orm in women's societies in the churches,
mostly charitable and missionary.

Finally, at the close of the land-farmer period, about 1890, there
sprang up the young people's societies, which in the ten closing years
of the land-farmer period reached a membership of hundreds of thousands
among the Protestant churches. These societies of young people
were organized in the churches to correspond to the growing
self-consciousness among adolescent members of the land-farmer's
household. The young men and women in the maturing of the family group
came to have a life of their own. As frequently happens, the family
group reached its highest development and perfection just before it was
to pass away.

The church of the land-farmer is the typical Protestant church of the
United States. So influential has the farmer been in national life that
organized religion has idealized his type of church. It has been
transported to villages and towns. It has become the type of church most
frequent in the cities.

Nearly all the Protestant churches in New York City are land-farmer
churches; "and that," says a noted city pastor, "is what ails them."[6]
This church centers its activities in preaching, rents or assigns its
pews to families, and organizes societies for the various factors of the
family group. It has Sunday schools, women's, men's and young people's
societies, with only one minister to supervise them all.

The transformation of this type of church, so deeply rooted in the
idealism of the whole people, into a church better suited to city,
factory, town and mining settlement, has been the problem for Protestant
bodies to solve in the past twenty years. The beginning of this
transformation, it is striking to observe, came at the end of the
land-farmer period, about 1890.

The land-farmer, then, whose period according to Prof. Ross, extended
from 1835 to 1890 in the Middle West, is the best known agricultural
type. He is the typical countryman as the countryman is imagined in the
cities and recorded in our literature. It has been the American hope
that he should be the land-owner of the days to come. In East Tennessee
the farmer is still the type of landowner in country communities. In
some portions of Michigan and Minnesota the farmer type gives character
to the whole population, but generally throughout the country the
processes described by Prof. Ross have undermined the integrity of the
farmer type and broken his hold upon le