eekly paper
have a wide circulation among rural people and furnish a source of
penetrating and persistent social influence all the more significant
because the readers are little conscious of what they receive from
their reading. Into the most remote places the paper goes and is
received with avidity. The appeal is to human interest and is based upon
the entire hierarchy of instincts. No agency more successfully
socializes. It affords a mental connection with distant places that is a
good antidote for the physical loneliness in the country, which many
living there experience. It prevents the stagnation that comes from
concentration upon the interests of the day and neighborhood, for it
draws the attention of the reader out into the world of business and
affairs. It keeps country people from a too great class character by
charging the rural mind with the effects of modern civilization and of
necessity brings rural and urban people into a more sympathetic
relation. If it invites some to the city--as it certainly does--it also
makes the country a more satisfying and safer environment for those who
remain. Fortunately the papers are themselves sensitive to modern
thought and therefore attempt propaganda of a constructive social
character. If the appeal to human interests causes these educational
efforts to err respecting scientific accuracy, it is nevertheless true
that in spite of this fault the articles have a beneficent effect in
protecting the country from the excessive conservatism that isolation
tends to bring. The newspaper is the great gregarious meeting place of
the minds of men and therefore it serves to develop mental association
in a most intense manner. The weekly paper also serves a large
constituency in the country and on the whole probably socializes in a
more profound degree than the daily. The weekly permits the rural reader
to associate with the leaders of popular thought and builds up that
enthusiastic conviction which leadership always obtains. The leaders of
the country districts in this manner come into fellowship with the
thinking of urban men of influence. The farm paper is not to be
overlooked in a survey of the influence of the press upon country life.
Its little value as a professional journal because of its unscientific
character is in many instances a great handicap upon the progress of
agriculture, but even when these papers fail in having real worth for
the industry of farming they do extend p