process
gained a footing by ownership of land. But this ebb and flow of
population out of the country community and back again has weakened and
strained the country church and school and has not yet begun to
strengthen them. There is every evidence that with a pleasant and
agreeable country life the country community can retain the best
elements of this population, which comes and goes. The country church
and school ought to take measures to retain the best of the country
population through these changes.

Through all these causes the presence of a large proportion of aliens in
the community who are American born, but locally unattached by birth or
ownership, has effected great changes in the country church, and other
community institutions. The State of Illinois, which has a tenant farmer
population of more than 50 per cent in its richest sections, has
suffered severely through the loss of many country churches. There is no
precise measure of this loss, but a sociological survey recently made in
Illinois indicates that in the past twenty years more than fifteen
hundred country churches have been abandoned in the State. This
statement must be accepted as approximate, but the number is likely to
be greater rather than less. This abandonment of country churches has
come in the same period in which the proportion of tenant farmers has
greatly increased. Reference is made elsewhere to a similar condition in
the State of Delaware, in which the churches of the old land-owners have
been abandoned and replaced at heavy expense with poorer churches built
by the incoming tenant farmers.

Everywhere in the United States this process has in some measure
affected the country. It does not much matter whether the proportion of
tenants is increasing or decreasing, the present effect is one of
instability. In New England where in the past ten years tenantry has
been diminished ten per cent, the country churches are weakened as
elsewhere. The churches have not yet had time to recover while the
population is in a state of change.

The old order in the country is crumbling. The church is an expression
of stability. The people on whom the church always depends for its
audiences, its enthusiasm and its largest accessions, are marginal
people, working men, adolescent youths and those who are coming to a
position in the community. The exodus of these from the country
community, or the incoming of persons in these classes into the country
c