s the need of food or of sleep.

This recreational life is highly ethical. The craving of the young and
of working-people for common places of recreation is a normal craving
due to the development of conscience as well as to weariness of body.
The exactions of modern labor create a craving for free and voluntary
movement. Those who are hired to work, and those who if they are
employers are bound to the routine of the desk or of the bench, seek to
breathe deeply the air of happy and self-expressive action. The result
is that play, especially team work, is highly moral. It is not only
personal and self-expressive, but it involves co-operation,
self-surrender, obedience and the correlation of one's own life with
other lives in a glorious complex of experiences, unexampled elsewhere
in modern life for their ethical value in developing adolescent minds in
the common humanities and moralities. The playground is an essential
field in the preparation of good citizens and it is not to be wondered
at that in country communities, where all provision of recreation is
difficult, and no public provision of playgrounds is thought of by those
in authority, that young people and working people, indeed all classes
of the population, tend to move away.

The religious attraction of the community has just as real a value for
the satisfaction of individual life as the economic or ethical or the
educational. "Mankind is incurably religious," and the life from birth
to death cannot be complete in average cases without religious
experience. Indeed the conscious testimony of men to the community's
religious value for them is greater than any of the others. Religious
experience is indeed a form of community conscience. To many men the
church and the community are one. We cannot within our definition grant
this; but the testimony to the religious character of the country
community is a classic in American thought. The early days of every
community are hopeful and optimistic. The tendency has been therefore
for each religious communion to establish its own church. These early
Protestant churches were expressions of the community sense on behalf of
these people. The average American can best think of the community in
terms of a church and a school. For building up the community,
therefore, the maintenance of religious institutions is essential.

We are concerned in these chapters most of all with the American
community in the country. Not because