it is more important, but because
it is easier to understand and affords a better model for interpreting
other communities more complex and highly organized. In it one may see
the processes which affect the town and city communities; shifting of
population, economic changes, educational improvement or retrogression
and the processes of social life which express themselves in moral
conditions. The community is the field in which may be observed the
prosperity of the people as a whole. It is the local exhibit in which
the average man shows what has come to pass throughout the commonwealth
as a whole.

American rural communities have been under the influence of swift and
sudden changes during the years of railroad development. This is
exhibited in the country community very clearly. There almost all the
causes which are at work in the city are seen and their operation is
easier to observe and to measure than in a city community. It is the
general impression that the country community has suffered greatly
though the loss of population. This is probably due to the diminishing
agricultural activity of the country. Thirty-four counties in Ohio are
producing less than the same counties were producing before the Civil
War. It is natural that the population of these counties should be on
the whole smaller than at that time. But it is more probable that the
social, educational and moral life of the people of these counties who
stayed in the country is slacker and less vigorous than in 1860.
Sometimes the population of a community remains stationary but the
economic weakness expresses itself in a retarded social, ethical and
religious life.

There is high authority for the statement that the sifting of the
country community in recent years has on the whole improved it. Wilbert
L. Anderson says, "If this emigration of the best were the whole story,
it would be impossible to refute the charge of degeneracy. There is,
however, another aspect of the matter. The industrial revolution has put
a pressure upon rural life that is more important even than the
attraction of cities. That pressure has aggravated the severity of the
struggle for existence, and this grinding of the mill of evolution has
crushed the weaker strata of the population. Among those who have gone
are laborers and their families, the owners and occupants of the poorest
lands--the famous abandoned farms, and the weaklings and dependents.
Many of these have swollen the c