nities in Pennsylvania, Indiana and Illinois,
no single meeting that brings all the people together. The small town
has its fireman's parade, to the small city comes once a year the circus
and to the great city comes an anniversary or an exposition. Every year
there is some common experience which welds the population, increases
acquaintance and intensifies social unity. The tillage of the soil in
those farming communities from which the blacksmith, the storekeeper,
the peddler and the shoemaker have departed, is very lonely.

The telephone is the new system of nerves for the rural organism, but
the telephone is a cold, steel wire instead of the warm and cordial
personal meetings with which the countryside was once enlivened. In
eighty country towns in Pennsylvania, of which fifty are purely
agricultural, we found in our survey only three that had a common
leadership and a common assembling. The life of the people in these
communities is so solitary as to be almost repellent. Their social
habits are those of aggressive loneliness. This isolation in the
pioneer days made the country people cordial to the visitor: but in the
coming of the new economy the farmer shrinks from strangers, because he
has become accustomed to social divisions and classifications in which
he feels himself inferior; so that the loneliness of country life has
become not merely geographical, but sociological. The farmer is shut in
not merely by distances in miles, but by distances of social aversion
and suspicion. Difference has become a more hostile influence in the
country than distance.

Organized industry necessitates organized recreation. The subjection of
mind and body to machine labor requires a reaction in the form of play.
All factory and industrial populations, without exception, provide
themselves with play-grounds of some sort. In the city where no public
provision is made the streets are used by the boys for their games, even
at the risk of injury or death from the passing traffic. Jane Addams has
shown, in a fine literary appeal in her "The Spirit of Youth and the
City Streets," the necessity of some provision for the recreations of
the young and of working people in a great city.

This necessity is not primarily due to congestion of the population. Its
real sources are in the system and organization by which modern work is
done. This necessity is as characteristic of the rural community as it
is of the city, for on the farms as wel