ung people.

The sale of votes in every election is a fixed quantity in the life of
certain country towns. It is to be counted on each year. The number of
votes for sale in each town is a known proportion of the whole, and
through certain counties the selling of votes is the political factor
everywhere present. These uniform facts point to a common cause. That
cause is the degeneration of a proportion of the rural population into
peasantry.

The growth of a peasant population in America is surely our greatest
danger. A peasantry is a rural population whose moral and spiritual
state are controlled by their material states. There may be rich
peasants, though most peasants are poor. Peasants are a specialized
class, incapable of self-government and controlled by some political
masters who exercise for them essential rights of citizenship. The
peasants in Europe are the last to receive the ballot. In America they
are the first to surrender the ballot by selling their votes.

A young minister called to a country parish denounced the sale of votes,
in his first year, and publicly fixed the whole blame on a prominent
political leader of the town, who was there present in the church. His
criticism was resented by the whole community. He was right, and so were
they. It is well to denounce the purchase of votes, but the duty of the
country church to Americanize the peasant class is the greater duty. The
presence of such a class in a town infallibly leads to this iniquity.
The sale of votes is as bad as the sale of woman's virtue, and both have
an automatic tendency to degrade the population.

The danger sign of peasantry is a degraded standard of life. In this
town there is one household in which nobody works but the mother. "How
they live beats me," is the public comment of the neighbors. Through the
winter into that house are crowded the father and mother, two sons and
two daughters, the husband of one daughter and their two children, with
three other small children, whose presence in the house is due to the
loose good nature of the family. There is an indolent uncle of these
children. None of the household follows any gainful occupation. The
table is furnished with potatoes and pork. The attraction of the
household is the easy, loose, good-nature of all its members. There is
no one to complain of the indolence of the five grown men who lounge
about through the winter days.

The presence of such a household in a town means