THE SURVEY 497 



an open country church, and a creamery may frequently be 

 found together, among fifteen to thirty families, in a territory 

 of from three to five square miles. A slight tendency to consol- 

 idate adjoining school districts exists, but it is only slight. 

 There seems to be a greater tendency to enlarge the village or 

 city districts by addition of farms. 



The Actual but Unofficial Community. Eight of the twelve 

 civic centers of Walworth County are incorporated; four as 

 cities and four as villages. Officially, that is legally, the in- 

 corporated centers are treated as communities, each by and 

 for itself. The foregoing analysis of the use of the leading 

 institutions of each center by the farm population discloses 

 the fact, however, that these institutions are agencies of social 

 service over a comparatively determinable and fixed area of 

 land surrounding each center; that this social service is pre- 

 cisely the same in character as is rendered to those people 

 whether artisans, employees, or professional persons who hap- 

 pen to live within the corporate limits of the city or village; 

 moreover the plain inference is that the inhabitants of the center 

 are more vitally concerned in reality with the development 

 and upkeep of their particular farm land basis than with any 

 other equal area of land in the state. 



It is difficult, if not impossible, to avoid the conclusion that 

 the trade zone about one of these rather complete agricultural 

 civic centers forms the boundary of an actual, if not legal, 

 community, within which the apparent entanglement of human 

 life is resolved into a fairly unitary system of interrelatedness. 

 The fundamental community is a composite of many expanding 

 and contracting feature communities possessing the character- 

 istic pulsating instability of all real life. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

 SURVEYS 



Aronovici, Carol. Knowing One's Own Community. Bulletin No. 20, 

 Social Service Series, Dept. of Social and Public Service, Ameri- 

 can Unitarian Association, Boston, n. d. 



Bailey, L. H. The Survey Idea in Country Life Work. In his York 

 State Rural Problems, Vol. I, Lyon, Albany, 1913. 



Bailey, Wm. B. Modern Social Conditions. Century, N. Y., 1906. 



Boardman, John R. The Rural Social Survey, N. Y., 1914. 



