country and those living in villages up
to twenty-five hundred inhabitants in size.

In the agricultural group the unit is the farmstead. By that term is
meant the whole complex organization of the farm, including the land and
its products, the stock, the barns and the sheds, the whole family
together with whatever houses it, the corps of workers, farmer, farmer's
wife, sons, daughters, maiden aunts, working people unhired and
hired--in fact, everything "animal, vegetable or mineral," as the
children say when they play "Forty Questions," that ministers in any way
to the success of the farm as a business and to its ultimate object, the
happiness of the family living thereon. So when we say "farmstead" we
mean not only fodder for beasts but also food for the human beings; but
inasmuch as the human being is soul-endowed and has imperative appetites
in the aesthetic and spiritual realm as well as in the physical, the
farmstead covers the matter of the piano as well as of the hoe. A
wealthy farmstead is indeed one that has cattle upon many hills, or that
sends many carloads of milk to the city; but it can scarcely be called a
wholly prosperous farmstead unless it has an unrestricted view of the
scenery from its living-room windows, a public reading room within reach
of its buggy's wheels--that means, say, within twelve or fifteen miles
at most--or of its automobile--which may mean within forty or one
hundred miles according to the roads and the car; and, we may add,
unless it takes advantage of this and other cultural privileges.

It may be said that the ultimate end of the whole farm business is the
happiness of the family; yet the minds of many do not travel to the
ultimate--they pause at some one of the possible stopping places along
the way and fashion that subsidiary idea into the fiction of an ultimate
end. For instance, one may make the fattening of stock or the purchase
of a certain additional strip of land into an ultimate end, and work for
that, sacrificing much that is of immediate happiness value, or perhaps
even of supreme happiness value, to gain that minor object. Meantime the
real end, the one that if we should penetrate to the heart of our
ideals, we should find seated in the most sacred place: namely, the
welfare and happiness of the family group for which we live and labor,
has been neglected, and nearer, more direct means to attain it have been
overlooked.

This, then, is the heart of the matter. The fa