s constant daily stimulation from the world of business,
sports, and public affairs at times awakens his appetite for urban life
and makes him restless, or encourages his removal to the city, or makes
him demand as much as possible of the quantitative pleasures and
recreations of city life. In a greater degree, however, the paper
contents his mental need for contact with life in a more universal way
than his particular community allows. The automobile and other modern
inventions also serve the farmer, as does the newspaper, by providing
mental suggestions from an extended environment.

A very important source of suggestion, as abnormal psychology so clearly
demonstrates, at present, is the impressions of childhood. Rural life
tends on the whole to intensify the significant events of early life,
because of the limited amount of exciting experiences received as
compared with city life. Parental influence is more important because it
suffers less competition. This fact of the meaning of early suggestions
appears, without doubt, in various ways and forbids the scientist's
assuming that rural thinking is made uniform by universal and unvaried
suggestions.

The discontent of rural parents with reference to their environment or
occupation, due to their natural urban tendencies, or to their failure
to succeed, or to the hard conditions of their farm life, has some
influence in sending rural youth to the city. Accidental or incidental
suggestion often repeated is especially penetrating in childhood, and no
one who knows rural people can fail to notice parents who are prone to
such suggestions expressing rural discontent. In the same way,
suspiciousness or jealousy with reference to particular neighbors or
associates leads, when it is often expressed before children, to general
suspiciousness or trivial sensitiveness. The emotional obstacles to the
get-together spirit--obstacles which vex the rural worker--in no small
degree have their origin in suggestion given in childhood.

The country is concerned with another source of suggestion which has
more to do with the efficiency of the rural mind than its content, and
that is the matter of sex. Students of rural life apparently give this
element less attention than it deserves. As Professor Ross has pointed
out in "South of Panama," for example, the precocious development of sex
tends to enfeeble the intellect and to prevent the largest kind of
mental capacity. It is unsafe at pres