RURAL RECREATION 227 



busy improving his farm to take thought of social conditions 

 or to notice the change. In his haste to be rich, he has forgotten 

 to live. He has not learned to love nature or his work. He 

 and his wife are working too long hours themselves, and working 

 their sons and daughters too long. Following a plow or a drag 

 over a cultivated field is not as interesting as felling the trees 

 in the forest and burning the clearing. Much farm machinery 

 has been introduced and the work and hardships have become 

 less. Perhaps the farm is not less interesting to the adult far- 

 mer who is trained to handle machinery and to understand the 

 problems with which he has to deal, but country life is vastly 

 less interesting to children and young people, because its danger 

 and romance are gone. The nature appeal of great forests, 

 and wild animals and a wild life is gone. The adventure and 

 romance and exploration are gone. The opportunities of taking 

 up new land and becoming a proprietor have largely gone. The 

 cooperation and sociability of the pioneer have been replaced 

 by the independence that has come with safety and labor-saving 

 devices. The rural school is no more a social center. The re- 

 sults of these conditions are upon us. Forty-three per cent, of 

 American farms are now held by tenants. It is very difficult 

 if not impossible to get either a hired girl or a hired man in 

 most sections. The more capable members of the population are 

 drifting toward the city, and there is a vague but general unrest 

 and dissatisfaction among the younger generation, which is the 

 outward expression of this hunger for a larger life. 



The country must take seriously this problem of readjust- 

 ment. It must provide some substitute for the adventtfre and 

 romance and sociability that have disappeared. It must break 

 the isolation and spirit of self-sufficiency of the* modern farm 

 that has replaced the interdependence and sociability of the 

 pioneer. It must restore to the country school at least as much 

 of social value as it had in the old days of spelling matches 

 and debates. It must appropriate for itself the message of the 

 modern gospel of play. This should not come to the country as 

 something wholly new, but rather as a restoration and a read- 

 justment. It is essentially an effort to give back to life those 

 fundamental social values of which changing conditions have 

 deprived it. 



