though often questioned, that farmers'
wives on western farms furnished the largest quota of insane asylum
inmates, because of the monotony and loneliness of their life. The
tendency was especially noticeable in the case of Scandinavian immigrant
women, accustomed in the old home to the farm hamlet with its community
life.

To-day the farmer's wife suffers no such isolation. To be sure the wizards
of invention have not yet given us the _teleblepone_, by which the faces
of distant friends can be made visible; but the telephone brings to us
that wonderfully personal element, the human voice, the best possible
substitute for the personal presence. Socially, the telephone is a
priceless boon to the country home, especially for the women, who have
been most affected by isolation in the past. They can now lighten the
lonely hours by a chat with neighbors over household matters, or even have
a neighborhood council, with five on the line, to settle some question of
village scandal! All sorts of community doings are speedily passed from
ear to ear. Details of social plans for church or grange are conveniently
arranged by wire. Symptoms are described by an anxious mother to a
resourceful grandmother and a remedy prescribed which will cure the baby
before the horse could even be harnessed. Or at any hour of the day or
night the doctor in the village can be quickly summoned and a critical
hour saved, which means the saving of precious life.

On some country lines a general ring at six o'clock calls all who care to
hear the daily market quotations; and at noon the weather report for the
day is issued. If the weather is not right, the gang of men coming from
the village can be intercepted by phone. Or if the quotations are not
satisfactory, a distant city can be called on the wire and the day's
shipment sent to the highest bidder--saving money, time, and miles of
travel.

All things considered the telephone is fully as valuable in the country as
in the city and its development has been just as remarkable, especially in
the middle West where thousands of independent rural lines have been
extended in recent years, at very low expense. In 1902 there were 21,577
rural lines in the United States, with a total length of 259,306 miles of
wires, and 266,969 rural phones.

_Good Roads, the Index of Civilization_

When John Frederick Oberlin began his remarkable work of community
building in the stagnant villages of the Vosges Mountains