sense of belonging to a community. The
reasons for this cannot be discussed in detail, but a large factor is
the increasing tendency to centralize institutions; school, church,
grange, lodge, stores, etc.; in the village as the country becomes
older, roads are better, and higher standards develop. Furthermore, the
relative status of the farmer changes the situation. In the older parts
of the country most of the capital needed to supply credit to farmers
and their business organizations comes from within the locality, whereas
in the newer sections they are dependent upon outside capital. In the
older sections where land has become more valuable and wealth has
accumulated, the farmer as well as the villager is a bank director, and
the amount of capital which the farmer has invested in his business is
often much greater than that of the village business man. When the
farmer comes into town in his first-class automobile as frequently as he
desires, he has a very different status from former days. The
"banker-farmer" movement, which started as an effort of the banker to
assist the farmer in better methods of production and marketing, has now
become a "farmer-banker" movement in which the country banker has been
forced to give new thought to the credit facilities of his patrons, and
is already challenging the justice of the country's credit facilities
being dominated by the large city banks which are chiefly interested in
financing industry and commerce.

There is no question that in many a rural town there are too many
stores, as there are in the cities, that in many cases their service is
very inefficient, and occasionally their prices are exorbitant, but
several forces are already tending to remedy these evils where they
occur, and improvement may be hastened by intelligent and constructive
discussion. Thus exorbitant prices or poor service has made possible the
large sales of the mail-order houses, but the total volume of their
business in most localities is relatively small and their competition
has probably been beneficial to the wide-awake merchant. For first-class
merchants have been able to show that they can meet the mail-order
prices if the customer is willing to pay cash, and the advertising of
the mail-order houses has undoubtedly increased the wants of the average
farm household. In a recent address Dr. C. J. Galpin has pointed out
that one of the shortcomings of the average country merchant is that he
has not s