ly influenced by
the interests of eastern capital and the mortgage owners than by the
real needs of his local constituency.

The result has been an increasing friction between the villages and the
farms, and we have come to think of them as two separate groups or
interests rather than as essential and inter-dependent parts of a social
area--the community. The literature of country life and of rural
sociology has very rightly recognized the existing situation, but many
writers seem to accept the division between village and farm as
inevitable, and even question whether there can be a rural community of
the type herein described, rather than to recognize that this is but a
necessary stage in the beginning of community life, due to the mode of
settlement and temporary conditions.

This friction between farmer and villager has been most acute in the
Middle West and has found its extreme expression in the Non-partisan
League Movement, which has engendered a degree of bitterness between the
two factions which cannot be permanently maintained without serious
injury to their common interests. This, however, is only an attempt of
the farmers to secure redress through political control, and is but the
political form of expression of a protest which is being more
effectively made as an economic movement through cooperative buying and
selling agencies, particularly strong in Kansas and Nebraska, but
rapidly spreading throughout the country.

Some rural leaders would have us believe that the interests of the
village and the farm are fundamentally antagonistic and irreconcilable.
They advocate that the consolidated school or high school be placed in
the open country where it will be uncontaminated by the urban-mindedness
of the village; that the grange is the farmers' organization and is
sufficient for him and has no need of affiliating itself with the
affairs of the village; that the farmers should develop their own
cooperative stores and selling agencies so that they can be economically
independent of the "parasitic" trader of the village. Such a naive point
of view has a certain logical simplicity which is based on the
presupposition that conflict is inevitable and that justice and equity
can be secured only through dominance. The same line of reasoning finds
no solution of the problem of capital and labor, or of the interests of
producer as over against consumer, except in strong organization and
eternal economic conflict. It