74 STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



Country people swarm to the larger social centers often leaving com- 

 parative independence for the most hopelessly subordinate occupation in 

 the city. When asked why he did not return to his good home on the 

 farm, a Chicago youth replied, ''Because I find more fun in South Hal- 

 sted street in a week than I would have in two years in the country." 

 When chided for returning to her desolate tenement house quarters in 

 New York after having been removed to the country at considerable cost 

 to her friends, the mother of a family of children justified herself by the 

 declaration, "A body can't live among stumps, but must be with folks." 

 In urging the people in western agricultural states not to overcrowd 

 the cities, I have been indignantly answered at summer assemblies by 

 men and women, who insisted that their families had as much right 

 as mine to the social and educational privileges of the city. 



TUE TIDE IS TURNING. 



Happily, however, the tide begins to turn countryward again. The 

 social importance of improved highways and the introduction of tele- 

 phones, trolley lines, and rural mail delivery is primary to and fully as 

 far-reaching as the economic facilities thus afforded. These are socializers 

 of the country community in a higher sense than they are wealth pro- 

 ducers. They lift more burdens from life, than they carry for labor. They 

 will give more heart's-ease and contentment than money value, rated by 

 cost or production. , Not the least significant among many other signs, 

 this joint conference of the educators and the farmers of Michigan 

 betokens an awakening consciousness of the necessity and opportunity 

 to socialize rural life. All together they forecast the reintegration of the 

 country community, and possibly the check of the unhealthfully rapid 

 growth of city population. 



What part the country churches are to have in the coming organiza- 

 tion of rural life depends upon the vision the local church has of its 

 social function. To suggest what that function may be, it has been 

 necessary to dwell as particularly as we have upon the need which most 

 country communities have of some inspirational and co-operative center. 

 This need of its field must first be seen and felt by the country church 

 before it will recognize its imperative duty and supreme opportunity to 

 be such a center to its community. 



In the organization of rural life the country church has a three-fold 

 social function. 



Its primary and perhaps supreme function is to keep the highest ideal 

 of individual and community life flying like a flag far overhead. The 

 church should be like the flagstaff of the community, and its membership 

 like the color-guard. By its worship, its example, and its prophetic 

 aspirations it should hold aloft what is worthiest for man, woman and 

 child to be, what God Almighty meant and made community life to become 

 in neighborhood and town. 



To initiate agencies and movements for realizing these ideals practi- 

 cally and progressively is the second social function of the church, but 

 its own organization is not to attempt to administer the social agencies 

 thus initiated. For, on the one hand, neither in the form of its organiza- 

 tion, nor in the constituency of its membership is the church adapted to 

 be an effective executive of social movements, and on the other hand, even 



