feel that the work is
too hard in old age, and that it cannot even be relieved sufficiently by
machinery, that it is not intellectual enough and furthermore leaves a man
too tired at night to enjoy reading or social opportunities. The work of
farming seems to them quite unscientific and too dependent upon luck and
chance and the fickle whims of the weather.

Farm life is shunned by many boys and girls because they say it is too
narrow and confining, lacking in freedom, social advantages, activities
and pleasures, which the city offers in infinite variety. They see their
mother overworked and growing old before her time, getting along with few
comforts or conveniences, a patient, uncomplaining drudge, living in
social isolation, except for uncultivated neighbors who gossip
incessantly.

Many ambitious young people see little future on the farm. They feel that
the farmer never can be famous in the outside world and that people have a
low regard for him. In their village high school they have caught visions
of high ideals; but they fail to discover high ideals in farm life and
feel that high and noble achievement is impossible there, that the farmer
cannot serve humanity in any large way and can attain little political
influence or personal power.

With an adolescent craving for excitement, "something doing all the time,"
they are famished in the quiet open country and are irresistibly drawn to
the high-geared city life, bizarre, spectacular, noisy, full of variety in
sights, sounds, experiences, pleasures, comradeships, like a living
vaudeville; and offering freedom from restraint in a life of easy
incognito, with more time for recreation and "doing as you please." But
with all the attractiveness of city life for the boys and girls, as
compared with the simplicity of the rural home, the main pull cityward is
probably "the job." They follow what they think is the easiest road to
making a living, fancying that great prizes await them in the business
life of the town.

Superficial and unreasonable as most of these alleged reasons are to-day,
we must study them as genuine symptoms of a serious problem. If country
life is to develop a permanently satisfying opportunity for the farm boys
and girls, these conditions must be met. Isolation and drudgery must be
somehow conquered. The business of farming must be made more profitable,
until clerking in the city cannot stand the competition. The social and
recreative side of rura