contains
sources of inexhaustible satisfaction for those who have the power to
appreciate them. Farming cannot be monotonous to the trained
agriculturist. It is full of dramatic and stimulating interests. Toil is
colored by investigation and experiment. The by-products of labor are
constant and prized beyond measure by the student and lover of nature.
Even the struggle with opposing forces lends zest to the educated
farmer's work. This does not mean that such a farmer runs a poet's farm,
as did Burns, with its inevitable financial failure, but rather that the
farmer is a skilled workman with an understanding and interpreting mind.
If the farming industry, under proper conditions, could offer no
satisfaction to great human instincts, it would be strange indeed when
one remembers the long period that man has spent in the agricultural
stage of culture. City dwellers in their hunt for stimulation are likely
to face either the breakdown of physical vitality or the blunting of
their sensibilities. Country joys, on the other hand, cost less in the
nervous capital expended to obtain them. The urban worker, in thinking
of his hours of freedom in sharp contrast with the time spent at his
machine, forgets his constant temptation to use most of his surplus
income in the satisfying of an unnatural craving for stimulation created
by the conditions of his environment. This need not be true of the rural
laborer and usually is not.

It is useless to deny the important and wholesome part that the urban
life and the city-minded man play in the great social complex which we
call modern civilization, but he who would advance country welfare may
wisely agitate for country schools fitted to adjust the majority of
country children to their environment, that they may as adults live in
the country successful and contented lives. We need never fear having
too few of the urban-minded or the able exploiters of talent who require
the city as their field of activity. The present tendency makes
necessary the development of country schools able to change the
apparent emptiness of rural environment and the excessive appeal of
urban excitement into a clear recognition on the part of a greater
number of country people of the satisfying joys of rural stimulations.

FOOTNOTES:

[6] Gillette, "Constructive Rural Sociology," p. 42.

[7] Parmelee, "The Science of Human Behavior," p. 290.

[8] Royce, "Outlines of Psychology," p. 21.

[9] Ward, "Applied