The reason why the American people care so much for the ideals that are
presented to us in the Country Life Movement is that there is something
very deep-seated and permanent within us to which these motives can
appeal. We are a country-life people. The bogy of the overshadowing
city, threatening to spread and spread until, like a great octopus, it
should suck all the sweet fields into its tentacles and cover the green
areas with a compact blackness, has given us a definite fright. The
result of our terror is the "Country Life Movement." It is not that we
were actually approaching an imagined danger-point; it was only that a
vision of life constantly fed and inspired by the pure unadulterated
influences of the country was before the eyes of a country-bred people,
and was of so great preciousness that we must guard it at the first hint
of peril. There are indeed grave dangers threatening some fundamental
interests in the agricultural realm; to these the nation is now well
awake. The republic has many problems but on the whole it is prospering,
and perhaps one reason why this is so lies in the fact that the
profession of agriculture is still the backbone of our national life.

The so-called Country Life Movement, then, is not a sudden onslaught
upon our consciousness by an alien influence, as if we were fish
suddenly commanded to go and live on the land. It is more as if a band
of mountaineers with lungs adjusted to a height of several thousand
feet, had been trying to breathe the air in a close and stuffy valley
far below their proper levels, but who had now returned to their native
height and were feeling the glow and triumph of their original energy;
or who perhaps, being frightened lest they should be imprisoned in that
low valley, were making frantic efforts to escape this doom and to reach
their mountain homes where they could breathe freely and grow normally
again. The Country Life Movement is not the despairing gasp of expiring
effeteness; it is an exclamation of robust joy in the possession of a
life healthily adapted to our needs.

At present there are well-nigh six million farmsteads in this country.
They form what we may untechnically call the agricultural group, and
represent roughly, but of course vitally, the great business of farming.
In our consideration we have to include also the small rural villages,
because the United States Census Reports include under the word "rural"
both people living in the open