Sociology," pp. 169-98.

[10] Flexner, "Prostitution in Europe," p. 72.

[11] Ellis, "Studies in the Psychology of Sex," VI, 293.

RURAL SOCIALIZING AGENCIES

X

RURAL SOCIALIZING AGENCIES

The individualism of rural thinking has been universally recognized. It
is this attitude of mind that has produced much of the strength of rural
character and much of the weakness of rural society. That the closer
contact of town and country and the rapidly developing urban mind
require more social thinking upon the part of country people few can
doubt. There are some people, however, who fear this socializing
influence of urban thought in the country, because they believe that it
will antagonize rural individualism in such a way as to destroy the
fundamental distinction between rural and urban ethics.

As a matter of fact, however, people in these days obtain their sense of
personal responsibility from their confidence in their social function,
and this confidence is not developed by an excessive individualism. The
farmer, like men in other occupations, needs to make realization of his
social service the corner stone of his moral life. This world war has
made every thinking person realize the unrivaled function that the
farmer performs socially, and it is fortunate for the future of rural
welfare that what has always been true is at last finding adequate
appreciation. It is the farmer himself who has most suffered in the
recent past from not realizing the value of his social contribution. The
widespread thoughtless indifference to his social service has, at least
in the oldest portions of the nation, given him an irritating social
skepticism and driven him into a dissatisfying industrial isolation. We
naturally antagonize what we do not share and the farmer when he has
thought himself little recognized as a social agent has had his doubts
about the justice and sanity of public opinion.

It was doubly unfortunate that this situation developed at a time when
religion was called upon to make heroic changes in order to adapt
itself to the needs of modern life. Formerly religion gave rural
thinking a larger outlook than individual experience by providing an
outstretching theological environment. Rather lately this environment
has ceased to satisfy the needs of rural people. Religion has in the
city become social in a way of which our fathers did not dream, and in
the country it must find its vigor also by introduci