are too narrow. For convenience and mutual understanding, let us define a rural community as one that is characterized by genuinely rural conditions. This would include all farming neighborhoods and, according to the last census, all centers of population up to 4,000 inhabitants.

One must be on his guard, moreover, against the fallacies which are wont to be made in the discussion of this problem, such as non causa pro causa, which mistakes conservatism for decadence, crudeness for barrenness; insufficient data, which, observing the degeneration of one rural community, make unwarranted generalizations therefrom as to country life as a whole; false comparison, which compares rural life with urban life, and deduces disparaging results accordingly; and non sequitur, which infers that the problem of the country is the same as that of the city.

In the treatment of this question one must approach it with the broadest possible study and with thoroughly scientific methods. In most of the attempts to solve it from the religious side, the suggestions have been dogmatic and empirical rather than scientific. While I wish also to approach it from the religious side, it will be my endeavor to look upon the problem at the same time as a sociological as well as a religious one, and to study with strictly scientific methods.

The outline of treatment in this paper will be as follows: The rural problem as a community interest; the end of social action to be attained; causal relations and conditions; methods of amelioration; regulative principles; program for reform.

I.

The urban problem is that of a growing congestion, but the rural problem is that of a growing isolation. While the evils connected with the city have long provoked discussion, because they force themselves upon public gaze, the vicissitudes of the country have been somewhat disregarded, because hidden in their solitude. Nevertheless, they are just as threatening, if not more so, because the country is largely the source of that human stream that is constantly flowing to the city. Statistics

show that from 1790 to 1890 the population of the United States in cities of 8,000 or more has risen from one thirty-third to nearly one-third of the whole. The census report for 1900 shows no break. It points out the startling fact that in 1900 there were 5.4 per cent. fewer people in the country than ten years before; and that of the 13,000,000 people added to our population during the decade 73.8 per cent. found homes in urban centers, and only 26.2 per cent. in the rural districts.

The percentage of loss would be much larger, moreover, if the migration to the city were not accompanied by an immigration to the country—a movement which checks the depletion, but which is often as injurious, because it exchanges the native for foreign stock. Consequently, while the New Englander abandons his unremunerative acres and flees to the city, the farmer of the central West rents his isolated farm to the foreign immigrant and moves to town. This tends to the formation of a distinctly peasant class such as is found in Bavaria. It is said that there are several communities in the United States where the English language is never heard.

Such is the situation in the rural communities of the United States today. District after district is being drained to the cities, leaving isolated pools of human beings to grow more stagnant, dank, and noisome. The richest of agricultural states seem to be unable to stem the flood. "For twenty-five years past," said Professor Cooley at the last Michigan Farmers' Institute, "the population in settled rural districts of the northern states has been diminishing. According to the census of 1890, 66 per cent. of area in Illinois diminished, 43 in Iowa, 61 in Ohio, 83 in New York." The fruit of this growing isolation is keenly apparent.

The economic loss is great. Property depreciates in value. Farms are even abandoned. In New Hampshire 1,443 farms with tenantable buildings were at one time deserted. In the last decade the rural population of Vermont decreased 214.8 per cent. As a result, many acres are for sale for one dollar an acre, and scores of farms can be bought for one-fourth what they cost twenty-five years ago. But this depreciation is not

confined to New England. Every state that shows a marked decrease in rural population reveals an accompanying decrease in farm values. This loss, moreover, increases with the farmer who remains. The road deteriorates. The taxes increase. As the roads deteriorate, the farmer is pushed farther and farther back from the village. The value of the farm falls in proportion; the cost of transportation increases, until in some communities, it is said, it costs the farmer as much to haul his produce six miles as he pays the railroad to carry it five hundred.

Moreover, the social, intellectual, and religious life likewise degenerates as the farmer is pushed in time farther back from the village. The church and school have always been prized for their value to inspire a longing for the highest life. It is a great loss for a community when the standards of these institutions fall. But as the migration grows and the roads deteriorate, this inevitably follows. The belief is growing today that the little country schoolhouse offers small opportunity for the farmers' children, and must be abandoned.

The church, not endowed with government support as is the school, suffers still more. Deprived of the best element of the community through removal, separated from the farming community through poor roads, the church rapidly goes to pieces. It is said with authority that there are ninety-five towns in Maine where no religious services are held, and that there are more villages in Illinois without the gospel than in any other state in the Union. Over one-half of Vermont, so purely agricultural and intensely American, never goes to church. Yet the church there spends annually one dollar and a half for every man, woman, and child in the population. Statistics show that people living over two miles from church in fourteen of the states east of the Mississippi river never go to church. This is largely true of the large rural populations in the South and West as well as the North. "During the past thirty years," said Josiah Strong in 1893, "thousands of churches have died from exhaustion in the rural districts of the United States." This is seen especially in the back towns of New England, which have wandered far from the Puritan traditions of their founders and

have locked the doors of many of their churches. "It is a pathetic sight," says an investigator of this section, "to see a church, firm in its aim and ideals, yet gradually decaying because its best blood is going to the cities; but it is more pathetic to see churches that have locked their doors, not because there was no one to attend, but because no one would attend.” Such churches are growing more numerous every day in communities invaded by foreign immigrants who care more for their European customs than for the Puritan traditions of the church.

So we witness in our rural communities a vast destitution of religion. We hear annually long reports of dead and dying churches; we behold churches barely alive, with no settled pastors; we see churches having settled pastors giving their entire strength in a mere fight for existence, and having no money or energy left for community interests and philanthropy. Thus the conception of the church in the rural districts has come to be something to be kept in existence rather than something to be kept on the increase; something to be ministered unto rather than something to minister; something to be built up out of the community rather than something to build up the community out of it; “a humble pensioner upon the people, hat in hand, begging for support, rather than a divine institution which is to bestow upon men the gift of God in Jesus Christ."

With the redemptive power of the church practically nil, her message forgotten and marred, the spiritual condition of the community falls correspondingly lower. The other spiritual forces of the home, school, vocation, and social life lose their incentive to struggle and sacrifice. And with no broad, rich social life, no general intellectual activity, no religious inspiration, no initiative to political self-consciousness and community action, life in the rural districts tends toward idleness, vulgarity, animality, and drunkenness. Such is the problem of the rural community, with its highest factor for good an object for apology and pity.

II.

It is now essential, having stood face to face with the problem demanding solution, to get a clear vision of the end of

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proposed social action and endeavor. This can be no mere superficial program of church action along the lines of the traditional ecclesiastical polity. One must dig deep into the roots of human life, and lay bare the laws, desires, and interests that prompt individual and community action. Only upon the basis of the Eternal in human life can one found the superstructure of social and individual action.

It is said that every individual acts always in reference to six ends or desires with which he is naturally endowed. These ends are health, wealth, sociability, knowledge, beauty, and rightness. Upon this basis the sociologist makes two assumptions:

The life of the individual is a process of achieving the self that is potential in the interests which prompt the desires of health, wealth, knowledge, sociability, beauty, and rightness; society, or human associations, is a continuous process of realizing a larger aggregate and better proportion of health, wealth, knowledge, sociability, beauty, and rightness.

Life in the rural districts today is in a state of growing discontent, because under present conditions it is impossible to satisfy those deep desires of the self and the community. The result is the tide of migration to the urban environment where these interests may be more successfully guaranteed. Denied the means of growth and activity, the weaker ones left behind lose interest in life, and stagnation and degeneration result. The end to be sought, then, in solving the problem of the rural community is a rational program for reform that will enable every individual to achieve his highest self potential in these sixfold desires; and that will help every rural community to realize a larger aggregate and better proportion of these interests in which life, individual and social, finds its only satisfaction.

III.

Having this end of endeavor before us, let us again take up the problem to discover, if possible, its causal conditions and relations, and lay bare the social structure upon which it rests. These causal conditions naturally group themselves about the various interests of social activity.