INFLUENCE OF A SINGLE FARM COMMUNITY. 5 



What achievements do migrants make? — Do farm migrants make 

 achievements in the first generation, or must they wait for some 

 necessary city amalgam until the second generation or third? Can 

 certain farms be said to be the seed beds of achievers in national life ? 

 No one seems to know what the relation of migration is to distin- 

 guished service in the realm of art, education, invention, industry, 

 and the like. 



Not until migration is analyzed so far as to record how far and 

 under what circumstances migration from farms is related to national 

 achievement can we he said to know rural migration. 



THE PRESENT STUDY. 



An initial study of migration from farm life is presented in the 

 following pages. Attention is centered minutely upon a single 

 representative farm community, and the story of migration over a 

 series of years is unrolled so that one may plainly see it at work on 

 single farm units as well as in a single community unit. 



STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM. 



As already stated, migration is a process natural to farm life and 

 necessary to national life and very likely inevitable from either point 

 of view. Danger to farm, to farm community, and to the Nation 

 lies especially in too much migration. In our study, therefore, we 

 shall consider migration as basically normal and good, rather than 

 basically abnormal and evil. 



At the present time (1920) the loss of workers from agriculture 

 to city industry is so pronounced that one may be inclined to over- 

 look the fact that migration is a normal condition of farm life. But 

 it is hoped that in a study of the normal aspects of migration there 

 will be disclosed some of the methods of preventing the evils of 

 overmigration on the one hand and undermigration on the other. 



The problem may be stated in this way: What are the facts 

 surrounding and accompanying migration from the farms — espe- 

 cially with reference to the proportion of persons migrating; with 

 reference to the character of the persons remaining; and to the 

 conditions which render the farm community stable and prosperous 

 in spite of its contribution of strong young people to the city; and 

 with reference also to the occupations recruited from country-bred 

 people; in fact, to the whole role in national life of the local farm 

 community ? 



THE REMEDY FOR OVERMIGRATION. 



It may quite possibly be found that the evils of migration from 

 the farms result from a general lack of knowledge as to the conditions 

 under which migration is normal and wholesome. A thorough 



