an any other profession except the practice of medicine.

There are few abandoned farms to-day within easy distance of the cities.
For several years it has been quite the fad for city men of means to buy a
farm, and when a competent farm manager is placed in charge the experiment
is usually a safe one. Often it proves a costly experiment and seldom does
the city-bred owner really become a valuable citizen among his rural
neighbors. He remains socially a visitor, rather than a real factor in
country life. Conspicuous exceptions could of course be cited, but
unfortunately this seems to be the rule.

The kindly purpose of well-meaning philanthropists to transplant among
the farmers the dwellers in the city slums is resented by both! It would
be a questionable kindness anyway, for the slum dweller would be an
unhappy misfit in the country and escape to his crowded alley on the
earliest opportunity, like a drunkard to his cups. Sometimes a
hard-working city clerk or tradesman hears the call to the country and
succeeds in wresting his living from the soil. The city man need not fail
as a farmer. It depends upon his capacity to learn and his power of
adaptation to a strange environment. The "back to the soil" movement is
not to be discouraged; but let us not expect great things from it. The
real "Country Life Movement" is something quite different.

[Illustration: Rural Redirection by the County Committee of the Lake
County, Ohio, Associations.

One hundred and forty farmers in "five day school," the Ohio Agricultural
College cooperating. A girls' exhibit in cut flower contest. A May pole
dance at a township school picnic. One of the boys participating in corn
growing contest. The winner of the strawberry growing contest.]

_Its Objective: A Campaign for Rural Progress_

The back-to-the-soil trend is a city movement. The real country life
movement is a campaign for rural progress conducted mainly by rural
people, not a paternalistic plan on the part of city folks for rural
redemption. It is defined by one of the great rural leaders as the working
out of the desire to make rural civilization as effective and satisfying
as other civilization; to make country life as satisfying as city life and
country forces as effective as city forces. Incidentally he remarks, "We
call it a new movement. In reality it is new only to those who have
recently discovered it."

_Its Early History: Various Plans for Rural Welfare_

The