FIFTY MILLION STRONG 



plants or other institutions that reach beyond the immediate 

 territory surrounding them. But the rule is that the activities 

 of the villages and towns of the country have to do with their 

 own people and the residents of adjacent territory. 



Now, while the great obstacle to the development of the 

 spirit of cooperation on the farm is individualism, the obstacle 

 that prevents a higher cooperation in the village and town 

 is absence of community spirit. If one makes a study of 

 villages and towns he finds in many of them only flickering 

 sparks of the spirit essential to progress. The result is, hun- 

 dreds of the villages and towns of the nation today are 

 decadent. Of course, when one takes into consideration the 

 several facts good roads, better facilities for getting from 

 place to place, loss of many little local industrial enterprises 

 due to improved methods of manufacture, organized compe- 

 tition of urban centers and growing cooperative activities for 

 buying and selling among the farmers themselves he realizes 

 that the villages and towns have had a hard fight. 



Good roads stimulate travel and make possible trips of greater 

 length. When mud roads were the rule, most of the year the 

 farmer was obliged to trade at the nearest village. Travel is 

 further stimulated by traction lines and automobiles. These 

 place even the remote farmer and his family in close touch with 

 the county-seat or the larger city. Centralized manufactur- 

 ing plants have robbed villages and towns of their little 

 industries, and, in the city, business combinations have been 

 the rule, with the result that there are today many depart- 

 ment stores and other commercial establishments whose 

 customers instead of being limited to local residents are not 

 even limited by state boundaries. And, because of the large 

 patronage enjoyed, goods can be sold cheaply, and thus 

 village and town competition is next to impossible. This sort 

 of development is greatly aided by the parcel post, which 

 makes possible the sending of almost all kinds of parcels and 

 packages considerable distances at small expense. Finally, 

 the tendency on the part of the farming population to organize 

 for the purpose not only of buying cheaply but of selling to 



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