244 RURAL SOCIOLOGY 



lesson, or a pageant of education, of beauty or of poetry. It may 

 re-create the past, explain the present, suggest the future. In 

 a word the pageant is what our enthusiasm, imagination and in- 

 telligent cooperation can make it ; it is, and should be, the play- 

 thing and the playtime of the masses. A small pageant, to be 

 sure, may employ only two hundred or three hundred people, 

 though a large pageant requires the cooperation of several thou- 

 sand. But even a small pageant, especially if given outdoors, 

 may each time be played to from three thousand to five thousand 

 people. 



Some of the most successful pageants here and abroad have 

 been given in the smaller places. Even fifty people may give a 

 creditable pageant. Nor is it true that only places rich in history 

 should attempt pageantry. Different conditions demand differ- 

 ent pageants ; that is all. There is the Pageant of the River, for 

 the river town which is lacking in beauty or scanty in history; 

 there is the Pageant of the Woods for the lumbering town ; there 

 is the Pageant of Grain for the farming community, the Pageant 

 of Steel for the manufacturing town, and the Pageant of the 

 Mountains for the village among the hills. Given imagination 

 and constructive skill on the part of the maker of the text, with 

 hearty cooperation by all concerned in the work, and any town 

 not far distant from railroads or with roads not too bad for 

 automobiles may have a pageant without fear of going into debt. 



It is not true, then, that only rich and large communities, or 

 those containing a few citizens able to be large guarantors, may 

 attempt a pageant. The great desideratum is time not in which 

 to prepare the actors, but in which to make ready a finished text, 

 to provide appropriate costumes and to foresee all the details 

 which provide for the comfort and artistic satisfaction of the 

 public. If possible some eight to twelve months before a pageant 

 begins, plans for it should be roughed out and committees or- 

 ganized. 



The text, which has been gone over again and again for the 

 largest dramatic effectiveness in the smallest space, the greatest 

 clearness of meaning as a whole and the largest effect of beauty, 

 should be ready in proof at least a month before rehearsals begin. 

 Thus the parts may be learned without too great a strain, and 

 changes which are first seen to be necessary in the rehearsals 



