lity for developing good citizens who are loyal to the welfare
of the community, and the school principal is rightly expected to be a
leader in community affairs in so far as they concern the participation
and interests of the school.

It is a far cry from the isolated one-room, box-type district school,
with a young girl with no professional training teaching a dozen
youngsters of all ages as best she can with little or no equipment, to
the modern consolidated school or rural high school with all the
intimate connections with the life of the whole community above
described, but this difference measures one phase of the progress which
has been made in recent years toward the integration of the rural
community and depicts one of the most important forces involved in this
process, whose influence is only commencing to be felt. How different
will the life of rural communities be a generation or two hence when in
most of them practically all of the parents and children will have had a
high-school education, with all the broader contacts and outlook on life
which that involves! We need only to study the influence of the Danish
Folk High Schools[42] to visualize the outcome.

THE PUBLIC LIBRARY

The public library has possibilities as an educational institution
exceeded only by those of the school. In many cases it is the
intellectual center of the community, while in others the caricature of
the library of Gopher Prairie in Sinclair Lewis' "Main Street," where
one of the chief objects was to keep the books from being soiled or worn
out, is not much overdrawn. Increasingly, however, the librarian is
studying methods of salesmanship for increasing the local consumption of
the products of the world's best minds in books and magazines, and is of
inestimable service to all organizations whose members have occasion to
study what human thought has contributed to the solution of their
problems. The public library gives the means of further education to
many a person deprived of academic privileges, who may realize the truth
of Carlyle's saying: "The true University of these days is a Collection
of Books."

In many states public libraries are aided by state and local
appropriations, particularly in New England and the states settled by
New England stock, for it is to New England[43] that we are indebted for
the public library as well as the public school. It is not, however,
economically possible for every small community to su