ficult to spur us on to
real conquests and to fit us for larger tasks.

It is the glory of country life that it is by no means enervated or
over-civilized. Enough of the rough still remains for all practical
purposes. Farm homes are comfortable usually but not luxurious. Rural life
is full of the physical zest that keeps men young and vigorous. As Dr. F.
E. Clark suggests, farming furnishes an ideal "_moral_ equivalent of war."
The annual conquest of farm difficulties makes splendid fighting. There
are plenty of natural enemies which must be fought to keep a man's
fighting edge keen and to keep him physically and mentally alert. What
with the weeds and the weather, the cut-worms, the gypsy, and the codling
moths, the lice, the maggots, the caterpillars, the San Jose scale and the
scurvy, the borers, the blight and the gorger, the peach yellows and the
deadly curculio, the man behind the bug gun and the sprayer finds plenty
of exercise for ingenuity and a royal chance to fight the good fight.
Effeminacy is not a rural trait. Country life is great for making men; men
of robust health and mental resources well tested by difficulty, men of
the open-air life and the skyward outlook. Country dwellers may well be
thankful for the challenge of the difficult. It tends to keep rural life
strong.

Our rural optimism however does not rest solely upon the attractiveness of
country life and the various assets which country life possesses. We find
new courage in the fact that these assets have at last been capitalized
and a great modern movement is promoting the enterprise.

III. The Country Life Movement.

_Its Real Significance_

The modern country life movement in America has little in common with the
"back to the soil" agitation in recent years. This latter is mainly the
cry of real estate speculators plus newspaper echoes. The recent years of
high prices and exorbitant cost of city living have popularized this
slogan, the assumption being that if there were only more farmers, then
food prices would be lower. This assumes that the art of farming is easily
acquired and that the untrained city man could go back to the soil and
succeed. What we really need is better farmers rather than more farmers;
and the untrained city man who buys a farm is rather apt to make a failure
of it,--furnishing free amusement meanwhile for the natives,--for the work
of farming is highly technical, and requires probably more technical
knowledge th