has made for progress; but as seen in the adoption of unhospitable
vertical city architecture for country homes,--an insult to broad acres
which suggest home-like horizontals,--and the wearing by the women of
cheap imitations of the flaunting finery of returning "cityfied"
stenographers, it is surely an abomination pure and simple.

Bulky catalogs of mail-order houses, alluringly illustrated, have added to
the craze, and the new furnishings of many rural homes resemble the tinsel
trappings of cheap city flats, while substantial heirlooms of real taste
and dignity are relegated to the attic. Fine rural discrimination as to
the appropriate and the artistic is fast crumbling before the
all-convincing argument, "It is _the thing_ now in the city." To be sure
there is much the country may well learn from the city, the finer phases
of real culture, the cultivation of social graces in place of rustic
bashfulness and boorish manners, and the saving element of industrial
cooperation; but let these gains not be bought by surrendering rural
self-respect or compromising rural sincerity, or losing the wholesome
ruggedness of the country character. The new rural civilization must be
indigenous to the soil, not a mere urbanizing veneer. Only so can it
foster genuine community pride and loyalty to its own environment. But
herein is the heart of our problem.

_Why Country Boys and Girls Leave the Farm_

The mere summary of reasons alleged by many individuals will be sufficient
for our purpose, without enlarging upon them. Many of these were obtained
by Director L. H. Bailey of Cornell, the master student of this problem.
Countless boys have fled from the farm because they found the work
monotonous, laborious and uncongenial, the hours long, the work
unorganized and apparently unrewarding, the father or employer hard,
exacting and unfeeling. Many of them with experience only with
old-fashioned methods, are sure that farming does not pay, that there is
no money in the business compared with city employments, that the farmer
cannot control prices, is forced to buy high and sell low, is handicapped
by big mortgages, high taxes, and pressing creditors. It is both
encouraging and suggestive that many country boys, with a real love for
rural life, but feeling that farming requires a great deal of capital, are
planning "to farm someday, after making enough money in some other
business."

The phantom of farm drudgery haunts many boys. They