.

The rural problem is the problem of maintaining in our farm and village
communities a Christian civilization with modern American ideals of
happiness, efficiency and progress.

It is a problem of industrial efficiency, of economic progress, of social
cooperation and recreation, of home comfort, of educational equipment for
rural life, of personal happiness, of religious vitality and of
institutional development for community service. Though the problem would
exist independently of the city, its acuteness is due to city competition.

The fact that city leadership is still largely drawn from the country
makes the rural problem of vital importance to the welfare of the city and
in a real sense a national issue.

_A Classification of Communities_

The terms rural and urban, country and city, town, village and township
are so variously used they cause much ambiguity. The last is primarily
geographical rather than social. The word town means township in New
England and nothing in particular anywhere else. The others are relative
terms used differently by different people. For years the line between
rural and urban was arbitrarily set at the 8,000 mark, but the thirteenth
census has placed it at 2,500. It seems petty however to dub a village of
2,501 people a city! This is convenient but very inaccurate. There are 38
"towns" in Massachusetts alone having over 8,000 people which refuse to be
called cities.

Cities of the first class have a population of 100,000 upwards; cities of
the second class number from 25,000 to 100,000 people; and communities
from 8,000 to 25,000 may well be styled small cities. The term village is
naturally applied to a community of 2,500 or less. When located in the
country it is a country village; when near a city it is a suburban village
and essentially urban. When no community center is visible, the term "open
country" best fits the case.

The disputed territory between 2,500 and 8,000 will be urban or rural,
according to circumstances. A community of this size in the urban tract is
by no means rural. But if away from the domination of city life it is
purely country. The best term the writer has been able to find for this
comfortable and prosperous type of American communities,--there are over
4,500 of them, between the village of 2,500 and the city of 8,000
people,--is the good old New England term _town_; which may be either
rural or urban according to its distance from the nearest cit