PROBLEMS OF RURAL SOCIAL LIFE 339 



result would be possible. The less vigorous, capable, and enter- 

 prising youths being left in the country, there to marry and 

 bring up families, and the same process of selection going on 

 generation after generation, the quality of the rural population 

 would inevitably deteriorate. This would happen as certainly as 

 it would if a horse or cattle breeder should follow the practice of 

 selling his best animals and keeping the inferior ones for breed- 

 ing purposes. If such a breeder should continue this practice, he 

 would eventually have no first-rate animals to sell. Similarly, if 

 the rural population should degenerate, there would eventually 

 be no superior men and women to send to the cities, and the 

 cities themselves would then degenerate. But if it should happen 

 that the best, the strongest, the most intelligent, and the most 

 enterprising youths should stay in the country, and the inferior 

 ones should be sent to the cities to be sterilized by false ambitions, 

 then it would follow that the quality of the rural population would 

 improve. So long as the rural population is improving there is 

 no clanger of national decay or weakness, or of a decline of civi- 

 lization. It is therefore of great importance that the farms shall 

 retain at least their fair share of the talent of the country. 



I a order that young men and women of talent and capacity 

 may be induced to remain on the farms, rural life must be made 

 attractive to them. Farm life cannot be attractive to such men 

 and women unless it offers opportunities for a liberal material 

 income, for agreeable social life, and for intellectual and aesthetic 

 enjoyment. 



An adequate income. The problem of securing an adequate 

 income to the farmer's family is partly a problem of securing 

 an adequate supply of land and capital for them. There is very 

 little in the peasant type of farming, where the farmer is so in- 

 adequately supplied with land as to make efficient agriculture 

 impossible, and where even machinery and good teams are 

 unprofitable, to attract men and women of high spirit and 



