alities toward the teachers' calling.

=City and Country Salaries--Effects.=--The average salary for rural
school teachers in one state I find to be $45 a month. In that same
state the average salary of teachers in the city and town schools is $55
a month. Now, under such conditions, it is very difficult to secure a
good corps of teachers for the rural schools. If the ratio were reversed
and the rural schools paid $55 a month, while the cities and towns paid
only $45, there would be more chance of each securing teachers of equal
ability. Even then, teachers would prefer to go to the city at the lower
salary on account of the additional attractions and conveniences and the
additional facilities and opportunities of every kind for
self-improvement.

In the state referred to, the average salary of all teachers in the
common schools was $51 a month. It is utterly impossible to realize a
"profession" on such a financial basis as this. Forty-five or fifty
dollars a month for rural teachers is altogether too low. This must be
raised fifty, if not one hundred per cent, in order that a beginning may
be made in the solution of the rural school problem. Where $50 a month
seems to be the going wage, if school boards would offer $75 and then
see to it that the persons whom they hire are efficient, an attempt at
the solution of the problem in that district or neighborhood would be
made. Is it possible that any good, strong, educated, and cultured
person can be secured for less than $75 a month? If in such a district
there were eight months of school this would mean only 8 x $25, or $200
more than had been paid previously. For ten sections of land this would
mean about $20 a section, or $5 a quarter section, in addition to what
they had been paying with unsatisfactory results.

This sum often represents the difference between a poor school and a
good school. With a fifty-dollar teacher, constructive work was likely
lacking. There was little activity in the neighborhood; the pupils or
the people had not been fully waked up. There had not been enough
thinking and talking of education and of schools, enough reading, or
talking about books, about education, about things of the higher life.
Under the seventy-five-dollar teacher, wisely chosen, all this is
changed.

=The Solution Demands More.=--Instead of $75, a community should pay to
a wide-awake person, who takes hold of a situation in a neighborhood and
keeps things moving, at leas