on which the meaning and direction of life in the community will have increasing religious significance and may normally be expressed through a form of religious experience.

THE RURAL WORK OF THE YOUNG MEN'S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION D. C. Drew, National Secretary of County Work, Young Men's Christian Association, New York

In order to gain an accurate impression of the Young Men's Christian Association as it operates in rural areas, one must first eliminate from his thinking the city institutions with dormitories, gymnasium, baths, and other equipment for the service of young men and think rather of the origin of this movement. Young Williams, its founder, and a group of his fellow-workers from his store met in a room loaned for this purpose with the distinct aim of lifting the ideals of those working in the establishment under the inspiration of the religious motive. It was the methods of its founder rather than the institutional development of later years that gave hope to the leaders of the Association movement that there might be an opportunity through the process of volunteer leadership using meager equipment to constructively influence groups of boys and men in rural areas.

The natural and primary social groups of men, young men, and boys, therefore, have formed the social environment for the development of the rural Association program in its recreational and service aspects. The constant changes and uncertainties of these primary groups in rural localities have necessitated constant expert leadership called supervision.

The county, through a process of experimentation, has been found to be the best unit of administration. A county committee is organized and a county secretary expert in matters of group organization and religious leadership selected. The rural movement of the Association is thus called County Work, which has been defined as the method "by which the program of the Young Men's Christian Association is adapted to the needs of towns and country communities: using the county as the unit of supervision, with an employed secretary working through local leadership in each community and placing emphasis upon personality rather than upon equipment." Although in its present development the County Work plan has included various community-wide and county-wide aspects which we will later consider, let us first give our thought to the methods in rural communities. An illustration will indicate the process.

A crowd of young fellows in a New Hampshire village, some at work and some at school, but all members of the same gang, organized a social and recreational club, Their equipment consisted of a fourth-rate pool table, a few chairs, two tables, and decks of cards. They were not bad fellows nor hoodlums. Soon the parents of the boys were concerned with some of the things that went on. The county secretary, at the invitation of a local business man, looked into the situation. A board of directors comprising fifteen men from the various churches was organized, talked the matter over with some of the leading young men, provided a suitable meeting place where a recreative and social program could be provided. The young fellows organized themselves into a Community Club. They appealed to an outstanding young man to be their leader. They accepted the Y.M.C.A. program. Their first efforts were crude but with

right motive. It was the same old gang but with a different objective, supported now by the leading business men. Individuals within this group accepted the higher standards of personal conduct and gradually the whole group was socially converted.

What are the principles upon which this group enterprise is conducted? First, the Association utilizes a natural group, not a select body but a street corner gang, farmers, a high-school crowd, ranchmen, or any other industrial group which logically belongs together. Admitting the theory that groups have a cycle of life, a genesis, a period of growth, expanding life, decline, and death, adaptations are made to meet the change which each year or season imposes.

The second principle is group leadership. There is some person in every locality who is the one man whom a group of young men and boys most admire and most desire to be their counselor or leader. Such a one must be enlisted to assume responsibility of meeting with this group at least once a week.

The third principle is self-government. Under the limitations of working in harmony with the ideals of the Association these groups are self-governing, electing their officers, appointing committees and controlling affairs according to their best judgment: an experience in democracy within the community process.

The fourth principle is a program developed and accepted by the group. As an outgrowth of the Association ideal of the rational development of one's recreational, religious, educational, and service life, a program termed by Association leaders as "Four-Fold" becomes in many cases the concrete expression of the group's life and experience. It has been discovered that this ideal of personal development becomes a natural ambition of a normal young man and boy. This does not imply an equal development of the different phases of personality nor a standardized program of personal growth.

The fifth principle is the co-operation of interested business and professional men which gives stability to this community enterprise.

Sixth, the group becomes a force to be utilized by community and county welfare rather than a club merely for self-improvement and self-satisfaction.

The organization of vital interest groups along the ideals of the Association has been thus a basic method in the approach of the Y.M.C.A. to rural areas. Reports from 1,923 such groups were made to our national yearbook committee.

The religious energies of young men cannot be pent up. They must find expression within the area of their immediate influence. Group action for only those social units which render a real service to society, therefore, is the next logical step. How this works is illustrated by a group of high-school students under the name of Hi-Y Club up in Maine. Some of its members had been at the State Boys' Conference, and were determined to eliminate smoking both from the high and grammar schools where it was known that many had contracted the habit. Entirely of their own initiative, the Hi-Y Club posted notices in the school buildings that all boys caught smoking would be ducked in the town watering tub. Up to the time of this notice, the fellows went into the horse sheds behind the church, and the church officials were considering whether or not they should put doors on each shed to prevent the boys from entering. The Hi-Y Club informed the church officials that they had taken action on the matter and it would not be necessary to go to that expense. This method of group action may not be approved but it is evident that this determination to stop a known physical peril among boys was the result of group ideals and individual conviction.

Under the stimulation of the county secretary these local groups and the local committees which give them backing and guidance put on for the community a large variety of tremendously valuable community-wide events, the most notable of which is the annual Father and Son Banquet. On this occasion all the boys and men of a locality are brought together to face up to their mutual responsibilities and opportunities of fellowship. The relationship between the farm boy and the farmer is frankly faced with the result that a new comradeship between the dads and lads have developed and have given a new incentive for sticking by the home farm.

High-school groups often invite students from a neighboring college and entertain them in their homes for a three-day period. The students have personal interviews with the boys, set them right upon life's ideals, and show them how the keenest athlete takes his religion into every contest. The "Keep Fit" campaign has been brought to a locality as a result of the desire of the groups to bring the message of clean thinking and clean living to all the boys of the locality. Sunday afternoon forums, community Christmas celebrations, have been put on by the boys and their adult advisors. In fact every group actuated by the religious principle must be dynamic. As soon as it thinks only of its own good times, it is dead. Unwholesome conditions in the community have been removed by the action of the young men themselves without waiting for public officials. Gambling machines have been thrown out and disorderly houses closed up by young men who have resolved to make their community clean.

Little has been said thus far of the county secretary. It is he after all who discovered these natural groups, found their leaders, set them going with a program, and has brought about these notable results. This he does through the local forces. He does not seek to build a kingdom of his own but to stimulate the self-expression of the men and boys of each locality. His is a sacrificial life. One who understands rural life will quickly appreciate the self-sacrifices and Christ-like spirit involved in discovering and developing leaders in those areas from which leadership has been constantly going for many years.

Besides the stimulation of local groups in their service program for the locality, the county secretary undertakes through the county committee a service of co-operation. In many cases he is the only paid social worker in the county. One of the most fruitful opportunities is with the rural school. Inasmuch as many secretaries have been thoroughly trained in recreation, the school superintendent is glad to have him make the rounds of the rural schools in the county, taking charge of the children, teaching them schoolyard games, or demonstrating indoor recess games. The way is open in teachers' institutes to train and inspire in rural recreation. Play picnics of school children and their parents, sometimes reaching the entire county, have been developed. The county athletic meets on a simplified, informal basis are most successful.

Co-operation with the rural church has also been a productive field of helpfulness. The formation of a county ministers' association, if none exists, assisting in church picnics and socials, helping in Sunday school and in young people's societies by calling conferences, providing speakers, all offer such opportunities.

Co-operation with the Farm Bureau is usually welcome in boys' and girls' contests. In some cases the groups organized for Y.M.C.A. work undertake some definite agricultural project under the supervision of the farm agent. Agricultural exhibits have been held in certain places where the Farm Bureau was not equipped to handle such an

event.

Besides these services rendered to other agencies, there are certain county-wide responsibilities of the county Association. The County Young Men's Conference held annually is an outstanding religious event. It brings young men in their teens and above to face the great decisions of life. Delegates are urged to take some forward step. They are challenged with advance in their character and achievement. Cases could be enumerated where they have gone back to their locality and through the group to which they belong or through the Sunday school of which they are a member, made their impress upon the lives of other fellows. Such conferences last year were attended by 9,060.

The impressions gained at such a gathering are thus focused into action through local organization. The county camp exerts a similar influence where boys for a week or more in each locality are brought with the leaders of the county and the county secretary in recreation of body and refreshment of spirit and are sent back to their localities with a new determination of service.

Back of each individual county there are the state and international committees ready to assist in organization and guidance. Two schools of rural leadership have been established, one at Chicago and the other at Springfield, Massachusetts, both offering four-year courses preparing young men for the county secretaryship and other forms of religious service. In addition to this there are six summer schools giving courses of two weeks to which the secretaries come each year as a continuation school in which methods and inspiration are brought by competent leaders. They have done much in upholding the morale of this important group of pioneers.

This, then, in summary is the process; a group is organized about the ideals of selfexpression, self-control, and a normal personal development. The natural outgo of this group is service to the community, participation in the larger events, county-wide or state wide, stimulation of individual idealism, and a better community spirit. The result of this process is the development of initiative, self-reliance, and leadership among boys and young men.

I believe that the outstanding contribution of this movement is in producing rural leadership. Starting in many counties in an extremely limited way, it has been noted that over a period of years, genuine leadership has been developed through these processes. In one county twenty-two out of twenty-seven local "Y" leaders were once members of a local group. Teachers for Sunday-school classes and those now leading the movements for better schools, better roads, and better community life, it has been observed, were former members of a "Y" group. From one small group operating ten years ago, there is now one man who is an agricultural leader for an entire state, another is giving his life to the Christian ministry, and the third is in Association secretaryship, but more have stayed in the home town, to help the local institutions. Here, then, is a means of producing practical, homegrown, and for the most part, home-utilized leaders.

Are there no difficulties or limitations? Yes, indeed! The two big difficulties have been first to find men with leadership qualities and undiscouragable spirit to serve as county secretaries and second to finance them out of the resources within each county. There is no state or national subsidy available and each county must pay for its own Association. Failure of a county committee to function with genuine financial and administrative responsibility has too often broken the spirit of a young man willing and able to serve as a secretary. These difficulties can be best overcome when a state Y.M.C.A. committee places on its staff a man to give his entire energies to the organiza

n, supervision, and guidance of the county committees and secretaries of a given

.te.

City Associations lend their friendly resources especially to the county in which ey are located. The whole Association movement has pledged its support to this le band of less than 200 men who are out in the villages and open country like miners ¡ging out the precious ore of Christian leadership. It is with a consciousness that their k is of vital importance to the making of a new and better social order that they icule the difficulties and are daily producing mighty results.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LOCAL COMMUNITY LIFE
AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION

John Merriman Gaus, Associate Professor of Political Science, Amherst College,
Amherst, Massachusetts

The history of the Greek and Medieval City-States shows how effective a stimulus may be given ome of the highest activities and emotions of mankind when the whole environment of each citizen es within the first-hand range of his senses and memory. It is now only here and there, in villages ide the main stream of civilization, that men know the faces of their neighbors and see daily as part ne whole the fields and cottages in which they work and rest. Yet, even now, when a village is orbed by a sprawling suburb or overwhelmed by the influx of a new industrial population, some of older inhabitants feel that they are losing touch with the deeper realities of life.-GRAHAM WALLAS !uman Nature in Politics, p. 271.

An inquiry into the relationship between local community life and political organiion is essentially a study in the relationship between politics and administration. politics I mean the formation and formulation of a program or idea or ideal as a al policy. By administration I mean the application of that policy to specific ations. Both of these problems, that of the formulation of policy and of its admination, are only the shadowing in the field of political action of the larger issues: Has modern society any conception of itself as it wants to be, and can it direct its course nake that conception a reality?

Our society is composed of developing institutions, and it will help us to notice fly how its local neighborhoods have come to be what they are. First of all Amerisociety has been shaped by the frontier. Professor Turner, who has developed this is more thoroughly than anyone, remarks in The Frontier in American History: Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life shape them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is the fact that have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people-to the changes lved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress ›f the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life.

As a result, wherever and whenever the frontier influence has been potent our itutions have been adapted to a changing, expanding nation, of extreme individu> bred on the frontier, democratic in its equality of landholders, able to assimilate y types of people because of the great area of cheap lands, and with its local comuity life which expressed itself not so much in political as in extra-legal organizations e log-rolling and corn-husking, religious and reform groups, vigilance committees, s, orders, and fraternities and economic groups.