FARM PROFITS AND WELFARE 61 



regions that never heard of efforts to make the country 

 home beautiful or convenient, much less the country 

 landscape and the community buildings. There are 

 areas of child neglect and abuse, of immorality and 

 even of crime. There are neighborhoods of the weak, 

 futile, competing, even quarreling churches, where it 

 seems apparent that if God has not forsaken them, they 

 have repudiated Him. 



We may not say that these facts are isolated and 

 therefore not characteristic, for they exist far too fre- 

 quently; nor call attention to the great multitude of 

 instances where precisely opposite conditions prevail, 

 for you can't drain a swamp merely by looking at a 

 three-ton field of growing meadow. We may not say 

 that the cities are worse; it is slight gain for the " vet- 

 erinary " to try to comfort Smith for his sick horse 

 by telling him that Jones has a better horse that is 

 sicker. We may not call it a slander to tell the truth; a 

 boil can't be cured by pretending that it is merely a 

 wart. We would best admit that such things exist and 

 that they are a menace. We have often been short- 

 sighted with respect to them, because they are not all 

 true of any one region, because there are so many in- 

 stances of better things, because in some cases we are 

 ignorant of their existence, and also, sometimes because 

 we accept them as a part of the situation and not as a 

 challenge to improvement. We must not blame the 

 alert social worker from the city, where matters of this 

 sort have been the subject of close study and of inten- 

 sive effort toward relief, if when he gets his nose into 

 the country cellar he reports odors that he doesn't ap- 

 prove. 



