RURAL LEADERSHIP 



of books like the one from which she was reading. The 

 children were ready to do anything, and eagerly sold vege- 

 tables in order to provide sufficient funds to purchase the 

 books desired. 1 That teacher possessed imagination. She 

 did the usual in the unusual way and got wonderful results. 



In every avenue of life, in every job, in every task, 

 in every duty, if imagination is given free play, how vastly 

 different life becomes ! Once two preachers preached upon 

 the subject of the visit of the Queen of Sheba to the Court of 

 King Solomon. The one possessed imagination and the other 

 had little imagination. The preacher gifted with imagination 

 painted a picture of this beautiful incident that simply charmed 

 his hearers. His sermon was like a great moving picture 

 from beginning to end. The unimaginative preacher strug- 

 gled hard in his effort to portray the scene in an interesting 

 manner, but the beautiful colors that brightened the other 

 picture were absent, uninteresting details protruded them- 

 selves upon the audience, and the congregation dispersed far 

 from edified. The one picture was like a beautiful sunset on 

 a great expanse of water; the other was like a sunset blurred 

 by the murky atmosphere of a great industrial center. One 

 of the great needs of the time, in this materialistic land, is 

 giving more attention to the development of the faculty that 

 can transform the commonplace into the unusual. A chief 

 reason why the German nation has made such wonderful 

 strides in aesthetics is this : under the leadership of Schiller, 

 over a century ago, they began the " assiduous cultivation of 

 the things that give joy to the soul." 2 



A third essential of leadership is tact. What a vast amount 

 of trouble is caused in the world by failure to exercise tact. 

 Tact might be called that rare quality of mind that enables 

 one to make his way along the crowded avenue of life with 

 a minimum of jolts, jostles and elbow jabs. The pupils in 

 the third grade of a certain city school one afternoon shortly 



1 Prof. M. L. Bonham, Southern Conference for Education and In- 

 dustry, 1915. 



2 See The Atlantic Monthly, October, 1915, p. 560. 



