o the city home. When this conclusion is
reached, many students of rural problems are content to drop the
discussion of the rural family. Such an attitude of satisfaction
concerning the country home is neither logical nor safe. It may well be
that the country family will meet the strain due to modern changes later
than the urban family, but sooner or later it will have to face the need
of new adjustment. Only time itself can disclose whether the country
home will find serious difficulties in the way of its final adjustment
to the significant changes of modern life. There is certainly little
security in the fact that numerous country families have as yet been
insensible to the matrimonial unrest so characteristic of urban people.
What has come first to the urban centers must, sooner or later, to a
greater or less degree, enter country life. Indeed, it is impossible to
doubt that family discontent is growing in the country.

The important question, however, to the moral and social worker is
whether the country is obtaining all that it should from its superior
family opportunity. Assuming that it is healthier than the city, with
reference to the equipment, function, and adjustment of the family, it
is reasonable to ask, "What are the obstacles that keep the country home
from making its largest moral contribution to society?"

One fault with some country homes stands out on the surface. The wife is
too much a drudge. Her life is too narrow and too hard. This type of
home is passing, no doubt, but it has by no means passed. This kind of
woman may be little influenced by new thought, and may think her
situation as natural for her as it was for her mother. Whatever her
personal attitude, however, from the very nature of things she is unable
to make a significant moral contribution through her family duties.
There will be striking exceptions, of course, but the general rule will
stand--in modern life the woman drudge makes a poor mother. The fact
that she is less likely to rebel against her hard condition than her
urban sister, does not remove the dangers of her situation. And it is
well for the lover of country welfare to remember that even when the
wife accepts with no complaint the hardness of her lot, she often blames
her husband's occupation, farming, for her misfortune, and becomes a
rural pessimist, urging her children neither to farm nor to marry
farmers. Her deep, instinctive protest appears through suggestion in the