the latter city over night; and finally displayed,
wilted in the sun, in a store window, and sold to a housewife who buys it
for fresh goods! If raised in a suburb of Decatur, it might have been sold
at half the price, and been really fresh enough to eat. The same story of
flagrant waste through poor management might be told of butter, cream, and
practically all farm products which are not sold in a public market near
the producer's home.

Not only are both the farmer and his ultimate customer suffering a
considerable loss from this competitive system of marketing, the process
itself is bad socially, for this reason. It cuts off the farmer from his
normal market, the nearest village, and isolates him and his family so
that they have virtually no interests there. If the farmer should sell his
product in the village stores or through a public market, or a cooperative
commission house, he would have more at stake in that town. He would
probably trade and go to church there, his wife would do her buying there,
they would be persons of importance to the townspeople and would form
friendships and social relationships there. As it is, a wall of mutual
suspicion and disregard separates this family from the people of the town.

It is doubtful whether farming can be sufficiently profitable to-day, or
the life of the open country be really satisfying, without some degree of
cooperation in business. More and more men are realizing this; are
overcoming their natural weakness for independence and are discovering
numerous modern ways to cooperate with other farmers; to their great
mutual advantage both financially and socially, as will be indicated
later.

_Lack of Religious Cooperation_

The old self-sufficing and competitive methods of farming have been
closely paralleled by the selfish ideals in religion; the great aim being
to save one's own soul and enjoy the religious privileges of one's
favorite type of church, whatever happened meanwhile to the community. In
most country places religion is still strongly individualistic. Rural folk
have seen little of the social vision or felt the power of the social
gospel of Jesus, which aims not only to convert the individual, but to
redeem his environment and reorganize the community life by Christian
standards. Consequently rural churches are depending too exclusively on
preaching and periodic revivals rather than on organized brotherliness,
systematic religious education and broad u