ther some of them have gone. "The imbeciles and harlots and
criminalistic are bred in the Hollow, but they do not all stay there." A
case is cited of a family of only five which has cost the county up to
date $6,300, and the expense likely to continue for many years yet. "Would
you rouse yourself if you learned there were ten cases of bubonic plague
at a point not 200 miles away?" asks the investigator of Nam's Hollow. "Is
not a breeding spot of uncontrolled animalism as much of a menace to our
civilization?"[6]

_A Note of Warning_

These sad stories of rural degeneracy must not make us pessimists. We need
not lose our faith in the open country. It is only the exceptional
community which has really become decadent and demoralized. These
communities however warn us that even self-respecting rural villages are
in danger of following the same sad process of decay unless they are kept
on the high plane of wholesome Christian living and community efficiency.
What is to prevent thousands of other rural townships, which are now
losing population, gradually sinking to the low level of personal
shiftlessness and institutional uselessness which are the marks of
degeneracy? Nothing can prevent this but the right kind of intelligent,
consecrated leadership. It is not so largely a quantitative matter,
however, as Dr. Josiah Strong suggested twenty years ago in his stirring
treatment of the subject. After citing the fact that 932 townships in New
England were losing population in 1890, and 641 in New York, 919 in
Pennsylvania, 775 in Ohio, et cetera, he suggests: "If this migration
continues, and no new preventive measures are devised, I see no reason why
isolation, irreligion, ignorance, vice and degradation should not increase
in the country until we have a rural American peasantry, illiterate and
immoral, possessing the rights of citizenship, but utterly incapable of
performing or comprehending its duties."

After twenty years we find the rural depletion still continuing. Though
New England in 1910 reports 143 fewer losing towns than in 1890, the
census of 1910 in general furnishes little hope that the migration from
the country sections is diminishing.[7] Our hope for the country rests in
the fact that the problem has at last been recognized as a national issue
and that a Country Life Movement of immense significance is actually
bringing in a new rural civilization. "We must expect the steady
deterioration of our rural popul