the city child suffers spiritual privations from the
limitations of his environment, must this not show itself in social
tendencies? In any case I had a motive in what I have said. You are
interested in movements that attempt to enrich the experiences of
country boys and girls. That is good, but you must not occupy all of the
child's time or interest. Give him freedom to discover his own inner
resources, the spiritual union between his cravings and the richness of
nature. Don't exile him from nature's paradise by too much adult
supervision, organization, or influence. In my day we had too little
adult assistance in our games and recreation. I can imagine a condition
where the country childhood would suffer from too much."

It was this suggestion that I carried away with me from our
conversation.

THE MIND OF THE FARMER

VIII

THE MIND OF THE FARMER

In discussing the mind of the farmer, the difficulty is to find the
typical farmer's mind that north, south, east, and west will be accepted
as standard. In our science there is perhaps at present no place where
generalization needs to move with greater caution than in the statement
of the farmer's psychic characteristics. It is human to crave
simplicity, and we are never free from the danger of forcing concrete
facts into general statements that do violence to the opposing
obstacles.

The mind of the farmer is as varied as the members of the agricultural
class are significantly different. And how great are these differences!
The wheat farmer of Washington state who receives for his year's crop
$106,000 has little understanding of the life outlook of the New
Englander who cultivates his small, rocky, hillside farm. The difference
is not merely that one does on a small scale what the other does in an
immense way. He who knows both men will hardly question that the
difference in quantity leads also to differences in quality, and in no
respect are the two men more certainly distinguishable than in their
mental characteristics.

It appears useless, therefore, to attempt to procure for dissection a
typical farmer's mind. In this country at present there is no mind that
can be fairly said to represent a group so lacking in substantial unity
as the farming class, and any attempt to construct such a mind is bound
to fail. This is less true when the class is separated into sections,
for the differences between farmers are in no small measure
geographical. Inde