PROBLEMS OF RURAL SOCIAL LIFE 367 



are few who will approve a kind of division of labor which is 

 too frequently found in rural communities, where most of the 

 men work all the time and never play, while a few loafers 

 amuse themselves all the time and never work. 



Rural sports are the natural adjunct of rural festivals as a 

 means of maintaining a wholesome and agreeable social life in 

 the country. Owing to a natural excitability and tendency to 

 excess, Americans have found it difficult to develop distinctive 

 rural sports as a permanent and dignified institution of rural 

 life, except in a few favored localities. Fox hunting and horse 

 racing tend, in this country, to be spoiled as rural sports by 

 their affectation by urban magnates in the one case and livery- 

 stable toughs in the other. Nothing is finer and more dignified 

 than for a group of neighboring, well-to-do farmers to unite for 

 a day's hunting, when the purpose is to rid the country of 

 vermin ; but when a group of townsmen, who have learned to 

 ride under a roof in a professional riding school, proceed to the 

 country and advertise their solvency by chasing a timid fox 

 across the fields, the sight is not calculated to inspire admira- 

 tion. Nor is there any sport more fitting than for a group of 

 horse-breeding farmers to meet for the purpose of testing the 

 speed of their colts in a fair and open competition. It is only 

 by such open competition that successful horse breeding is 

 made possible. But when horse racing degenerates into a mere 

 vaudeville "stunt," or, as is more frequently the case, into a 

 mere opportunity for a group of professional gamblers from the 

 purlieus of the livery stables, who have been initiated into the 

 mysteries of race-track management, to enrich themselves at 

 the expense of the uninitiated, it is not too much to say that it 

 has lost its virtue as the inspirer of a wholesome and agreeable 

 soeial life in the country. 



In view of the well-known excitability of the American tem- 

 perament, and its tendency to excess, it is important that rural 



