"352 Missouri Agricultural Ecport. 



.and heart not found in the congested portions of our modern cities. 

 There is an increasingly large number of thoughtful people who believe 

 that the tendency from the country to the city is even now being 

 checked and a counter-movement from the city to the farm has begun. 



In recognizing the favorable environment of the open country for 

 the location of a home, we must in fairness, take cognizance of certain 

 disadvantages which present themselves forcibly to the country man and 

 his family. Chief among the disadvantages of country life is the lack 

 of satisfactory organization of the social institutions of the country. 

 Among the social institutions of the country are the school, the church, 

 and various farmers' organizations that are calculated to administer to 

 the social, intellectual or economic welfare of the farming class. 



The rural school does not furnish to the children of country people 

 the same opportunity to secure a good education as is presented even 

 by the smaller towns. The fact is that the children of the poor in towns 

 a.nd cities have a far better opportimity of securing a modern education 

 than the children of the rich who live in the open country. The result 

 of this disparity of school opportunity has led many farmers' families, 

 who are financially able to move to the town, to secure better educational 

 opportunity for their children. This not only drains the comitry of 

 the most progressive part of its people, but it removes the chief incen- 

 tive for building up the local school. The well-to-do man is able to send 

 Ms children to town, even if he does not himself, change his habitation. 

 He is not, therefore, impressed with the necessity of building up the 

 country school. To the poor boy or girl in the country this is a great 

 misfortune. 



The country church has declined in every agricultural section of 

 the United States. The country church w^as the cradle of our modern 

 religious institutions. No one of our social institutions can point to 

 greater service to country people than the country church of our pio- 

 neer days. It must be admitted by any fair-minded student of rural 

 social conditions that the country church of today does not occupy the 

 same important space in our developing civilization as formerly. 



A great many of our most thoughtful statesmen and industrial 

 leaders have expressed publicly the idea that the economic affairs of 

 the future will be shifted more and more from city to country. They 

 also admit that the best opportunity for the highest development of the 

 social life of the future wall be in the open country. How can these 

 things be when the two most important social institutions of the coimtry, 

 the school and the church, are failing so signally to fulfill the important 

 mission which they must fulfill if the future life of the country people 



