rosperous, to
raise some crop that others shall not raise, to have a harvest that
other men have not and to find a market which other men have not
discovered, by which he and his farm and his group may prosper. It is
hard to convince the land farmer, because of his immersion in this group
conflict, that the farmer's prosperity is dependent upon the prosperity
of other groups in the community.

The presence of the small group is the sign of normal social life. The
group is not complete in itself, but is a unit in human association. So
that the farmer economy had its social life and its own type of
communities. The economy of the farmer period represents the ideals born
in the pioneer nation. The community of the farmer is the destination of
the life of the pioneer. The farmer still practises a variety of
occupations. His tillage of the soil and his household economy are the
most conservative in all American population. He uses modern machinery
in the fields, but to a great degree his wife uses the old mechanisms in
the kitchen and in the household. The laborers employed on the farm are
received into the farmer's family under conditions of social equality.
The man who is this year a laborer may in a decade be a farmer. The
dignifying of personality with land ownership has been such a general
social experience in the country that every individual is thought of in
the farmer period as a potential landowner.

The institutions of the rural community of the land-farmer type are the
country store, the rural school, and the church. The country store deals
in general merchandise and is a natural outgrowth of the stores of the
pioneer period in which barter constituted the whole of the commerce of
the community. In the pioneer store but a few commodities were imported
from the outer world. The greater part of the merchandise was made in
the community and distributed in the store. But the farmer's rural
economy is the dawning of the world economy and the general store in the
farming community becomes an economic institution requiring great
ability and centering in itself the forces of general as well as local
economics.

The general storekeeper of this type in the country is at once a
business man, a money lender, an employer of labor and the manager of
the social center. He sells goods at a price so low as to maintain his
local trade against outside competition. He loans money on mortgages
throughout the community, and sells go