ome in New Hampshire, while the aunts and uncles
left behind must go out to see the new Nebraska or Wyoming lands on
which the young folks have settled. We do not stay still long enough
anywhere in the republic for a class of any sort to harden into
recognizable form.

New inhabitants may come here already hardened into the mold of some
class; but they or their children usually soften soon into the
quicksilver-like consistency of their surroundings.

There is also no subdividing of notions on the basis of residence,
whether as townsman or as rural citizen. The wind bloweth where it
listeth in this land. It whispers its free secrets into the ears of the
city dweller in the flat and of the rural worker of the cornfield or the
vine-screened kitchen. The rain also falls on the just and the unjust
whether suburbanated or countrified. There is no rural mind in America.
There has indeed been a great deal of pother of late over the virtue and
temper of "rural-minded people." This debate has been conscientiously
made in the effort to discern reasons why commissions should sit on a
rural problem. Reasons enough are discernible why commissions should
sit, but they lie rather in the unrural mind of the rural people, as the
words are generally understood, than in some supposed qualities imposed
or produced in the life of sun and rain, in that vocation that is
nearest to the creative activities of the Divine.

And if there is no rural mind, there is no distinctive rural
personality. If the man that ought to exemplify it is found walking up
Fifth Avenue or on Halstead Street or along El Camino Real, he cannot be
discovered as a farmer. He may be discovered as an ignorant person, or
he may be found to be a college-bred man; but in neither case would the
fact be logically inclusive or uninclusive of his function as farmer.

The same is almost as exactly true for his wife and his daughter. If one
should ask in any group of average people whether the farmer's daughter
as they have known her is a poor little undeveloped child, silent and
shy, or a hearty buxom lass, healthy and strong and up to date, some in
the group would say the latter and some the former. Both varieties exist
and can by searching be found along the countryside. But it is nothing
essentially rural that has developed either the one set of
characteristics or the other. To be convinced of this, one who knows
this country well has but to read a book like "Folk of the Fur