The
man needs them, too, for without them he becomes a mere machine for
making money; but the woman, deprived of them, tends to become a mere
drudge. The new rural social economy (which implies a denser population
occupying smaller holdings) must therefore include a generous provision
for all those forms of social intercourse which specially appeal to
women. The Women's Sections of the Granges have done a great deal of
useful work in this direction; we need a more general and complete
application of the principles on which they act.

I have now stated the broad principles which must govern any effective
scheme for correcting the present harmful subordination of rural life to
a civilisation too exclusively urban. Before I bring forward my definite
proposal for a remedy calculated to meet the needs of the situation, I
must anticipate a line of criticism which may occur to the mind of any
social worker who does not happen to be very familiar with the
conditions of country life.

I can well imagine readers who have patiently followed my arguments
wishing to interrogate me in some such terms as these: "Assuming," they
may say, "that we accept all you tell us about the neglect of the rural
population, and agree as to the grave consequences which must follow if
it be continued, what on earth can we do? Of course the welfare of the
rural population is a matter of paramount importance to the city and to
the nation at large; but may we remind you that you said the evil and
the consequences can be removed and averted only by those immediately
concerned--the actual farmers--and that the remedy for the rural
backwardness was to be sought for in the rural mind? 'Canst thou
minister to a mind diseased?' Must not the patient 'minister' to
himself?"

Fair questions these, and altogether to the point. I answer at once that
the patient ought to minister to himself, but he won't. He has acquired
the habit of sending for the physician of the town, whose physic but
aggravates the disease. Dropping metaphor, the farmer does not think for
himself. In rural communities, there is as great a lack of collective
thought as of cooperative action. All progress is conditional on public
opinion, and this, even in the country, is a very much town-made thing.

So I am, then, in this difficulty. My subject is rural, my audience
urban. I have to commend to the statesmen and the philanthropists of the
town the somewhat incongruous proposal that they sho