ety, thrift, and kindliness
as individual obligations, but they are not wrought out in isolation.
Isolation is never complete, and virtue is a social product. The
farmer makes occasional visits to the country store, where he
experiences social contacts; there is habitual association with
individual workers on the farm or traders with whom the farmer carries
on a business transaction. His personal contacts may not be helpful,
and his wife may lack them almost altogether outside of the home; the
result is often a tendency toward vice or degeneration, sometimes to
insanity or suicide, but it is seldom that there are not helpful
influences and relations available if the individual will put himself
in the way of enjoying them. Good morals are dependent on right
associations. Human beings need the stimulus of good society,
otherwise the mind vegetates or broods upon real or fancied wrongs
until the moral nature is in danger of atrophy or warping. Family
feuds develop, as among the Scotch highlanders or the mountain people
in certain parts of the South. Lack of social sympathy increases as
the interests become self-centred; out of this characteristic grow
directly such evils as petty lawlessness, rowdyism, and crime. The
country districts need the help of high-grade schools and proper
places of recreation, of the Young Men's Christian Association or an
association of like principles, and most of all of a virile church
that will interpret moral obligation and furnish the power that is
needed to move the will to right action.

160. =Rural Vices.=--The moral problems of the rural community do not
differ greatly from those of the town. The most common rural vices are
profanity, drunkenness, and sexual immorality. Profanity is often a
habit rather than a defect in moral character, and is due sometimes to
a narrow vocabulary. It is a mark of ignorance and boorishness. In
many localities it is less common than it used to be. The average
community life is wholesome. Not more than twenty per cent of American
rural communities have really bad conditions in any way, according to
the investigations made by the United States Rural Life Commission in
1908. Considering the monotony and hardships of rural life, it is much
to the credit of the people that most communities are temperate and
law-abiding. Intemperance is one of the most common evils; there is a
longing for the stimulant of liquor, which appears in some cases in
moderate drinking