590 RURAL SOCIOLOGY 





the country. How long this will continue, with the growth 

 of cities accelerating, no one can say with assurance; but in 

 the nature of things there are some reasons for believing that 

 the more natural environment of the open country and the vil- 

 lage will long -continue to furnish the city with much of its best 

 leadership material. Certainly so, if what Professor Giddings 

 says is true : ' ' Genius is rarely born in the city. The city owes 

 the great discoveries and immortal creations to those who have 

 lived with nature and with simple folk. The country produces 

 the original ideas and forms the social mind." Professor M. T. 

 Scudder even ventures to offer a definite explanation for the 

 great influence of rural leaders in the city: "The fully de- 

 veloped rural mind, the product of its environment, is more 

 original, more versatile, more accurate, more philosophical, more 

 practical, more persevering, than the urban mind. It is a larger, 

 freer mind and dominates tremendously. It is because of this 

 t} r pe of farm-bred mind that our leaders have largely come from 

 rural life." 



If all this is true even making large allowance for over- 

 emphasis why should we worry over leadership in rural life? 

 Have all rural leaders gone to the city? If leadership thrives 

 under the open sky, why not let it alone there ? Will not rural 

 life develop its own leaders anyway? This was the claim of a 

 keen and successful woman farmer, who told me that she was 

 very weary of rural uplifters and country-life specialists who 

 live in New York City. "If city folks would only let us alone, 

 there would be no rural problem," she testily remarked! Yet 

 the fact remains, as we are all aware, that country life is seri- 

 ously deficient in two social elements: cooperation and leader- 

 ship; and these two, though not identical, are inseparable, for 

 it takes the latter to develop the former. 



Rural Individualism. It is certainly true that an unsocial 

 streak of failure in cooperation runs through all phases of 

 country life and weakens all sorts of rural institutions. Dr. 

 Butterfield rightly calls the American farmer a "rampant in- 

 dividualist." He is apt to reveal the fact in all relations of 

 life. With all the gains made by the modern centralized school, 

 rural education is still dispensed generally on the old school- 

 district plan, with niggardly supervisors of no educational vision 



