the community's coffers. But community services in such
areas--things like sewage collection and disposal, water supply, trash
collection, roads and streets, schools, libraries--are seldom extensive
or elaborate, because they do not need to be in a rural stage of things.
If a subdivider erects, however, some 1500 new homes on a patch of
countryside, providing them with an inadequate supply of well water and
with individual septic tanks, and then shoves along to other fields
before things start breaking down and the protests start rising from the
1500 families who came there for lyrical but convenient country living,
the ensuing results for the county's finances can be catastrophic.

In some parts of America already, around $17,000 worth of community
services are said to be needed for every new family that moves in, a sum
which from one viewpoint amounts to a subsidy furnished by taxpayers to
land speculators and developers. Even assuming that those services
provided by the developer are adequate, and that some aid in providing
the rest can be obtained by the community through State and Federal
programs--thereby passing on a part of the cost to other taxpayers--a
rural county proud of its traditionally low tax valuations and of the
Jeffersonian simplicity of its local government, as most are, flatly
cannot dig up the remainder without a big revision of its old way of
being.

In bad cases, the alternatives to digging it up may be water pollution,
health hazards, siltation and perhaps floods, sour public discontent
among new elements unsympathetic to Jeffersonian simplicity, and the
rapid deterioration of the new suburbs into rural slums--a combination
of factors that in itself may bring about drastic change in the
community. Thus in one way or another contemporary rural individualism
tends to bury itself, but often too late for the salvation of the woods
and pastures and clear waters and human dignity it took for granted and
placed so little value on.

Vacation colonies are a rather distinct consideration, for they are
independent of ordinary and predictable population growth and they tend
to spring up in places of special natural beauty and value. There is no
reason why they should not be pleasant additions to a community or to a
landscape, and a good many are--well planned in terms of both practical
details and esthetic values, unobtrusive, and pretty. Unfortunately,
though, this kind is not the rule, for in many spot