r will obviously depend upon the extent to which the people have
common aims and purposes. If the people of a community form distinct
groups with diverse ideals and purposes, it will be much more difficult
to secure that sympathy, tolerance, and understanding which are
necessary for united action, than if they are more alike. Yet it is just
such diversity of interests of different elements in the community which
gives rise to community problems and which brings about an appreciation
of the need of developing community life.

It is necessary, therefore, to have some appreciation of how the
characteristics of its population influence community life.

In the first place, a community of people of different nationalities or
races, or sometimes even of people from different states, find it much
more difficult to secure a common loyalty than if they were of one
stock. It is, of course, quite true that many an old community of a
single stock is divided by family, religious or political feuds; yet
usually there is more solidarity between people of common traditions and
culture. The largest problem in the so-called "Americanization" of
foreigners in rural communities is to get the natives to understand and
appreciate the newcomers and to realize that the future of the community
depends upon mutual respect and good will. Had we a little more of an
historical perspective, we would remember that all of our ancestors were
"foreigners" but a few generations back. In almost every part of the
United States are communities in which alien groups form one of the
chief obstacles to a better community life. Throughout the South, the
most fundamental problem is that of a better understanding between the
two races, and until some means of amicable adjustment is attempted,
there is little prospect for the development of community life. In some
of our best agricultural sections there have been successive waves of
immigration of different nationalities. Thus in Dane County, Wisconsin,
of which Madison--the state capital--is the county seat, Dr. J. H.
Kolb[8] describes communities in which Germans, Norwegians, and Swiss
have largely supplanted the original settlers from New England. In an
interesting study of Americanization in a community in the Connecticut
Valley of Massachusetts, John Daniels[9] has described how the French
Canadians and Irish and then the Poles have taken up the land, and how
good feeling between them and the native Yankees wa