through
the country store. The country store of 1770 in Duchess County, New
York, had an amazing relation to a wide population. The radius of the
life dependent upon it was the same as the radius around the Quaker
Meeting, beside which this store was placed, and all the goods used in
the community with few exceptions were produced and manufactured in this
radius of the team haul of ten miles.[25]

Nowadays the country community has normally a store, a blacksmith shop,
a church and a school. In the recent past certain classes of peddlers
regularly visited the country community, though their place in the rural
economy is diminishing. The country store in many communities is already
closed and its maintenance is surrounded with increasing difficulty. So
long, however, as the horse drawn vehicle is the type of transportation
in the country, the elements of the country community must remain
substantially the same.[26]

The economic life of the community is necessarily a part of the general
economic life of the population as a whole. The world economy has in the
past hundred years, with the perfection of the means of transportation,
taken the place of the communal economy. In 1810 every country community
was obliged to manufacture its own raw products so far as possible
within its own limits. In 1910 it was no longer profitable for even a
country community to do so. The result is that the economic life of the
community is usually expressed in a specified industry to which the
whole community is primarily devoted. If it be a rural community this
organization takes the form of a "money crop." In the corn belt there
are other products raised from the soil besides corn, but the world
economy assigns to that fertile section the producing of corn as the
most profitable and the simplest task. In the coal region it tends to
the highest efficiency for the labor of the region to be concentrated
upon the supply of this fuel, although in addition the surface of the
soil may be cultivated and in the larger population centers other
industries are coming in to exploit the superfluous labor. None of these
competes with the primacy of the coal industry, which the world economy
assigns to that community.

It is essential that in every community there should be one or more
industries by which men may live. It tends to the highest well-being of
the community, that is, to its possession of a maximum of vital
attraction for individuals, that t