ys, "The reason so many young people go to hell is
because they have no other place to go."

What is the matter with the small town? Do not blame it all upon the
city mail order house. With rural delivery, daily papers, telephones,
centralized schools, automobiles and good roads, there are no more
delightful places in the world to live than in the country or in the
small town. They have the city advantages plus sunshine, air and
freedom that the crowded cities cannot have.

I asked the keeper who was showing me thru the insane asylum at Weston,
West Virginia, "You say you have nearly two thousand insane people in
this institution and only a score of guards to keep them in. Aren't you
in danger? What is to hinder these insane people from getting together,
organizing, overpowering the few guards and breaking out?"

The keeper was not in the least alarmed at the question. He smiled.
"Many people say that. But they don't understand. If these people could
get together they wouldn't be in this asylum. They are insane. No two
of them can agree upon how to get together and how to break out. So a
few of us can hold them."

It would be almost unkind to carry this further, but I have been
thinking ever since that about three-fourths of the small towns of
America have one thing in common with the asylum folks--they can't get
together. They cannot organize for the public good. They break up into
little antagonistic social, business and even religious factions and
neutralize each other's efforts.

A lot of struggling churches compete with each other instead of massing
for the common good. And when the churches fight, the devil stays
neutral and furnishes the munitions for both sides.

So the home towns stagnate and the young people with visions go away to
the cities where opportunity seems to beckon. Ninety-nine out of a
hundred of them will jostle with the straphangers all their lives, mere
wheels turning round in a huge machine. Ninety-nine out of a hundred of
them might have had a larger opportunity right back in the home town,
had the town been awake and united and inviting.

We must make the home town the brightest, most attractive, most
promising place for the young people. No home town can afford to spend
its years raising crops of young people for the cities. That is the
worst kind of soil impoverishment--all going out and nothing coming
back. That is the drain that devitalizes the home towns more than all
the city ma