There is to come a richer, deeper and more general appreciation of the country and of country things. The country is not alone healthful, to unspoiled men and women it is every way enticing. If any think it dull they lack culture. Young people will stand any amount of drudgery if mind work and culture accompany it. The farming familiar to so many youths doesn't answer any aspiration.

Happily, farm life is undergoing reform. Farmers and their families are learning elegance in and about the home. More and more they insist upon spacious houses, decorated interiors, pictures, tasteful lawns, lavish flower gardens, rare trees. The tillage of fields, the whole management of farms, is becoming an intensely scientific process. Farming will soon be so carried on that the mental faculties and art sense of farmer boys and girls will be appealed to by it more than would be done by almost any kind of city work.

Reaction in favor of the country is not yet marked so far as concerns schools and

schooling. The best teachers, the finest apparatus, the stateliest schoolhouses, the amplest appliances for schooling, in nearly all particulars, are still found in the cities. Only of late are we able to mark change. Country schools ought not to be inferior. They should be the best. This not alone for the farm folk's sake, but for the country's. The weal of rural communities is no affair of these communities alone, but concerns the entire republic.

Hearing me place the stress I do upon the education and upbuilding of the rural classes, some might accuse me of talking politics and bidding for the farmer vote. My thought is much more serious, and it is based on the most fundamental and rockribbed economic reasoning. The high welfare of men in the long future is bound up with agriculture. As agriculture shall fare in time to come so human civilization itself must fare, the interests being one and inseparable.

The other generic supports of men's industry-mining, the forests, and manufac

turing-are fast nearing their term, which means that fruitful toil by human beings is to be inevitably thrown back more on the land, its sole adequate and final resource. But the land itself will fail save as the tilth of it is placed in intelligent hands. The demand for a better educated rural populace is but the undertone of men's call for a larger and better life.

It is clear that nothing else can more momentously conduce to this grand end than perfecting the country school. It is an indispensable requirement. Let all country schools be rendered just as fine, just as complete, just as efficient as resources permit. There is no reason why country schools should not be the best in existence. Their possibilities are as great as their importance. In many respects all the natural advantages lie with them. As we are not sufficiently awake to the value of the country school, so we do not begin to appreciate. the future that can be created for it.

In the classification of pupils one might at first imagine that town schools must be

the more fortunate. They are usually large, giving the fullest opportunity to sift. But the matter is not so simple. Numbers afford chance for fine grading, but they also impose the necessity of large roomfuls, which make aught like perfect teaching an impossibility. A great many country schools will remain small, with not over 25 pupils in a room, enabling the skilled teacher to apply the personal method, as can rarely be done in cities. What a benediction is freedom to deal with pupils one by one, or in very small classes, that individual peculiarities may be noticed, to be cultivated or to be repressed!

No one will question that in pupil material country schools are greatly the better off. As a rule country pupils have the firmer constitutions, endurance and health. Generally speaking their intelligence is higher and their thirst for learning greater. Their sensibility is the more open and free. City children have fewer plays involving imagination. The average morality of country children is far and away superior

and they have an impatience to learn which is not to be paralleled save by the rarest boys and girls in cities. The whole morale of schools in the country may easily be made loftier than is common in city schools. How helpful in this direction is the freedom country children have to play! It would also seem easier to secure from them regular attendance. Less occurs to distract their attention from study.

Country schools are animated by a charming spirit of democracy not found in cities, preventing cliques and the partitioning of school society into higher and lower. The stanchest type of Americans is that country and village population, whether Saxon, Celtic, Latin or Slavic in origin, so little subjected to the undesirable influences of our newest immigration. Only, in far too many localities, this sturdy American stock is failing to make the progress it should. Our social resources need a development at once more intensive and more intelligent, to supplement the spontaneous efforts upward,