cises a supper to which the
other sex is admitted, it performs a yet wider social service.

124. =The Grange.=--The grange is an institution that includes both
sexes and combines the interests of young people with those of their
elders. Its primary purpose was to consolidate the common interests of
a farming community and to stimulate economic prosperity, but it has
included several social features, and in many localities exists merely
for social purposes. It is an institution that is well adapted to
become a social and educational centre for the rural community. When
the child has advanced from the home to the school and, graduating
from school, has entered into the adult life of the community, the
grange serves as a training-school for civic service. In the
grange-room, in company with his like-minded parents and friends in
the community, he learns how to hold his own in debate in
parliamentary fashion, he discusses improved agriculture and listens
to lectures from masters of the science, he gains literary and
historical knowledge, and from time to time he participates in the
social diversions that take place under grange auspices. Music
enlivens the meetings, and occasionally a feast is spread or an
entertainment elaborated. The Farmers' Union is a similar
organization, originating in the South in 1902.

Such rural interests as these have come into existence spontaneously
and continue to provide social centres of community life because other
institutions do not satisfy. The home, the school, and the church are
often spoken of as the essential institutions of the American
community, but they do not at best perform all the functions of
neighborhood life. The boys' gang, the circle of men about the stove
at the corner grocery, the women's sewing circle or club, and the
grange, each in its own way performs a necessary part of the group
activities, and deserves recognition among the institutions that are
worth while. It is scarcely necessary to note that they have their
evils, but these are not of the nature of the institution. As the gang
can be guided to worthy ends, so the energies of the store club and
the sewing circle can be turned into channels of usefulness and low
talk and scandal-mongering abolished. As for the grange, it is capable
of becoming the most valuable social centre of the community, if it
maintains the ideals of its existence and co-operates heartily with
other social institutions of worth, like the