e support from every other person,
and without adequate safeguards from exploitation and from unessential
commercial pressure.

This social support requires a ready response on the part of the farmer;
and he must also be developed into his position by a kind of training
that will make him quickly and naturally responsive to it. The social
fascination of the town will always be greater than that of the open
country. The movements are more rapid, more picturesque, have more color
and more vivacity. It is not to be expected that we can overcome this
fascination and safeguard the country boy and girl merely by introducing
more showy or active enterprises into the open country. We must develop
a new background for the country youth, establish new standards, and
arouse a new point of view. The farmer will not need all the things that
the city man thinks the farmer needs. We must stimulate his moral
response, his appreciation of the worthiness of the things in which he
lives, and increase his knowledge of all the objects and affairs amongst
which he moves. The backbone of the rural question is at the bottom a
moral problem.

We do not yet know whether the race can permanently endure urban life,
or whether it must be constantly renewed from the vitalities in the
rear. We know that the farms and the back spaces have been the mother of
the race. We know that the exigencies and frugalities of life in these
backgrounds beget men and women to be serious and steady and to know the
value of every hour and of every coin that they earn; and whenever they
are properly trained, these folk recognize the holiness of the earth.

For some years I have had the satisfaction to speak to rural folk in
many places on the holy earth and to make some of the necessary
applications. Everywhere I have met the heartiest assent from these
people. Specially do they respond to the suggestion that if the earth is
hallowed, so are the native products of the earth hallowed; and they
like to have the mystery--which is the essential sentiment--of these
things brought home to them with frequency. I will here let my reader
have a letter that one of these persons wrote me, and I print it without
change. On inquiry, the writer of it told me that he is a farmer, has
never followed any other occupation, was brought up "in the woods," and
has had practically no education. I did not ask him, but I judge from
the narrative style that he has been a reader or a hearer o