rently that the
manager and owner are more like the factory operator than the usual
farmer. To them the problem is labor-saving machinery, efficient
management, labor cost, marketing facilities, and competition. They are
not especially influenced by the fact that they happen to handle land
products rather than manufactured articles.

Much has been made of the farmer's hand-to-hand grapple with a
capricious and at times frustrating Nature. This emphasis is deserved,
for the farmer is out upon the frontier of human control of natural
forces. Even modern science, great as is its service, cannot protect him
from the unexpected and the disappointing. Insects and weather sport
with his purposes and give his efforts the atmosphere of chance. It is
not at all strange, therefore, that the farmer feels drawn to fatalistic
interpretations of experience which he carries over to lines of thought
other than those connected with his business.

A second important influence that has helped to make the mind of the
farmer has been isolation. In times past, without doubt, this has been
powerful in its effect upon the mind of the farmer. It is less so now
because, as everyone knows, the farmer is protected from isolation by
modern inventions. It is necessary to recall, however, that isolation is
in relation to one's needs and that we too often neglect the fact that
the very relief that has removed from country people the more apparent
isolation of physical distance has often intensified the craving for
closer and more frequent contact with persons than the country usually
permits. Whether isolation as a psychic experience has decreased for
many in the country is a matter of doubt. Certainly most minds need the
stimulus of human association for both happiness and healthiness, and
even yet the minds of farmers disclose the narrowness, suspiciousness,
and discontent of place that isolation brings. It makes a difference in
social attitude whether the telephone, automobile, and parcel post draw
the people nearer together in a common community life or whether they
bring the people under the magic of the city's quantitative life and in
this way cause rural discontent.

The isolation from the great business centers which has kept farmers
from having personally a wide experience with modern business explains
in part the suspicious attitude rural people often take into their
commercial relations. This has been expressed in a way one can hardly
for