to embody these virtues in human lives. Plant and animal development are some of the realities that overshadow all human life. Children should be aided to come in contact with their environment, or such an environment should be created and called a Course of Study. The city child-needs such a course more than his country cousin. Not that all should be trained to till the soil. The lawyer, the doctor, the minister and the teacher are of more service to mankind for a training in the elementary principles of agriculture.

No occupation of man has made such rapid progress as that of agriculture. Good seeds for the crops and high bred animals have placed the farmer abreast of any profession. A large portion of all for all time must engage actively in the conservation of the soil and the growing of food products. Thinking farmers and other progressives know that the Course of Study for all children must contain this important study. Our elementary schools have partially failed because they have existed to feed the high schools, which must lead a life of uncertainty because of dictation from the University. Our first high schools were a descent from the old-time church academies, which were fostered by the college as preparatory schools. That the high school should be gripped and lifted by this hand from above is easily explained. One is reminded of the vision which was necessary for Peter before he would permit the Gentile world to accept Christianity. A sheet knit at the four corners was let down from heaven like the course of study in our high schools, which comes down from the college or university. There is yet

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another similarity. This sheet let down from above and knit at the four corners was filled with four-footed beasts, wild beasts, creeping things and fowls of the air. In a like manner, too much of the course of study in our high schools comes down to us with the aroma of the dark ages.

Before agriculture in the grades can be successfully rounded out, we must have high schools that recognize and use a course adapted to the needs of modern society. Our high schools must, Janus-like, face both the past and the future. They must lead both collegeward and lifeward. AU subjects from the kindergarten to the university are studied by children because of the demands of society of the present and past. The past in all courses of study is the predominating influence. This must continue to be so. The birth-pangs of a new study entering a course are not always accompanied by the death-rattle of a retiring subject. Civilization must hold to the past because slow elimination is constantly dropping off, while assimilation is as slowly changing the old with the new structures.

Here is the field of the great educational leader. Like the prophet of old, he is a voice crying in the wilderness. Educational reformers are equal or superior to reformers in any other field of human endeavor. Like reformers in other fields, the rank and file of teachers often leave their Horace Mann’s “not without honor save in their own country.” Teachers and followers of professions other than teaching feel the need of a change in our course of study so as to include manual arts and agriculture.

Every study when it first enters a curriculum is admitted for the purpose of use. After being firmly established, it is defended on the ground of mental discipline. Latin entered at the close of the dark ages and was introduced for its usefulness. All theological or political articles in those days were written in Latin. No educated man could be possible without knowing something of this universal language media. It is yet of use to about five per cent of the boys and girls who finish our high schools. The remaining ninety-five must study it or leave school on the grounds of mental discipline. In the development of civilization, the manual arts and agriculture may be supplanted by some other study, at which time the conservatives will wish to retain these studies on the ground of mental discipline. All studies must possess these two features in a varying degree. All students should receive their mental discipline from those studies that are related to life’s future activities. Life is too short to rest mental discipline and culture on a less firm foundation.

A great impetus could be given agriculture in the elementary schools by giving our present course of study in high schools a setting in agriculture. Our chemistry should be more of soil and less of star dust. Botany more of corn, and kindred cereals and less of toad stools. Zoology more of helpful and harmul insects and breeding of farm animals and less of the microscopic protozoa.

All children should be taught to use the camera and telescope more than the gun and scalpel. The microscopic cross section of a bull frog’s vertebra

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has no more relation to the real problems of life than a Mexican bull fight has to the price of steak.

A neglect of the fundamentals of agriculture means a child handicapped for life. Our present system of education has broken too often from these fundamentals and attempted a short circuit by the use of books only.

The struggles of society to make a useful and usable environment have been more potent factors in the education of mankind than all the schools from Socrates to William T. Harris.

The school never before has so fully realized its mission and possibilities as now. The day is rapidly approaching when the school will be the chief factor in race development.

Students of the school are realizing the value and possibilities of the manual arts and agriculture as factors of force and power for mental discipline and culture.

The training of the hand must be formatory as well as reformatory. Until a few years ago a child had to become a criminal before the state would teach him the use of his hands. All state institutions that are the most effective are training the hand for accuracy and arousing higher emotion by cultivating plants and animals. Why not give this birthright to the children who will be the future sheet anchors of society?

The following forward movements in country schools were shown by the means of slides: 1. Preservations of Seed Corn. 2. Testing of Seed Com. 3. Corn Breding, Ear-to-Row Plats and Cross Fertilization. 4. Excursion to College of Agriculture. 5. Agricultural Short Courses. 6. Farmers’ Institutes. 7. School District Corn Shows. 8. Seed and Soil Specials. 9. Use of the Babcock Milk Tester. 10. Growing Garden Plants for the Patrons of the District in a Hot Bed at School House. 11. Paper Folding and Cardboard Construction. 12. Wood Work. 13. Basket Weaving. 14. The John Swaney Consolidated School. 15. Agricultural Experiment Plot at the Macomb Normal School.

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GOOD ROADS AND THE FUTURE OF OUR STATE.

MR. C. O. RAINE.

The subject of Roads has claimed the attention of all nations, and history tells us that the first promoters of art and science, commerce and manufacture, education and government were builders of good roads. Centuries before the Christian era the Persians and Romans were noted for their construction of permanent highways. The Romans were indeed the first to practice scientific road building and travelers tell us that sections of Appian Way, the construction of which was commenced by Appius Claudius 312 B. C. and completed about thirty years B. C., remain to this day and are practically as good as when built.

The old saying that “All roads lead to Rome” was true, for twenty-nine great roads centered at Rome and extended to the extreme limits of the empire. How happy would you be if you could say that all roads lead to your town and extend to the extreme limits of your trading. The examples in road building set by the Romans have been followed by France, Germany, England, Norway and Sweden until today their roads are the finest in the world; all constructed and maintained under strict supervision, they are the most attractive features of these countries to the American tourists, who make much use of them.

In our own native land Jefferson, Calhoun and Clay were famed for their advocacy of good roads, and in that day, next to the tariff, the roads question was the most important subject before the country. The celebrated Cumber-land road was built, and a complete system of the great national roads was contemplated, but the panic of 1837 put a stop to their construction. Then later came the railroads, which have so completely occupied the attention of the nation that wagon roads, the feeders of great lines of commerce, have been neglected and only constructed when the owners of abutting lands were taxed for the public road. At the present day we need some of the type of Jefferson, Calhoun and Clay to bring the government back to the people, build good roads, and improve and beautify our own land.

Since 1861 Congress has donated 44,464,719 acres of public land to railroads, 4,500,724 acres to canals, 1,900,593 acres for river and harbor improvements; guaranteed the payment of principal and interest of bonds to the amount of $64,623,512 for the building of railroads, millions to build levees to prevent overflow along the Mississippi Rivet, millions to aid irrigation in the arid lands of the West, is working on the Panama Canal to cost $40,000,000 to complete and $60,000,000 more to fortify, has recently donated $3,000,000 for roads in the Philippines, $2,000,000 for roads in Porto

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Rico, $1,459,073 for roads in the Canal Zone and $1,100,000 for roads in Alaska; sent the navy around the world at a cost of $13,460,512 and on it now has a repair bill of $4,730,823.46; and for this year has appropriated for the navy $188,815,323.52, for the army $257,829,192.62, for public buildings $23,000,000 and $4,000,000 for powder for the navy, but not a dollar for the roads at home. Our country roads arc so notoriously bad that it costs more to haul a ton of wheat from farm to market than to ship that ton from New York to Liverpool. Our country roads are so bad that it costs the American farmer twenty-three cents to haul a ton where it costs the English, Belgian, French and German farmer only from seven to nine cents for the same haul. Our bad roads cost the American farmers one-half billion dollars per year in waste of time and that one-half billion dollars would build 100,000 miles of macadam roads every year. The necessity for good roads is the need of the hour and we should realize the tremendous importance of them. Show me a community where there are good roads and I will show you painted barns and houses, well kept farms, good fences, fat cattle, hogs and horses, school houses and churches and an air of prosperity, a happy people and prosperous merchants. Show me a community in which the roads are bad and I will show you a reverse condition of farms, surroundings and people.

But there is more in the road question than mere commercialism. Good roads have many advantages over bad ones such as the possibility of securing quick medical assistance in the event of sickness in the family. The ability of children to attend school regularly, although possibly living a considerable distance from the school house. The possibility of the family attending church and enjoying social intercourse with their neighbors and friends both in the country and in town. The possibility of utilizing time in bad weather by attending to business and social duties away from home both day and night. The enlarged rental value of the farm. The ability to market produce when it is scarce, because those living on bad roads cannot get to market. The increase in the tonnage in the hauling of produce to market and the return haul of family necessities. The increase in the value of the farms by many dollars per acre and the possibility of selling with a readiness not known to those holding lands not adjacent to good roads. The importance given to the country by reason of its being inhabited by people who build and maintain good roads with pleasure and profit to themselves. If it could be truthfully said that this, Adair County, has more and better roads than any county in the state it would be acclaimed as the banner county and property would be worth six times more than it is now.

Again, thousands of young men and women are growing up in the rural districts that are cognizant of their ability to enjoy their leisure hours, as others, in more favorable localities, and they are looking about for a condition that will favor them more than the bad and impassable roads. For six months in the year in the locality in which they reside, they become tired of the drudgery and isolation of the bad road districts, and in a short time you lose your sons and daughters from the farms and no one can find fault with

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these young people who have aspirations for better life and better surroundings.

Improve the roads and organize a good Grange in every community and you will have made a great advance in breaking up the monotony of farm life. Every devoted father and mother ought to consider the forceful co-operation of their neighbors, their townships, their county, their state and our nation in the construction of improved public highways. We must cease building for today only and should look to the future, preparing for the possibilities of a great people in Missouri. Threatened with disintegration by bad roads, good roads, everywhere studded with happy homes, is the only guarantee of a safe and sane future of a state and nation. We are all interested in good roads and the time has come for a general forward movement for roads, built and maintained on a general uniform plan, roads to be paid for by all who derive profit or pleasure therefrom.

Good roads mean additional profits for the farmer and cheaper products for the consumer, they bind people together in industry, intelligence and patriotism, they bring the country to the town and will take the town to the country, and while no one is mean enough to advocate bad roads, yet there are a great many, both in the town and country, who seem to be contented with them at their front gate.

Adair County will prosper as she never prospered before when she improves her 900 or more miles of roads, by properly grading and draining her earth roads, kept under the supervision of a competent highway engineer, who is not hampered in his work by a lot of well meaning but incompetent road overseers, but has the entire supervision with power to dismiss for inefficient service and to command the best workmen both in road construction and maintenance. When her people have realized the value of good earth roads then the way of permanent gravel or macadam roads will be an easy one.

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THE ROLE OF THE AMERICAN FARMER.

H. J. WATERS.

President Kansas State Agricultural College, Manhattan, Kan.

In all the civilized ages agriculture has been the most important occupation of man. It is true, it has not always been so regarded. Other occupations, such as war, seafaring and commerce, have been looked upon as far more important to society than tilling the soil and producing the world’s food.

Never was there a time when agriculture was more important to the nations of the earth than now, and it is a comfort to realize that the world is beginning to appreciate this fact. To be true, it is only a beginning. We have not progressed very far toward the appreciation of agriculture, else the government of the United States would not be appropriating three hundred and fifty millions for the support and betterment of the army and navy, and only nineteen millions for agricultural research and development. Seventeen dollars for the support of the art and science of war for every dollar devoted to the industries of peace does not look like we are yet fully alive to the importance of the latter.

The farmer has played an important part in every great crisis in, the history of the world. The story of the seven fat and the seven lean years of biblical history presents a picture of the problem of food supply as vividly as does a succession of crop failures in this day.

The Roman empire did not fall until the farms flanking the Appenines from which it drew its support had been exhausted.

In the Napoleonic wars, when sugar became contraband, Napoleon, realizing that it would be impossible to recruit his army without giving his people their accustomed supply of sugar, took two hundred thousand dollars out of a depleted treasury, at a time when France was beset on every side by her enemies, and placed it in the hands of three of the most celebrated scientists of his country, with the command to discover some means of manufacturing sugar at home. These men were the first to extract sugar with commercial success from the beet, and as the result of these investigations France is today one of the leading sugar export nations of the world.

If Cyrus McCormick, the Virginia farmer and blacksmith, had invented a cotton picker instead of a reaper, so that the mother of the South could have supported her husband and five sons at the front, there might have been a different ending of the Civil War, and it might have been our misfortune to have two nations instead of one, the one free and the other slave.

The Boer soldiers did not surrender until the British had destroyed their farms and had driven away the women who tilled them and supported the

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army. Then the Boer soldiers faced the alternative of starvation or surrendering, and chose the latter.

Mr. B. F. Yoakum, President of the Frisco Railroad System, recently said that in a country as old as China and in a country as new as the United States the farmer is its most important citizen, and agriculture its most important industry.

President Roosevelt, in a message to the Fifty-ninth Congress, said: “The only other person whose welfare is as vital to the welfare of the whole country as the welfare of the wage workers are the tillers of the soil—the farmer. It is a mere truism to say that no growth of cities, no growth of wealth, no industrial development can atone for any falling off in the character and standing of the farming population. The farmer represents a peculiarly high type of American citizenship and he must have the same chance to rise and develop as other American citizens have. All of this is peculiarly necessary here in the United States, where the frontier conditions even in the newer states have now nearly vanished, where there must be a substitution of the more intensive system of cultivation for the old wasteful^ farm management.”

THE PRESENT SITUATION AS OLD AS CIVILIZATION.

We think we are facing a new condition of affairs, in the drift of the people from the country to the city, in the increase in tenantcy, in the steady rise in the cost of living, and in the decline of our food exports. It is true that for us this is a new situation, but for the world it is as old as civilization.

Plutarch, in his “Praecepta Politica,” protested against the threatening invasion of large cities. Cicero thundered against the depopulation of the rural districts through similar attractions to those which draw young men and young women from the farm today. Even Justinian, the great law maker, was in favor of legislation designed to keep people on the farm.

The great Roman Emporor, Augustus, before the Christian era saw that his empire was being undermined and the strength of his people sapped by the exodus from the country to the city, and called to him the poets of the nation and commanded them to sing of the beauties and profits of country life, in order to attract his people back to the land.

Vergil saw the evils of land monopoly as clearly as we see them, when he said: “You may admire a large farm, but you should till a small one.”

Walter Blith, as early as 1649, had the evils of tenantcy as clearly revealed to him as we have today, when he said: “If a tenant be at ever so great pains or cost for improving his land, he doth thereby occasion a great rack upon himself or else invest him landlord with his cost and his labor gratis, or at best lies at his landlord’s mercy for requital, which occasions a neglect of good husbandry, to his own, the land, the landlord, and the Kingdom’s suffering.”

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BREAD A WORLD PROBLEM.

"Give us this day our daily bread” was the petition of the ancients, and has been the chief prayer of all the ages. Never, until the prairies of the West were conquered by the plough and made to grow grain, had the world had food enough and to spare. For the first time in history the spectre of famine was banished from the feast. In all the ages before, the struggle for bread had been man’s chief occupation. In this period of surplus, cities grew apace; urban population far outstripped rural population, and a great leisure class grew up. But we have come again upon a time when there is no surplus food. With a series of bumper crops the country over the prices for the necessities of life have steadily mounted, and the cry of all the nations is for more and cheaper food.

Famine stalks unchallenged through the most densely populated country of the globe; bread riots are of daily occurrence in almost every civilized country. The City Hall in the center of one of the best agricultural regions of the United States has been converted into a market place to enable the consumer to buy cheaper food.

We of the golden middle west, where the food export business of the nation originates, have been so accustomed to plenty that we cannot realize on what a narrow margin the world lives. General J. Franklin Bell, formerly chief of staff of the United States Army, is authority for the statement that if the people of the small country of Japan, for example, lived on the same plane as do the people of the United States, there would not be enough food in the world to supply all its wants.

The following significant statement from Mr. Balfour, Prime Minister of England, in an address at York in January, 1910, is an eloquent tribute to the importance of agriculture:

“The peril which England has to fear is not invasion, but starvation—the most terrible of all perils. Apart from the raw material needed by our factories, four out of every five loaves which we eat come to us in ships passing over the frontiers dividing us from possible enemies, frontiers which soldiers cannot, but sailors can and have defended. The sober facts as be-tween invasion and starvation may be thus stated:

If you drilled every man in this country to the picture of perfection now possessed by the general army, or by any other great foreign military force, if every young man of twenty were trained to arms, what would it avail you if the sea were not free and open to bring to these shores raw material and the food upon which we depend?

Your training would be useless, your valour would be thrown away. Your patriotism would waste itself in empty effort. You would be beaten without firing a shot, you would be enslaved without striking a blow, and that result is absolutely assured unless we have the patriotism and the energy to see that the fleets of this country are not merely adequate to fight a battle, but that they are adequate to preserve the great trade routes which are the very arteries and veins through which our very life-blood flows.”

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OUR FOOD PRODUCTION MUST BE DOUBLED IN THE NEXT HALF CENTURY.

During the last quarter of a century our total food output has been doubled, but the product per acre has remained practically stationary. Our population is growing at the rate of approximately two million a year, which means that within the next half-century we again shall need to double our food output. But this increase cannot be brought about as was the last—by doubling the area under the plough. We have reached, in a large way, the limit of this sort of expansion, and henceforth must look to the acres already in cultivation to produce this extra food. Otherwise we must rely upon our manufacturing industries to maintain our trade balance and we shall become a food importing people.

KEEP THE BRIGHTEST BOYS AND GIRLS ON THE FARM.

Broadly speaking, our present problem is a two-fold one, as follows:

First, to keep the rural population increasing in numbers, intelligence and efficiency proportionately to the urban population.

Second, to adjust our industrial and commercial affairs in such a way that the farmer is assured a larger share than he now receives of what the consumer pays for what he, the farmer, produces.

These I call the fundamental Rural Life Problems.

To the first problem, there can be but one permanent solution—keep the brightest boys and girls on the farm. To make up the deficiency in rural population in one state by attracting them from another is but to shift the problem from one locality to another. To draw them from the city is perhaps impossible, and generally undesirable, if possible, because of the danger that they may not succeed under such radically changed conditions of life. To attract immigrants from Europe for our farms is fraught with serious dangers. Certainly we do not need additional immigration to this country of the kind we have been getting in the past. We could use, to good advantage, such immigrants as might be safely and profitably put on our farms. This means that they must be intelligent, well educated, possess capital, and have had the sort of experience that will keep them in sympathy with country life and enable them to quickly adopt American methods and American ideals. We must not forget that the foreigner is Americanized more slowly in the country than in the city, and that the wrong sort of a foreigner is a far greater menace to society in the open country than in the closely guarded city.

EDUCATION THE FINAL REMEDY.

While the drift from the farm to the city, as has already been pointed out, is not a new situation, we are seeking to apply a new remedy. In ancient times the remedy was sought in some instances in legislation; in others, in laying emphasis upon the beauty and attractiveness of country life. We are seeking now to hold the boy and girl on the farm by a new education-by intellectualizing, so to speak, this old industry; by making it a profession that will attract rather than repel the strong young men and young women.

In addition we are seeking to meet this condition through improvements

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in rural conditions, so that life on the farm may actually possess the attractiveness of which the ancient poets sang.

MAKE FARMING MORE PROFITABLE.

Of more importance perhaps than either of the foregoing is the attempt through more scientific methods and better business management to make farming more profitable. In other words, to increase the income of the farmer. If the people, generally, believed that farming offered as good, business opportunities as does the city and that country life possessed the attractiveness of city life, there would be plenty of people to supply the places of those who have left the country for the town.

That is to say, if an income equal to that of the city dweller could be assured the farmer, and if there were available in the country as good school, church, social and home facilities as are afforded by the city, we would not hear complaint of too few people on the farm.

THE ATTRACTIVENESS OF CITY LIFE OVER-ESTIMATED.

But, added to the actual situation is the extremely unfortunate fact, that the difference between city and country life in all these respects has been greatly exaggerated in the public mind. The young people of the country have been taught in their homes, in the schools, and through the literature placed in their hands, largely to overestimate the advantages of city life, and they have not been taught correctly to comprehend its disadvantages. Likewise, the people of both the city and the country exaggerate the difficulties and drudgery of country life, and fail to appreciate its great and peculiar advantages.

The trend cityward, therefore, partly is due to the half education that has prevailed in the rural districts, giving farm boys and girls glimpses of a more attractive city life than really exists, without teaching them at the same time the true attractiveness of country life and how they may attain their ideals of living in the country.

THE FARMER OF TOMORROW MUST BE WELL EDUCATED.

But we have at last come to the point where we realize that it is quite as much due to the boy who is to remain on the farm that he be soundly educated as it is to the boy who is to leave the farm and become a physician, a minister, an editor, or a merchant. It is due him not only to insure his future success, but likewise it is due his calling. It is only by this means that the dignity of agriculture is to be maintained.

OUR HIGH SCHOOLS MUST BE MORE PRACTICAL.

It is of more importance to the country to have our high-school pupils taught the principles of economics and government than that they have instruction in an ancient or modern foreign language.

It is far better for the young man who is to go from the high school to the farm that he know how to judge stock, how his soil is wasted, and how to market the products of his labor, than can possibly be the most exhaustive study of Ancient and Medieval history that any high school can afford.

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To the young man who is to take his place in the industries, high-school training in drawing, shop-work, commercial arithmetic, commercial law, bookkeeping, stenography and typewriting will prove far more useful than the biological sciences.

To the girl who is to take her place at the head of a home, a knowledge of human nutrition, personal hygiene, home decoration, and sewing and cooking, will serve a far more useful purpose than a study of higher mathematics.

TEACH AGRICULTURE IN THE RURAL SCHOOL.

The problem is by no means solved, however, when Agriculture is successfully taught in all the high schools, for after all comparatively few of those who will farm ever attend a high school. Indeed, from seventy-five to ninety per cent of the boys and girls in the United States leave school and enter their life’s occupation before they are sixteen years of age and before they reach the high school.

The real problem, therefore, is to devise a system of education for the grades that will best fit these young people to take their places in society and in the industries.

Perhaps nine-tenths of the farmers go direct to their occupation from the rural school. To reach them with instruction that will make them better citizens and more successful husbandmen and business men means that we must carry it into the rural school, and into the graded schools of the towns and villages.

WILL EDUCATION BE EFFECTIVE?

Will better education for the farmer solve the problems of a sufficient food supply? Cornell University recently took the record of 573 farmers in New York State, selected at random, and classified their earning power, per adult laborer, according to the education of the farmer, with the following result:

Number of Farmers - Average labor income
Attended district school only - 398 - $318
Attended high school or equivalent – 168 - 622
Attended college – 10 - 847

Thus, a high school trained farmer was nearly as effective as two district school trained farmers. A farmer with some college training was worth two and three-fourths district school trained farmers. A high school course was, according to their results, more than the equivalent of a $6,000 endowment.

When a non-technical high school course nearly doubled the efficiency of a farmer, when compared with an eighth grade farmer, what may be expected of a man trained in a properly equipped agricultural high school? Or when a partial college course will make a farmer two and three-fourths times as effective as district school trained men, what may we expect of a graduate of an agricultural college?

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WHAT VOCATIONAL EDUCATION HAS DONE FOR DENMARK.

Among the countries of Europe, Denmark has been notably successful in meeting these problems with her technical schools, and we may derive much profit by considering the results. This little country, with an area less than a fourth that of Missouri, and with a population approximately two-thirds that of this commonwealth, makes school attendance compulsory up to the age of fourteen years. In these schools the children are taught bookkeeping, business methods, and everything possible pertaining to the industries and to farm life, all in addition to the ordinary school subjects. Above this are the courses in the agricultural colleges, and that little country supports twenty-nine agricultural colleges with an attendance of more than six thousand students. In America we are satisfied if a State, substantially aided by the Nation, supports one agricultural college.

With a poor soil and a harsh climate, Denmark supports a population of 155 people to the square mile, and maintains a favorable trade balance in food stuffs. The United States, with far more favorable natural conditions and a population of but twenty-eight people to the square mile, is already engaged in a struggle to keep its trade balance in food stuffs from getting on the wrong side of the ledger.

Denmark, old as she is, has approximately sixty-five percent of her people on the farm, while the United States, so recently settled and yet so undeveloped, has not more than thirty-five percent of her population on the farm. In Denmark only one farmer in ten is a tenant, and nine out of every ten own their own farms. In this country, with Uncle Sam still giving away farms, four out of every ten farmers are tenants, carrying with it all the baneful influences which a tenant system exerts upon the country roads, the country schools, and the country church.

Were Missouri as densely populated as is Denmark, you would have a poulation of more than ten and a half million, instead of fewer than three and a third million, yet Denmark, in addition to supporting this vast population, exports an average of nine dollars’ worth of food stuffs for every acre of land under cultivation. With a better soil and far more favoring climate, does Missouri export this amount of food stuffs for every acre she has under cultivation, even though supporting a home population only one-fourth as dense?

WE MUST HAVE HIGH MAN YIELDS AS WELL AS HIGH ACRE YIELDS.

We have heard much about the necessity for a more intensive system of farming and of this being the means of increasing the yield per acre. But increased acre yields must not come at the cost of man yields. We must not sacrifice the manhood and womanhood of the American farm on the altar of high acre yields, as they have been sacrificed in European countries. High acre yields must come while the yield per man remains large, if we are to keep up the grade of the people in the country.

To illustrate what I mean, the average yield per acre of wheat in America is something like 15 bushels, in Germany about 31, in France 30. But the yield per farm family is:

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In America, $900; in France, $580; in Germany, $570.

It is for. the American farmer to show the world how to secure high acre yields at the same time that the high yield per man is maintained. In other words, we must pursue intensive farming with machinery and without the hand labor and drudgery that have gone with this kind of farming in Europeon countries.

THE FARMER’S SHARE.

To so adjust our industrial and commercial affairs that the farmer shall receive his full and just proportion of what the consumer pays for what the farmer produces, is the greatest problem after all.

The farmers of the United States, by their industry and sacrifice, produced, in 1911, nine billions of wealth. That is, what he produced was estimated to be worth this sum on the farm.

According to the United States Department of Agriculture, it cost approximately fifty-five percent of what the consumer paid for this material to take it from the farm to the kitchen of the consumer. If we assume that the farming population is one-third of our total population, we are safe in estimating that the farmer sold two-thirds of his product, retaining one-third for his own use.

If it costs fifty-five percent to deliver this food from the farm to the consumer, the farmer got for his labor, in producing this material, forty-five percent of what the consumer finally paid for it. This means that the farmer sold material worth at his door six billions, for which the consumer paid thirteen billion dollars at his door. In other words, it cost more to get this material from the farm to the consumer than the farmer received for producing it. If these figures are even approximately correct, we are justified in asking whether the farmer gets his share of what the consumer pays for his products.

When it costs more than sixty percent of what the consumer pays for his meat to get it from the pastures and feed lots to the table of the consumer, is not there an unnecessary waste in our system of distribution and marketing?

OUR ENORMOUS FREIGHT BILLS.

A very large item in this six or seven billion dollar charge was the freight and express account, amounting last year to two and one-half billion dollars. This is equivalent to one hundred and fifty dollars for every family in the United States, and is one-fourth of the total cost of living for the average family.

I do not know whether the freight and express rates charged were exorbitant, or whether they are so low that a reasonable return cannot be made on the money invested in the trasportation business. This is a question which I am not prepared to discuss. What I do say, however, without fear of successful contradiction is, that we are moving our products unnecessarily. Our centers of consumption are too far from our centers of production. We depend upon fruit shipped from California, and let our own waste. Our

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meat products seldom reach the consumer with less than two and frequently with as many as four freight charges. For example/ we ship our feeding cattle and sheep to the market centers, where they are purchased and shipped back to the country to be fed. They are again shipped to the market centers to be slaughtered. The fourth shipment carries the meat to the consumer, and not infrequently it is back over the same road that the live animals came, either as feeders or as fat animals.

THE PARMER PARTLY IS TO BLAME.

The farmer contributes his share to his waste. As stated before, he buys many things which have been shipped long distances that he could have produced better and cheaper at home. Using meat again to illustrate the point: Thewriter recently interrogated a large number of the leading farmers of Kansas with respect to the extent to which they patronized the local butcher shops for their fresh and cured meats. It was found that they spent annually between five and seven million dollars at the local butcher shop. Practically all of this meat was shipped into Kansas from Kansas City, Omaha, St. Joseph, and Chicago, notwithstanding the fact Kansas is one of the leading live stock States of the Union and produces far more meat than her people consume.

The magnitude of this waste will be appreciated when we realize that the farmers bought this meat back at an increase in price of from one hundred to one hundred and twenty percent from what they received for it alive. Here is an annual waste of over three to four million dollars in a State like Kansas, all of which easily might be saved.

This is but one of a hundred ways in which leaks of more or less magnitude occur on the average farm. The American farm is no longer self-sustaining and self-centered as it once was. Not all of the departures from the old regime were wasteful or improper. Any step that has lightened the burdens of the women on the farm, is highly to be commended. In many ways, however, we may stop these wastes without imposing burdens upon the house-wife or increasing the drudgery of farm life.

The following humorous and of course exaggerated account of the extremes to which we have gone in buying everything consumed on a farm, with the exception of the one crop in which we specialize, was clipped from the Meridian (Mississippi) Dispatch:

“The average Mississippi farmer buys canned and dried fruits, likewise canned and dried other goods.

“He gets up at the alarm of a Connecticut clock, fastens his Chicago suspenders to his Detroit overalls, washes his face with Cincinnati soap in a Pennsylvania washpan, sits down to a Grand Rapids table and eats Indiana hominy fried in St. Joseph lard on a St. Louis stove. Then he puts a St. Louis bridle on a Tennessee mule and plows a farm covered by an Ohio mortgage.

“When bed time comes, he reads a chapter from a Bible printed in Chicago, says a prayer written in Jerusalem, and crawls under a blanket made

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in New Jersey, only to be kept awake by a Mississippi dog, which is about the only home-raised product on the place.

“It might also be added that: He raises cotton to buy corn to raise cotton to buy corn to raise cotton.”

CO-OPERATION WILL HELP STOP WASTES.

You ask what is the remedy? I propose what has been proposed a thousand times, and in the main has been unsuccessful wherever tried in this country, namely: Co-operation among the producers. Nevertheless, it can and will be made successful in this country.

Today the farmer is the only individual of large economic importance in America who is not compactly organized for his own protection and progress. He buys and sells and conducts all of his business operations as an individual and without any regard whatever to his neighbor or his fellow farmer in any portion of the country. When he has a load of hogs or a bushel of wheat to market he must accept, without recourse, the price for these wares fixed by a compact organization of merchants or manufacturers. Co-operating, he might easily become independent of such organizations at the same time that he could increase his efficiency as a producer. Personally I have no respect for an organization that will seek to impose burdens upon other classes, even though they do benefit the farmer, or that will seek to deprive other men of a just and necessary occupation. But the farmer will get his full share of what the consumer pays for what he produces only when he is compactly organized, and he will increase his efficiency as a producer and do his full part toward reducing the cost of production only when he is associated with all the other farmers of the country in these undertakings.

We are experimenting most diligently in co-operation in this country at this moment. These experiments embrace almost every kind of endeavor from the control of the distribution and price of farm products in New York and Pennsylvania to affording a market in Texas for all the meat animals produced in that State and providing facilities for slaughtering these animals in municipal abattoirs and selling the meat direct to the consumer. Many of these efforts will fail, as similar ones have failed in the past. But what is being done successfully by other people can be done by us.

In Denmark, for example, there are more than a thousand dairy societies with more than 150,000 members. Through these societies, with their experts employed to help the members, the butter export business of that country has risen from 19,642,500 pounds in 1880, when this co-operation began, to 176,782,000 pounds, in 1908, or an increase of more than eightfold in thirty years.

But of special significance, most of this and the other products of the farm are sold direct to the consumer by these societies. They maintain retail stores in London and elsewhere to market their butter, eggs, bacon, cheese, etc.

A further beneficial effect of this co-operation is to be observed in the yield of the Danish cows. For example, the average butter yield per cow

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in that country in 1884 was 112 pounds. Last year it was 224 pounds per cow, and this result was accomplished, not by importing high-priced cows from other countries, but by breeding up their own stock. Our butter yield per cow has not increased 20 pounds in the time that Denmark’s has doubled. We are just beginning to organize these co-operation cow testing associations in this country. The next few years will tell another story—the duplicate, let us hope, of Denmark’s.

Other instances of successful co-operations are not lacking.

Denmark has 2,500 societies with 132,480 members, organized for the sole purpose of exporting and marketing in foreign countries their cattle, horses, sheep, swine, and poultry. They have more than 500 central societies with 12,000 members; 1,364 co-operative purchasing societies for the supply of articles of consumption with 205,000 members, and an active capital of nearly nineteen million dollars.

The co-operative selling agencies in Great Britain with eight million beneficiaries, and a half a billion dollar yearly business, is a further example of what co-operation may do.

We shall make it successful in this country sooner or later, for it is by this means and this alone that the most important resource we have, the American farmer, is to be conserved.

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FOR MISSOURI

Mrs. EDWARD M. SHEPARD.

It was the Irishman who said, “Every one likes his native country best, even though he wasn't born in it We who are, so many of us, Missourians only by adoption, with something of the sentiment of that son of Erin for the “ould sod", have still become so much a part of this great Middle West that its life is our life, and the problems that lie before it are our own.

As we remember the part that Missouri has played in the westward march of national development, it is not strange that this great State should make strong appeal to our loyalty and our pride. Even before the name “Missouri" was applied to this territory, it had become the center of activity for those adventurous explorers who added the Far West and the Great Northwest to the possessions of the eager Anglo-Saxon race. It was Missouri that set out to learn what the more western world was like, even before she had, herself, achieved statehood. You remember, it was from Missouri that Lewis and Clark started on their 1,900-mile journey into the heart of the then unknown Rocky Mountains; from Missouri the indomitable Zebulon Pike turned his face westward to conquer the unknown desert and learn what lay beyond; and beginning in Missouri, the Santa Fe Trail, blazed by the hardy pioneers who knew no discouragement and were equal to any emergency, became the highway to new fields of enterprise in the great, mysterious Southwest, and the starting-point of that northward route along which a steady stream of pathfinders guided their families and drove their herds far into the territory that has since become the States of Oregon, Washington and Idaho.

History tells us that the pioneers who went out from this great State were never lacking in courage, enterprise or adventurous spirit. They helped to settle and develop what Representative Borland has called “great empires *** brought under the protection of the American flag." Then, as the exigencies of an increasing civilization and the demands of daily life began to turn the mind of man to his more immediate surroundings, the beauty, the grandeur, the gradually unfolding riches and future possibilities of this particular part of the Louisiana Purchase began to be made manifest, and from that time to this there has been no backward step in Missouri's march of progress.

Placed by Providence in the very center of all the States, her geographical advantages are such as to make supremacy over her surroundings a matter of choice on her own part. Endowed with physical features that combine the attractions of all adjacent territory, she need fear the competition of neither North nor South, neither East nor West; and filled with resources that make her practically independent of all the world, she

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ONE OF THE EXHIBITS OF THE DEPARTMENT OF RURAL EDUCATION AND SOCIOLOGY, KIRKSVILLE STATE NORMAL SCHOOL



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EXHIBIT OF EDGAR COUNTY, ILLINOIS. GEO. W. BROWN, SUPERINTENDENT.

ANOTHER EXHIBIT OF THE DEPARTMENT OF RURAL EDUCATION AND SOCIOLOGY, KIRKSVILLE STATE NORMAL SCHOOL.



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invites to her boundaries those who may wish to aid in unlocking her hidden storehouses of wealth or engage in the scientific development of the innumerable industries for which her climate and her soil are so preeminently adapted.

Nature has been most prodigal in our behalf, but after all, she has given us only the tools to work with. It is for us to say what shall be done for Missouri to insure for her an enviable place among American commonwealths,—to give to her that larger, and less-easily defined position that we should like to see accorded her in the public consciousness. No matter how reassuring the reports from various organizations which record the progress of the State; no matter how satisfying the “Red Book’s” announcement that our surplus products amount to upwards of 400 millions of dollars yearly; or how encouraging the knowledge that education and general culture are advancing with rapid strides, we must recognize the fact that there is still work to be done for Missouri in which every one of us may have an active and a happy part,—the work of raising the general conditions of life within the State to an average that shall indicate the highest degree of public intelligence, and the most perfect development of her chief institution,—the home.

Missouri has, within her boundaries, what has been called the most typical city on the continent. This, and others that have grown to large size and influence, indicate little danger that she will not keep abreast of the times in her more congested centers, and we must therefore see that any study of the forces needed to advance the State must begin, not with the urban centers, but with the rural conditions surrounding the lives of those who furnish the substantial background of the progress of every people.

Within a month, the proudest nation on earth has been made to recognize the weakness that has come through neglect of her rural possibilities. The recent labor troubles in England brought to light the fact that she imports 240 millions of dollars worth of foodstuffs yearly, and that her food supply could be cut off and her population reduced to starvation within a few weeks, should any hostile power be able to subdue the English fleet. A country which boasts a kingdom and an empire has become an object lesson to the world on the need of providing a proper balance for her economic scale.

While the same dangers do not exist in America, the best use of our great areas of uncultivated and uncleared Missouri lands is still a problem before us, for all this work should proceed along lines calculated to bring the most good not only to individuals and families, but to the best development of the State and her advancing rank among sister States. We have great areas to colonize. Shall we give them to the riff-raff of the least desirable European countries, or shall we save them for our own people and the more thrifty classes of the North European races? Is it not better to grow slowly, and save our resources for enterprising settlers, than to give our farms to alien races that do not assimilate with our own? Canada furnishes us with an excellent example in selecting her immigrants, with

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great painstaking, from the north of Europe countries, the most of them settling immediately on lands or becoming farm laborers. The small minority who go to the cities or engage in unskilled, non-agricultural labor have the strictest requirements of the excellent Canadian immigrant laws applied to them.

But the United States exercises no selective power in enticing the right kind of foreigners to her shores, and has no immigration policy beyond the keeping out of the mentally, morally and physically diseased, with the result that the very large majority of the more than 900,000 immigrants who come to us yearly crowd into our cities, adhere to their own language and customs instead of adopting ours, and increasingly add to the grave problems that confront our government.

Has not the time come for Missouri to choose which of these examples she will follow? When the question of giving our lands to foreigners is before us, should we not use the same restrictive method by which our cousins in the North are striving to acquire a homogeneous population, having, as a basis, fundamentally similar ideals, tendencies and faiths?

But, aside from the question of the incoming foreigner, there is a form of emigration that should begin among ourselves and go steadily on until a better adjustment of economic conditions throughout our State is effected. A great unrest has fastened itself upon the middle and lower classes of our people, and nowhere is this more marked than in the congested life of our cities. Here the expense of living and the impossibility of making a limited income serve to maintain a social position that has ever-increasing demands, drives the bread-earner more and more closely to the wall. What is to become of the salaried man whose advancing years bring him diminution, rather than increase of income, and to whom the future presents itself only in the form of a hideous interrogation mark? What of the laboring man, whose constant conflicts with capital, and whose too frequent domination by the unscrupulous agitator renders a livelihood more and more precarious? There is a safe and happy refuge for all these troubled souls as soon as they can read the signs of the times aright and turn their faces toward a new promised land of peace and plenty. It is clear that the tide of life with us is at the flood, and its turning must lead away from the city through ever-widening avenues of opportunity in the rural districts of this great State.

The countryward movement is the problem before Missouri today; and how to make the country meet the expectations of those who leave the so-called advantages of the towns is a matter for the serious consideration of those who are now, as well as those who expect to be, a part of our rural life, for there is no denying that there is a great deal of sentiment in regard to country life that is not borne out by the facts in the case, and that there is room for reform in the country as well as in the city.

History furnishes us with one significant comment on the cumulative effect of life largely lived in the open as compared with urban influences. From time immemorial, the typical Englishman has found his chief de-

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light in the broad acres of his inheritance, where he has lived the greater part of his years,—building up a sturdy manhood for the support of an ever-growing national power; while on the continent, the Frenchman, more and more devoted to the intensified life of the cities, has seen his country declining in vigor until the verge of national bankruptcy has been reached. It needs very little penetration on our part to decide what lesson the story of these two nations teaches.

When the last census of Missouri disclosed the fact that our rural population was decreasing rather than growing, our thinking people began a diligent quest for the reason thereof, and in it was included a search for the changes needed to maintain a healthy balance between the city and the farm. The importance of such an effort as this was further indicated by the investigations of the “Rural Life Commission” which President Roosevelt instituted for looking into the conditions of the farm and the home,—an inquiry continued by certain organizations and publications until it became quite clear that the greatest problems encountered were of an economic and sociological nature centering in our women and the home.

So, thinking of these things with reference to Missouri, we must try to find out what it is that will make our rural home happiest, and our rural life best calculated to contribute to the good name and prosperity of this great State. Out of our homes must come the strength or weakness of our commonwealth. Our men have always had it in their power to make conditions for themselves. It is time for our women to know that they should do the same. What will make the woman of the country more happy and useful in her sphere? What will make the woman of the city willing to go to the more rational life of the country and there build up, according to her own ideas and ambitions, the home that is probably impossible for her in any other surroundings?

In the first place, woman mast have a new adjustment of values on the farm. So long as all the money made goes into buying more land or buildings more comfortable quarters for the blooded stock, while the home lacks the ordinary comforts of life, there is no attraction in it for the women or their children. Only a few days ago a cultured city woman, who had gone with her husband to the country that he might regain his health, said to the writer: “It takes twenty-three pails of water from the spring to run the house each day. We were going to have a ram to pump the water, but the men are always too busy to see to it. We have lived here three years, and we still take our baths in the washtub!” To be compelled to make a rag carpet, if she has one at all; to do her work with insufficient and poor utensils; to have few clothes beyond those absolutely needed for the daily round; to have no taste for reading because there is no time to cultivate it; no ambition for social life because neighbors are too inaccessible for the encouragement of friendly courtesies; and no adequate advantages for the education of growing children,—these are conditions which, prevailing in some of our rural districts today, make farm life seem monotonous and hard to those who are living it, and repellent to those who need to seek a new environment in which to work out their

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own problems of existence. These are primitive conditions which many States have outgrown more rapidly than has Missouri, and these are the things that we should try to completely divorce from the idea of our farm life.

How is this to be accomplished? Who will undertake the task? An old Australian saying runs to the effect that “Man fishes, hunts and sits around: the rest is woman’s work.” Our women do not aspire to such an indefinitely large sphere of action, and we do not believe that our men are willing to so circumscribe their own; but we seek, rather, more of those intellingent partnerships in which the farmer and his wife, with one aim for the highest good, shall make more common the existence of the now all too few country homes that minister to the social and intellectual, as well as to the material, wants of those who occupy them.

With an increased spirit of fairness in giving to the home a proper share of the interest manifested in the land and the live stock; with good churches and schools for instructions (concerning all of which you have heard much in these meetings), life, to the woman of the country, may unfold so many possibilities as to make each day teem with new interests and every tomorrow an opportunity for the trial of some fresh scheme for improvement or pleasure.

The right kind of a farmer’s wife, on the right kind of a farm, may have almost unlimited facilities for “trying out” some of the great experiments or problems of the day. She may cause to be cultivated, in her own preserve, such a variety of products as to make her kitchen garden an epitome of horticultural possibilities, and from the abundance of foodstuffs at her command she may evolve the scientific diet that will keep her family well nourished. In the planning of household work she may establish such a division of labor among her associates and dependents as shall create efficiency and skill among the workers. She may study sanitary problems and find in the increased comfort and health of her family a rich reward for all thought and time expended. She may teach her children thrift in business and desirable traits of character in having their own possessions, living or otherwise, to care for. She can promote ingenuity and design in allowing the girls to experiment in dressmaking and millinery, as well as in cooking, or in encouraging the boys in such original schemes as that of making the nearby spring provide the power for some of the more arduous tasks of the home. She may find constant joy in the pure air and peace of the country, where she may live close to nature in the songs of the birds and the verdure of the forests, while rearing her children in an environment secure from the temptations and pitfalls of city life. She may have the satisfaction of inspiring her sons to reach out for the scientific training of the agricultural school, from which they will return to put new life into the old farm by improved methods of cultivation. She may teach the daughters that home-making is a profession ranking higher than any other for women, and by the application of the true principles of home economics prepare them for the time when, in homes of their own, they may work out their own ideas of right living. She may encourage the particular

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bent of each child, whether it be for music, art, poetry, horticulture, or any of the many occupations and diversions that attract the young, until the home becomes the center of interest for every one of the family. She may help establish the woman’s department of the Farmer’s Institute, and so open new avenues of interest and companionship among those of like occupations. She can make time in which to become interested in the neighborhood school; and in cultivating the acquaintance of “teacher”, she may establish a real partnership with the one who, next to herself, is in all probability destined to have the strongest moulding influence on her children’s characters. She may find increasing comfort in the adoption of mechanical appliances for lightening household labor, and in planning cooperation among neighbors for mutual benefit. She may have the telephone, rural free delivery, and even the automobile, which, with the aid of good roads, can so annihilate time and space as to give to the rural dweller many of the advantages of the nearby towns. She may have books from our State Library Commission; or even find time to organize a woman’s club, and so enjoy the pleasure of planning, with other public-spirited women, altruistic movements for the improvement of many features of country life.

Surely no woman need find the country devoid of opportunity. Can you think of any greater service to the State than the development of its rural home life, with all the accessories that elevate it to a plane of dignity and influence? Can there be any more hopeful attraction to the cramped and poverty-stricken toiler of the town than the change to an environment where material prosperity may be commensurate with the effort and judgment put forth, or where the success of the individual contributes more conspicuously to the sum total of the general welfare?

It is emigration away from her own untoward conditions that Missouri needs,—an exodus from the crowded places into the free life of the open, where sturdy manhood and womanhood may grow up to replenish the human force worn out by too intensive living, and where hosts of courageous, resourceful, broad-minded men and women, working for imperishable results, become the patriots whose everyday lives make for the upbuilding of a greater State.

Nature has, indeed, dealt generously with Missouri. Well for her that she has the physical attractions of so many of the other States,—broad prairies and plains, rugged mountains and lowlands, to give variety to her economic features and stimulate the activities of her people; that two great rivers invite her commerce; that the greatest known springs in the world point her to new industrial possibilities; that she leads all States in horticulture and mining; and that an untold variety of economic products assure her commercial independence. But better still will it be when, throughout all the now unoccupied regions of her territory, fertile and well-managed farms, comfortable and well-equipped homes, and public institutions commensurate with the highest needs of the people who dwell in these large places shall testify to the fact that the foundation of Missouri’s prosperity is well laid in the substantial character of her rural life.

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PREVENTION OF INFANT MORTALITY

MRS. C. W. GREENE.

Do you recall being told at your mother’s knee the tale of the Pied Piper of Hamlin? You remember that this Piper with his magic music was able to charm all living creatures. He bargained with the fat Council-men of the little village of Hamlin to rid it of all its rats and in return he was to be paid 1,000 guilders. The Piper drowned all the rats, and then the worthy Council of Hamlin refused to pay the Piper his 1,000 guilders. They preferred to spend that money on Rhenish wine. The Piper finally evened the score by playing on his pipe a tune so attractive that all the rosy-cheeked, flaxen-curled baby boys and girls of the town ran laughing and dancing after him and he disappeared with them into the mountain’s side and never returned. Since that day and long before it we have been paying the Piper and always with the same precious currency—our own rosy-cheeked, curly-haired baby boys and girls.

It is to me one of the most marvelous bits of inconsistency to be found that we Americans as a nation should wear our bodies out by the very strenuous lives we lead in our mad rush to accumulate material wealth for our children when they are older. In fact, we are so eager to bring this desirable thing to them that we forget about the babies and let many of Diem die in their infancy.

We do not know just how many die any year, because we have not cared enough about it to have either their births or deaths recorded. Our last census revealed the fact that in only seventeen states is there any attempt to record the births or deaths of children. From these seventeen it has been estimated that not less than 200,000 babies under five years of age died last year.

What is the use of a home if it fails in taking care of the infant that comes into it? Why wear out our lives in gathering together the good things of this world for the grown man if we carelessly let him die in his infancy? It is conservation of infant life that we should be spending our thought and money on, rather than spending it on forestry, water supply and mineral resources.

People have for long years recognized the value and desirability of registering cattle, horses, dogs, chickens and kittens; then why not men? Here is what the Secretary of the State Board of Health of Kansas has to say on the matter: “Poor old Kansas, bleeding Kansas, bleeding money,
wheat and corn at every pore. A land of smiling sunshine, of winding streams, where you have but to tickle the soil to make it laugh a harvest—, a land dotted with school houses and growing towns and villages—a land of pigs given adipose—of sleek cattle, of strong horses, of handsome women,

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of bouncing babies, of homely, rugged men—a land where no one dies except through accident or over-eating. Poor bleeding Kansas cannot afford to pay twenty-five cents to register those bouncing babies, and while for years they have duly registered their fine pigs, their cows and horses at an expense of from fifty cents to ten dollars each, they deny their future citizens, the potential farmers and mothers of this great Republic, the right of registration, the establishment of legal birth rate for the pitiful sum of twenty-five cents.”

In spite of its up-to-dateness in other matters, our own United States has been slow in realizing that the babies of this generation are to become the material out of which the citizens of tomorrow are made, and that one of their rights as such is a record of their birth. Every great nation except the United States keeps such records. With the imperfect records at its command the Census Bureau has approximated that the death of infants under five years of age for the year 1908 was 200,000—one-fifth of a million of child lives. The Spanish-American War cost us only 6,000 men in deaths from all causes. Think of the public demonstration of our grief as a nation over their loss. It was a great loss and our nation should recognize it and spend endless dollars on peace congresses and arbitration boards to do away with such dreadful sacrifices. But what about those 200,000 babies—thirty-three times as many lives—that are dying every year?

Our distinguished statesman, Theodore Roosevelt, has had much to say on the question of race suicide, and greatly deplores the fact that not more childrn are born in our country. I agree with him that we need all the children that we can take proper care of. But when we are letting 200,000 die every year,-of whom our physicians say 100,000 could be saved by proper care, why increase that deathroll? If the 200,000 that died were the unfit only, it would be another question, but the fact is that those babies were taken from the ranks of the best born, it does not include the physically unfit. I have never been able to agree with the old lady who once said with some pride, “I have done my duty to the Lord, for I have brought into the world thirteen children.” Inquiry showed that these had all died in childhood except four. I say “hats off” to the family of thirteen children who have grown to useful and honorable manhood and womanhood, but I fail to see honor in a long line of tiny gravestones in the cemetery.

Dr. Fisher of Yale has investigated the causes of deaths in the 200,000 infants who died in 1908 and finds that fifty-five percent of them were unnecessary. The little fellows were brought into this world and not given a fair chance—not even an opportunity to fight for their lives. One hundred thousand useless deaths in one year; 100,000 homes heartbroken uselessly. The cost of the average infant burial is ten dollars. That means $1,000,000 spent for burial expenses that might have been spent in making babies laugh and gurgle and grow strong.

The State of Missouri through its agricultural college spent $40,000 last year in the investigation of the diseases of hogs and on methods of

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producing fine specimens of adult pigdom. We are making strenuous efforts to eradicate disease from the porcine family. We have an experiment station for the study of their diseases, and whenever an epidemic appears in any farmer’s herd of swine, he telephones at once for an expert to come and take care of them. What does this same man do when there is an epidemic of measles or diphtheria in his school? Does he telephone for an expert, or does he trust to luck that the babies will escape? Two hundred thousand failed to escape in the United States last year. Why should a State spend $40,000 to keep its pigs well and strong and not one penny for its babies?

In your own City of Kirksville you take very good care of your babies. In the eleven months between February 1st and December 31st, 1910, 105 homes were gladdened by the coming of a young child. Only seven (six percent) of those homes were forced to pay their precious tribute to the Piper. In Adair County as a whole you were not so fortunate, because you lost thirty-three (twelve percent) of the babies born during that period. The record of the county as a whole shows that you do not take good care of your babies under five years of age. During this period you lost twenty-two children under five years of age from measles. Twenty-eight percent of your death rate in children under five years of age was due to measles—a contagious and easily preventable disease. That means that you do not observe rules of quarantine. Children under five years of age do not attend school, and there is no reason why, if strict quarantine is observed, you should lose anything like twenty-eight percent of your death list to measles. Here in the town of Kirksville the loss to measles was only two per cent. Adair County should study Kirksville’s quarantine laws. You lost six percent in whooping cough, while Kirksville lost only three percent. When you realize how much better chances the country child has for his life than the city child then the fact that your rural conditions here are so bad as to make a baby’s chances for escaping contagions twice as bad as in Kirksville, then I do not wonder that the country is being deserted. The babies under five will have to go to town to escape with their lives. Your problem here is not how to keep the young man and the young woman on the farm, it is how to keep the baby on the farm.

The answer is simple—clean milk and enforced quarantine laws.

To come at once to the root of this problem we must acknowledge that in the end it is the parents who are responsible for infant deaths. The truth is that nothing can save these babies but intelligent, educated parents. Fifty-two and one-half per cent of these death were due to digestive diseases,. Physician call them filth diseases. That means in most cases unclean food, improper food, or ignorance in adjusting food to the child’s need—ignorance and neglect—and this must be laid at the mother’s door.

I am not willing to believe that this is due to a lack of maternal love in the mothers of our county. I believe that the instinct that makes one’s heart throb and the tears come at the appeal of baby fingers is still within us. Last winter two Indian women with their babies were driven by cold

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and hunger to forsake their miserable teepees and start across the pathless prairies of North Dakota to the reservation. A snowstorm came up and they lost their way. When they were found the following day, the mothers were both dead, but clasped to each mother’s frozen breast was her baby warm and smiling wrapped in its mother’s clothing and blanket. This incident seems to indicate that maternal instinct is still alive in some of our American citizens. Is it possible that it is confined to the primitive mothers only?

Civilization as it is expressed in our modern life has robbed us of some most valuable things. One of the greatest of these losses is expressed by the fact that so many of our babies are bottle fed. When a mother places her baby on artificial food, either because she cannot or will not feed it naturally, she decreases its chances for life just fifty percent. This is not a pleasant fact, but let us face it fairly and squarely. If a mother can feed her baby naturally, is there any possible reason why she as an individual should not do so, or why we as a nation should allow her to take from that child half of its chances for life?

Our social and industrial conditions have robbed the mother of the power to nourish her own offspring in many cases; but they have not trained her to be able to prepare a substitute for the nourishment she should normally produce, nor have they furnished her as yet with any means by which she can learn to prepare such a substitute. The ignorance of women on such subjects is tragic. For example: the size of a clinical thermometer puts the average woman in a nervous chill, when she ought to see in it her best friend.

Men tell us we are conservative. This conservatism has kept us at home, has made us contented with the ways that mother and grandmother had. We have not realized that conditions have changed in the homes and have not accommodated ourselves to our new environment. We have to meet conditions of hygiene, sanitation, bacteriology and sociology in our homes of which our mothers did not dream and we have not been trained to meet them.

Dr. Burrel, President of the American Medical Association, says: “It is difficult to change the habits of parents, but the children can be educated into acquiring habits that will maintain a better standard of health and living.” That is to say, you cannot educate women, but you may be able to educate girls.

Dr. Gulick, President of the National Playground Association, who has thought and studied much on the question of hygiene, once said to me, that he considered it useless to try to train women into doing things in a new way—that the average woman cares for her baby and dresses it just as her mother did. He thinks we may be able to educate girls into new ways of doing things, but not women. How many girls trained in home economics in our universities will in time “keep house just as mother did?”

Personally, I do not agree with these gentlemen, for while I recognize that there is some truth in what they say, I am very optimistic as to what

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women will do if they are given a chance. If we wish a man to be an expert in soils, we send him to a college to study soils, and put him in communication with the National Bureau of Soils at Washington. Of, if it is horticulture, or dairying, or engineering, we do the same thing. If we have a sheep, horse or a cow of specially fine pedigree, we put it in the care of a man trained for that particular thing. But how is it with our babies? We put them into the hands of the young woman who happens to be their mother regardless of what her experience or training may be. What opportunity has the average young woman had to make herself equal to the great task of taking care of this most difficult of all young animals to rear. The most difficult to bring to his fullest physical and mental development, because he is the topmost bough of the evolutionary tree. I have not been able to find a single college or institution of any kind that gives courses of study designed to train married women for their task. Many courses are given in our universities and normal schools that will give the foundation principles on which intelligent motherhood must rest, but none are given as preparation for motherhood alone. It ought to be as natural for a woman to go to an institution of learning to fit herself for her life work of home-making and motherhood as it is for a man to study for law or for the ministry. When we have realized that to make intelligent mothers who can bring into the world strong, healthy babies and rear them to equally robust and efficient adults, we must educate women as well as girls. Then, and then only, shall we cut down our percent of infant mortality. Women must have thorough courses in the scientific subjects necessary for a grasp of the principles involved in intelligent motherhood, and not a few didactic lectures or dictated formula for modified milk. You would as well give an untrained seamstress one pattern and tell her to make all the family clothing by that one pattern. The results would no doubt be equally felicitous in both cases.

It is especially desirable at the present time that the women of Missouri should aid in the support and insist upon thorough enforcement of the present excellent registration law that has been in force in your State since February 1, 1910. Missouri has taken a long step in advance in the passage of such a law, and it is being executed very thoroughly by the State Registrar, Dr. Frank B. Hiller, Jefferson City. A strong moral support in the community will help the registration officials to make it the success that it ought to be and I hope each of you will go home and register your own babies, because we need the facts as to births and deaths of babies.

After registration of births and deaths, the next step in reducing the price that we annually pay the Piper is a clean milk supply. In towns our municipal authority must see that the milk supply is above reproach, and in the country the father must see that the milk furnished his household is CERTIFIED, and spell it with every letter a capital.

The third step is the help we may give our municipalities in enforcing laws for sanitation. Dr. Cutler of Columbia has just sent out a letter ask-

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ing every grocer in the State to have a Spring Opening at which he shall open, for inspection his refrigerators, storerooms, etc. You must go if there is such an opening in your own town and insist on its being kept up to that Spring Opening standard. We must help our City Council in segregating contagious diseases, and in providing pure water. These three points will include all the diseases that are specially fatal to infants, except the gastro-intestinal diseases, and in fighting those diseases the education of mothers is absolutely necessary. A milk depot can supply clean milk, but it cannot keep it clean until it reaches the baby. It cannot keep infected flies off the nipple of the bottle as the baby nurses, or away from the baby’s mouth as it sleeps. We mothers must do that. There is another long and most interesting story to tell of what we may do for the total elimination of that most active dispenser of disease germs, the house fly.

Investigation has proven that one takes typhoid fever only when he receives into his mouth some of the bodily excretion from a person who has previously had typhoid fever. Not pleasant to think of, but I would rather think and talk about it than to do it and have typhoid fever. This excreta in many cases is carried by flies, crawling over or hatching in infected material and then carrying the germs on its body and legs to food on our tables or washing its feet in the milk jar. While this matter has not been definitely proven, there is every reason to believe that the intestinal diseases that take so many of our babies in the summer are carried by flies. Just here I must put forever under the ban that infanticidal invention, the “baby comforter.” These “comforters” are psychologically and physiologically wrong anyway, and when you stop and think that the minute the baby drops that “comforter” from his mouth, the flies are swarming over it, you realize what a prolific seat of disease it must be. Why can we not realize that the house fly is a pest of which we might rid our-selves if we would only use concerted, persistent effort. How many men realize that when they allow flies to the refuse of their stables, or when they allow an unscreened soil pit, or garbage can, that they are providing a place where flies delight to breed. Oh! that our own state and local boards of health would plan and carry out a campaign against flies that would rid us of them and give us our quota of loved ones who have been subjected to tuberculosis, typhoid and such other diseases brought us by the house fly!

In this effort at conservation of our children and homes from the enemies that beset us on all sides we as women shall not be alone. The men of our State and county stand ever willing and ready to help. The primitive instinct of protection of offspring is strong in men, and I thank God that it is. An incident that shows just how strong this instinct may be came recently to my notice.

Two years ago a baby boy opened his brown eyes in the home of one of the leading scientists of America. For three weeks he slept and ate and grew as a normal baby should. Then something went wrong with his digestive tract, making abdominal incision necessary. The child survived

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the operation and was doing nicely, when, for some reason that a layman can never understand, the stitches pulled out and the operation had to be repeated. The child had been without food for several days and it could not recover from the shock of this second operation. The father came from his laboratory just at the time when four of the greatest specialists on infant surgery had declared that the baby’s minutes were numbered. The little body was growing cold, the lips and tongue were shrunken. The last man child of a long race of distinguished scientific men was dying. When the father asked if there was any hope, the doctor replied: “The child has been without food so long and has lost so much blood in the operation that we cannot save him.” The father said: “If he needs blood, take mine. I am perfectly sound and well. Give him my blood.” As a last possible chance, the experiment was tried. The father bared his arm, sat there and watched the physician as he opened the artery under the knee of the unconscious, seemingly dead baby and connected it with an artery in his own wrist. Instantly the circuit was complete and the warm, strong blood from the father’s great loving heart sent the life fluid pulsing through the tiny body of the little babe. The shrunken little figure responded at once. The face and lips filled out, the heart bounded, the chest rose and fell, color returned, the baby lived again. What greater miracle ever happened? That baby is today a rosy bouncing boy, and that father said to me as he showed me the scar on his wrist, “Oh, that was a small thing to do. I was so interested in the baby that I did not feel the pain when they cut me.” Was ever more honorable scar won from saber thrust or bullet wound? Is paternal love lacking in our country? No. It is here in greatest abundance, but it seems to be guided by blind impulses more often than by quiet, sane reason as in this father. We are all willing to lay down our lives for our children. That is an easy thing to do. What we need to do is to keep our lives and use them in protecting intelligently the little ones about us. Let us learn the way that will make it possible to save these 200,000 babes every year—our own babies, and those of the family in the alley and the slums of the big city. Education of parents can do so much along this one line.

Many forces may be used to help us in this matter of educating the parents. Our physicians will help, our state normal schools and state university professors will help with lectures and demonstrations; our State Board of Agriculture with farmers’ institutes and lecturers, home-makers’ conferences and women’s clubs will help; the United States government will help with bulletins and lecturers and lantern slides; conferences on country life such as this has been will help more than we can measure.

With so many organizations willing to help it would seem that we ought to accomplish something. Do you recall the race that Alice ran with the mouse, the hare, and some others, when she was in Wonderland? Then you recall that they all stood in a circle, each one ran when he wished and stopped when he was tired. They made a great flurry and noise, but each stood in his own place all the time and accomplished nothing.

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We must not run our race in this way. Let us clasp hands and run all together in straight lines for a definite goal; or better, let us apportion this race in relays, each one carrying part of the burden, and in time we shall reach our desired goal. Then shall we have a National Department of Health that shall be considered just as important as our Departments of Agriculture and Commerce. We shall make the Conservation of the Infant and the American Home the most important business of our lives and every woman and every man shall be trained for intelligent Home-Making.

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THE GRANGE AS A FACTOR IN RURAL LIFE IMPROVEMENT.

STATE MASTER N. P. HILL.

The history of the world is a proof of the necessity of organization. Without organization there could be no law nor the enforcement of law, without enforced law there would have been nothing to secure to man the enjoyment of the fruits of his own exertion, hence there would have been no incentive to progress. The history of progress has been the history of organization. In primal times, the weaker man came to the stronger, contributed something to the stronger, and in return secured the physical protection that he needed. In this uniting of forces, the strong man was made stronger and the weak one protected. Thus both were benefited. In time they, too, encountered forces stronger than they could withstand, so they joined others, that their united strength might afford them protection. In this uniting of forces, again, all parties were benefited. Thus the desire to protect life and limb, and the accumulations of the work of their hands and brains, first forced men to join forces, or organize. It was this giving up of some of their individual privileges, the suppression of some of their savage instincts, and the abiding by the will of the majority that all might be ultimately benefited, that has made possible the building up of the splendid civilization of today. As the power of organization was recognized in promoting individual protection and public welfare, so its power was recognized early by those classes of men who propose to prosper easily, by appropriating to themselves the proceeds of the toil of other men’s hands. And they organized themselves into bands of pirates and brigands, and with the strength of their united forces, preyed upon their fellows. This forced the toilers and the owners of flocks and herds and treasures to stand and strive together for their mutual protection. The day of open brigandage is past. But there are yet many men possessing the instincts of the buccaneer, and by so organizing themselves as to be able to exert great influence, and control large aggregations of wealth, have been and are striving to so shape legislation as to bring to themselves distinct advantages, and by unfair, and often dishonest methods, are stifling competition, ruining competitors, creating fictitious value, and exacting exorbitant profits. Through the power possessed by their combined forces, they are enabled to deprive others of their full, fair share of the product of their exertions just as effectively as was done by those of other days by less modem methods. The farmers in this country are the main producers of wealth, and it is a matter of but common justice and fairness that they should have their full share in the distribution of that

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wealth, and that they should receive consideration in the adoption of economic policies commensurate with the importance of their vocation. Judging by the history of the past, by the standards of the present, or by the probabilities of the future, how are we to obtain and maintain justice for ourselves in this great and almost conscienceless struggle among men, other than by making our effective strength equal the strength of others by the combination of our forces? The Grange furnishes today an organization through which we may and do unite our forces and thus all work for the benefit and protection of each. This was and is the object of the Grange. And it aims through its strength to improve the financial, educational, and social condition of its members. Most of us are striving to improve our financial condition, and we are justified in so doing, for it means better farms, better homes, more of the comforts and joys of life, better education, and greater advantages for our children, larger opportunities for culture for ourselves and families, and the accumulation of a competency against the day of disaster, old age and death. We are individually striving to educate ourselves that we may increase our capabilities of earning, of appreciating, of enjoying, and of living; that we may better do those things that are for us to do in our appointed day. We wish to improve our social conditions, that we may master the art of getting more, and as much more as is possible out of our life while it is passing, because of the fact that other people are living in the same world, in the same community, and are striving along the same lines as are we. We are each of us making the great effort of our lives along these lines of endeavor. And the Grange as an organization, with the strength of its combined forces, is striving to do for each of us just what each of us is striving to do for himself. Thus-our order and its aims must appeal to every enlightened farmer who believes that “in union there is strength.”

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THE TEACHERS’ PART IN THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE RURAL SCHOOL.

(Illustrated with 75 stereopticon views of rural school improvement work.)

MR. A. C. MONAHAN.

To attempt to tell much of what the teacher can do to improve the rural school in a forty-minute period is almost a hopeless undertaking when we consider the amount there is to be done depending in so large a measure on the teacher and her alone.

To her, more than anyone else, must come a clear vision of the country school in its proper position as the most powerful force in country life. To her it must mean more than an institution existing merely for the purpose of teaching reading and writing and arithmetic; she must grasp a clear conception of the New Rural School, teaching whatever is most essential to the lives of the children and maintaining itself as the educational, intellectual and social center of the community. Our idea of a school is so surrounded and burdened by tradition that it is with difficulty that we are coming to a conception of what the "new school’’ may be. We are attempting to redirect the country school by the addition of new subjects to the curriculum, but the redirection must be more fundamental, the character of the institution must be changed.

I like to think of the country school of the future as a “People’s Institute” similar in some respects to the people’s institutes found in certain cities which furnish means of self-improvement, general culture and healthy amusement to its members. Such work, certainly in the country, should be done by the school. An institution supported by private philanthropy, no matter how well conducted, has an air of charity which our country people are too independent to suffer; but when the work is done as a part of the work of the school which is maintained by the town or county from money raised by taxation, it bears no longer the air of charity and is more apt to have the good will of the community and is better able to reach out into every home.

This People’s Institute should be an organization composed of all the people of the community with its headquarters and meeting place in the school building. It should concern itself with the needs of the community, educational and social. It might regard as legitimate work any form of activity for the intellectual and social benefit of the community, or of any portion of it, provided that its activities are developed along definite lines of action. It should make the school an agent for disseminating information to all people, old as well as young, upon those things that concern most

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closely the lives of the people. It should make the school building the meeting place for lectures and public meetings, of farmers’ organizations and women’s clubs, the gathering point for the exchange of ideas and for social life. It should see that the regular school work is made more vital to the child. Nature study, agriculture, housekeeping, sanitation, are parts of the life of the country child; these subjects should be taught in the school, but it is very necessary that a definite relation between them and the English grammar, arithmetic and geography be established.

The teacher’s place in this entire scheme is that of the executive secretary who keeps in motion the machinery of the organization. But whatever is to be the exact form of the new rural school, it is certain to be an institution of wider use with greater and broader duties than the school of the present day or the old-time New England district school, and it is the teacher more than anyone else who, having a clear vision in her own mind, is going to create the public sentiment which will result in the reorganization of the school and its functions.

While the teacher may do much in creating sentiment in favor of a school of wider usefulness, in favor of better equipment, in favor of new building to replace old, in favor of consolidated schools to replace one-room district schools with few pupils, there are many other improvements fully as important that she can make herself alone, with the aid of the school board if she can get it, but without this aid if she can not.

(1) She can improve the general appearance of the school building and grounds by the addition of trees, shrubs, flowers, etc.
(2) She can improve the sanitary condition of the grounds and out-houses and school building.
(3) She can make the interior of the building clean, neat and attractive.
(4) She can teach what subjects she is required to teach, as live subjects, taught in terms of the familiar things in the lives of the children.

I will try to show you what teachers can do by showing what some of the leaders in rural school improvement have done; how teachers with little facilities and with poor buildings have made their schools attractive, inviting and appetizing to the boys and girls who come with strong natural cravings for education which are so often destroyed by surroundings in which we expect them to assimilate what we have to offer.

I want to show how school grounds have been made attractive, how bare buildings have been improved by trees and vines, how back yards have been made to bloom with flowers, how the old-fashioned pump with the drinking cup attached by a chain and the well covered with wet planks on which the children stand when getting a drink has been replaced by an interior tank with individual cups. I want to show some very beautiful yards, but absolutely lacking in any facilities for play, and impress upon you the wonderful improvement in the work and spirit of your boys and girls who have spent their recess in a yard equipped with good home-made apparatus.

Among men who have worked with great success in the improvement of

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the country school, O. J. Kern, superintendent of Winnebago County schools, Illinois, stands prominent. He has done much in replacing old buildings by new ones and in closing small district schools and replacing them with a consolidated school. The Seward and Harlem Consolidated Schools in his district are good examples of this work. Consolidation is going to solve many of the problems of the country school. It is no longer an experiment, but is an assured success. Better buildings, better equipment and better teachers have resulted in nearly every section where consolidation has been tried. For the same amount of money that it has cost to run the five or six district schools, the consolidated school has been maintained with fewer but better trained teachers, better facilities for teaching, a longer annual session, the expense of transportation included. It makes it possible to add extra years to the course and provide for the country children school facilities more nearly equivalent to those enjoyed in the city. Mr. Kern’s best work, however, has been the inspiration given to his teachers which has caused an improvement in school yards, the introduction of school gardens, the screening of outhouses, the brightening of the interiors, sanitary drinking cups, and in good systems of heating and ventilating.

Professor A. B. Graham of Ohio, now superintendent of agricultural extension at the Ohio State University, is another man who accomplished much toward the improvement of the rural schools while a county superintendent and who is doing even more now. He was one of the first to introduce instruction in agriculture into the elementary schools and he has achieved particular success with his boys’ corn-growing clubs. Mr. Graham believes in tree-planting and the trees he has planted in his school work now bear witness to the advisability of this work on the part of teachers who are willing to look ten years ahead in the interest of the children to come. He believes also in flowers and tries both for beauty and for screening ugly sights, but most of all he believes in teaching the child about the things the child sees in his daily life, and under his direction the Ohio State University is publishing for rural teachers many bulletins full of readable information on birds, insects, farm animals, agriculture, nature study, housekeeping, and many other subjects which properly belong in the rural school course of study.

Miss Jessie Field of Page County, Iowa, has earned a well-deserved reputation for her work in the country school. She has as a result of her work the most enthusiastic body of teachers, pupils and parents to be found anywhere. She has not done this by new buildings or by consolidation but by enriching the course of study in the schools. She believes in live subjects, in teaching in terms of the life of the child, in studying com, farm animals and bread-making. She has interested her children’s parents through this work so that they are always ready to help and the gatherings of parents on occasions furnished by the schools are the most popular meetings in the section.

Mr. Jackson Davis, state supervisor of rural elementary schools of Virginia, is doing an exceedingly valuable work in improving the conditions among the Virginia schools for negroes. The sort of buildings he found

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and their condition, and the condition of the surroundings, was pitiable. Sometimes an abandoned dwelling house was furnished by one of the fraternal orders. Better buildings have been erected mainly by subscriptions raised among the colored people, and the influence of good school buildings has awakened a desire for better homes and better churches. Miss Virginia Randolph began to teach in a little one-room house in a swampy piece of land. Today she has a fine two-room school in excellent order, with pleasant surroundings. Her story is one of what the teacher can do—from the worst to near the best by her own exertions. Her teachings are concerned largely with life and living, cooking, mending, housekeeping, canning, kitchen gardening, sanitation, prevention of diseases, the making of household articles of use and comfort, mats and chairs. She is now industrial supervisor of Henrico County under the Jeanes Fund.

Professor Z. V. Judd of Wake County, North Carolina, has undertaken and carried through to great success a unique plan of rural school improvement, a plan broad enough to include the teaching of agriculture to the school children, the teaching of better agriculture to their fathers and mothers, the dignifying of farm labor in the eyes of children and parents, the beautifying of the school grounds, the making of the school the social center of the community, making an increased revenue for the schools—all included in the simple scheme of establishing farms at the rural schools of from two to ten acres of land planted, cultivated and harvested by the pupils and their parents. The first work was done at Holly Springs, where ten acres of land was included in the school site. Two acres were planted in cotton, the light work being done by the men, women and children, the heavier work by the men. The effort netted $132.

The next year the plan was tried at eleven schools with a net profit of $1,152 in money. Twelve hundred persons had helped at the work in what Professor Judd calls “school farming bees.” The work was in charge of an expert farmer in each case so that the best methods were used and incidentally taught. Cotton, corn, tobacco and wheat were raised. The community dinners prepared and held under the trees were an enjoyable part of the occasion. Everybody worked and everybody helped at the table in doing away with the good things provided and the combination of work and pleasure made the gatherings of more interest than any other sort of picnic could be.

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