e strong agricultural
colleges, that there should be the keenest interest in the welfare and
needs of country life; but is it not time that other institutions faced
more frankly the responsibility of training more of their students for
country life leadership? Certainly, with the splendid signs of promise in
country life to-day and the opportunities for a life mission there, no
thoughtful man can refuse to consider it.

_The Stake of the City in Rural Welfare_

It was quite natural that the rapidly growing city should attract a large
proportion of college men preparing for business and professional life and
various kinds of religious and social service. Not only have larger
opportunities for earning money usually been found there, but the city has
certainly needed the men. The call of the city in its dire need of
Christian idealism and consecrated leadership has been as urgent and
definite a call to service as ever a crusader heard. Dr. Strong's eloquent
appeal to earnest young people in his "Challenge of the City" is by no
means extravagant. His facts are facts and his logic is convincing. He is
quite right in saying, "We must save the city in order to save the nation.
We must Christianize the city or see our civilization paganized." But even
if "in a generation the city will dominate the nation," _where are the men
who will then dominate the city? Most of them are now in the country towns
and villages getting ready for their task_, developing physical, mental
and moral power in the pure atmosphere and sunlight of a normal life. To
work on the city problem is a great life chance; but _to train rural
leadership is to help solve the city problem at its source_.

Thus, the bigger and more urgent the city problem becomes, the more
necessary it will be to solve the rural problem, for the city must
continue to draw much of its best blood and its best leadership from the
country. Professor M. T. Scudder explains in a sentence why this is a
continuing fact: "The fully developed rural mind, the product of its
environment, is more original, more versatile, more accurate, more
philosophical, more practical, more persevering than the urban mind; it is
a larger, freer mind and dominates tremendously. It is because of this
type of farm-bred mind that our leaders have largely come from rural
life."[38] City leaders, of course, ought to be _trained in the city_, and
they usually are, even though born and bred in the country.

_