THE INFLUENCE OF URBAN AND RURAL ENVIRONMENT 377 



When speed, and change and power over material things 

 seem less valuable than those quahties and properties of 

 life which man holds always within himself, regardless of 

 his place of residence, we shall see, or our inheritors will, 

 a redistribution of people where less effort will go to the 

 creation of a safe environment by artifice, in an intimate 

 and abundant contact with the invigorating reahties of 

 outdoors. 



CONCLUSIONS 



Apparently we pay and pay heavily in terms of loss of 

 Hfe for our inchnation or rather determination to live in 

 increasing numbers in cities. We have been for at least fifty 

 years reducing the discrepancy between rural and urban 

 death rates. Whether we shall ourselves be so modified or 

 adapted that we can tolerate or survive, on equal terms with 

 our country cousins, the conditions so far inherent in city 

 environment, or whether we shall so alter and command the 

 contacts and physical setting of our urban life that these 

 no longer constitute a handicap, only the future can tell. 

 But as long as the rush of people cityward continues, social 

 and medical science will be concerned with watching end 

 results and trends, with analyzing material, social and 

 psychical elements of city hfe, until man can be sure of 

 control of his environment regardless of place and association 

 with his fellows, so that there may be no hindrance or limit 

 to his choice of place or manner of life in seeking to satisfy 

 his reasonable ambition to live to the limits of his inherited 

 capacities. 



The city dweller is in the majority. He will command and 

 perhaps dominate as fanatically as the farmer often has 

 ruled the city in the past. After the city dweller has learned 

 to bend material things to his wishes with entire safety 

 and to accommodate his body and life to the pressing throngs 

 about him in street and store and factory, he will still require 

 in all probability to make and keep contact with the 

 elements, a relation which no amount of associations with 

 similar men can replace. He will always need the sweetening 

 influence of the uncontrollable sun and wind and rain which 



