THE COMMUNITY IDEA 163 



the entertainment course, adapted to all the people of 

 the community; community sport or play days for old 

 and young; inter-community contests of various sorts, 

 athletic and intellectual; how much richer life will be 

 wherever a community decides to have such a program 

 of recreation. 



The Community Beautiful. Nature has done her 

 part for the country. Unfortunately man has often 

 done his part to spoil it all. Straight highways, square 

 corners, the absence of shade trees, unsightly weeds, un- 

 kempt door yards, box-like houses are altogether too 

 common in our American country life. It is possible 

 without great expense to develop a set of beautiful com- 

 munities in the country side. We need a rural archi- 

 tecture, simple but charming. We may locate farm 

 buildings so as to render the plant both convenient and 

 attractive. The use of fruit trees as well as of shade 

 trees in the highways; the development of parklets or 

 squares in the country villages after the fashion of the 

 old New England village common; the proper location, 

 architecture and landscape surroundings of such build- 

 ings as the school, the church, the Grange hall, the town 

 hall, the library and the community house are possibili- 

 ties within the reach of multitudes of farmers, once 

 public opinion of the community insists upon it. If 

 these things cost a great deal of money, perhaps they 

 might not be so strongly urged, but it is largely a mat- 

 ter of community enterprise and education and in- 

 sistence. There are plenty of farmers and farmers' 

 wives who want these things, but they have to treat 

 them as individual matters. They must now set the 

 community to work to get them. 



The Socializing of Rural Morality. What is meant 

 by this? Simply that we can no longer consider the 



