comes in; they act as
agencies through which scientific teaching may become actual practice,
not in the uncertain future, but in the living present. A cooperative
association has a quality which should commend it to the social
reformer--the power of evoking character; it brings to the front a new
type of local leader, not the best talker, but the man whose knowledge
enables him to make some solid contribution to the welfare of the
community.

I come now to the last part of the threefold scheme--that which aims at
a better life upon the farm. The cooperative association, in virtue of
its non-capitalistic basis of constitution and procedure (which, as I
have explained, distinguishes it from the Joint Stock Company), demands
as a condition of its business success the exercise of certain social
qualities of inestimable value to the community life. It is for this
reason, no doubt, that where men and women have learned to work together
under this system in the business of their lives, they are easily
induced to use their organisation for social and intellectual purposes
also.

The new organisation of the rural community for social as well as
economic purposes, which should follow from the acceptance of the
opinion I have advanced, would bring with it the first effective
counter-attraction to the towns. Their material advantages the country
cannot hope to rival; nor can any conceivable evolution of rural life
furnish a real counterpart to the cheap and garish entertainments of
the modern city. Take, for example, the extravagant use of electric
light for purposes of advertisement, which affords a nightly display of
fireworks in any active business street of an American city far superior
to the occasional exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London, which was
the rare treat of my childhood days. These delights--if such they
be--cannot be extended into remote villages in Kansas or Nebraska; but
their enchantment must be reckoned with by those who would remould the
life of the open country and make it morally and mentally satisfying to
those who are born to it, or who, but for its social stagnation, would
prefer a rural to an urban existence.

In one of his many public references to country life, President
Roosevelt attributed the rural exodus to the desire of "the more active
and restless young men and women" to escape from "loneliness and lack of
mental companionship."[8] He is hopeful that the rural free delivery,
the telep