336 PRINCIPLES OF RURAL ECONOMICS 



efficiency. We may persuade ourselves that we like other quali- 

 ties or people who possess them, but nature pays very little at- 

 tention to our likes and dislikes in such matters. However much 

 we may like other qualities, the peoples who lack these quali- 

 ties will fail ; and however much we may persuade ourselves that 

 we despise the sober, homely, economic virtues, the peoples who 

 possess them will succeed and eventually dominate the world. 



The problem of maintaining the capacity of the rural popula- 

 tion for civilization will depend upon two questions : (i) Is it the 

 most or the least capable individuals who marry earliest and have 

 the largest families ? (2) Is it the most or the least capable indi- 

 viduals who leave the farms and migrate to the cities ? 



Ideally it would seem as though the most capable young men 

 should arrive first at a position of independence, where it would 

 be possible to marry and settle down to the work of building up 

 an estate and a family. Where social ideals are sound this is 

 doubtless the case ; but where they are unsound it is otherwise. 

 Where the social ideals are such that it is regarded as an honor- 

 able ambition as the most honorable ambition, in fact to 

 found a family, with a family estate to support it, or to perpetu- 

 ate a family already honorably established, and to maintain its 

 standards and traditions, the capable young men will be guided 

 by this ideal, and the most capable of them will succeed best 

 in realizing it. But where the end and aim of economic life 

 centers in the gratification of the senses or of individual vanity, 

 in attracting public notice because of individual achievement in 

 fashionable society, in art, literature, or scholarship, or in any 

 other of the so-called polite pursuits, the family ideal is lost from 

 sight. Under such circumstances, there is a tendency to look 

 upon achievement in some of these directions as an end in itself, 

 rather than as a means of family building ; to assume that an 

 honorable ambition is realized when success along these other 

 lines is attained, regardless of the fate of the family ideal. Such 



