ent to
Mifflin Center school and attended Wesley Chapel church. The
schoolhouse and the church were located at the same crossroads, and
these two institutions drew for their constituency from an area of
about four square miles for the school and a somewhat larger area for
the church. Brownstown school, to the south, Hendrickson's to the
east, and Whetstone to the west made up other school communities.
Pleasant Grove church, Salem, and Brownstown, with a different
territory covered by each, made up church areas that did not coincide
with the school areas bounding Mifflin Center school territory. In
like manner, when trading was to be done, Upper Sandusky and Kirby,
five and six miles away, were the centers to which everybody went,
generally on Saturday afternoon, when friends from other sections of
the county might be found on the streets. The boundaries of the trade
center were thus much larger than those of either the school or the
church. In politics, the center of interest of the particular township
with which the writer was concerned was the old schoolhouse turned
into a township house at Mifflin Center, the location of the church
and school. The local political interests of the other communities
mentioned were at the appointed places in the respective townships.
The seat of justice was for some time in the parlor of the writer's
father's residence, or in the front yard, to which court was
occasionally adjourned when weather conditions permitted. In a larger
way county courts were held at the county seat, as were other of the
larger political activities.

One could go on indefinitely illustrating the boundaries of interests
of various kinds. Some of them centered in the State House; others in
the national Capitol; and many a wordy political battle was fought in
the little country section over the question as to whether the
protective tariff or the Democratic party was responsible for the hard
times the farmers and others were suffering. There were even world
interests involved, as during the Spanish-American War or the
Venezuelan difficulty during Cleveland's administration.

This concrete illustration both raises the question, Which of these is
the "community?" and also points the way to the answer. None of the
groupings mentioned can be considered "_the_ community." Yet each is
"_a_ community." A "community" is a psychical and not a physical
thing. It can only approximately be bounded by physical lines. In the