the speaker believed lay chiefly in the direction of competition between elements of each race, and insufficiency in the leadership provided by each.

3. The informal discussion, which took place chiefly at an adjourned session on Tuesday afternoon, May 21st, was carried on almost exclusively by Negroes. It began with an evaluation of an address made the evening before by James Weldon Johnson, in which it was generally agreed that the speaker had expressed what was in the hearts of his race. A second stage in the discussion was the consideration of the cause of the Negroes' failure to secure justice and advancement. With the exception of one speaker who was from the West Indies, all insisted that the Negro had ample capacity for organization. The deepest racial feeling was in evidence. The problems of the Negro were discussed in an unusually intimate and personal way. Mr. Cooper, the chairman of the Division, who presided, said: "I have never seen a meeting of such intensity as this."

4. Those who participated in this informal discussion included among others: Lester Riley, Springfield, 111.; Josephine Pinyon, New York; Mary E. Jackson, New York; Mary B. Belcher, St. Louis; Blanche Bass, St. .Louis; Mrs. R. T. Brooks, Columbia, S. C; Mrs. Myrtle F. Cook, Kansas City, Mo.; Amy Smith, Richmond, Va.; Mrs. Parsons, Chanute, Kan.; Mr. Ervin, Lawrence, Kan.; Mrs. Dwiggins, Kansas City, Kan.; Mr. Jenkins, Kansas City, Mo.

RURAL CENTERS OF COMMUNITY ACTIVITY

Warren H. Wilson, Country Church Work, Board of Home Missions, of the Presbyterian Church, New York

There are many signs of the formation of an agrarian class in the United States. The latest of these is the proposal to organize the rural community. The country community will be the end of the chain of organizations and the last link in the structure of a national agrarian mechanism. In Lincoln's administration the Homestead Act and the Land Grant Act; in the last decade of the 19th Century the popular movements culminating in Mr. Roosevelt's Country Life Commission; the past eighteen years with their rapid organization under the SmithLever Act, the Smith-Hughes Act, the rural free delivery provision, the parcels post service, the creation during the past twenty years of the Department of Agriculture, with corresponding state departments, the development of good roads, telephones and of the rural service of automobiles and auto trucks, are all part of the structures which will serve an emergent class of farmers, specialized, peculiar in their needs and national in their thought and ambition. Recent radical movements, such as the Non-Partisan League, the Dairymen's League, Farmers' Union, and others less successful, show that the farmer in some respects has over-run the provision for his self-expression. But the materials provided in this list have tended to satisfy and exhaust the desire for self-expression on the part of the growing farmer class.

The war has brought to many the realization that the country community needs to be organized. This had been advocated by a few for a long time and recognized in an academic way; but now there are three departments in Washington, each with local correspondents in the state and county, demanding and insisting upon community organization in the country. The Department of Agriculture, through its States Relations Service; the Bureau of Education, through a special section; and the Department of War, through the Council of National Defense, have established offices and employed experts, with graphically outlined plans, for the purpose of organizing every rural hamlet. Their reason given is that the country community needs "civic form" such as the city has. The reasons given do not satisfy the inquirer fully and it is evident that this proposal from Washington, to be carried out through state and county officials, paid or volunteer, is the culmination of a long growth in opinion. The war has made it acutely necessary for the national government to function in the place where the farmer spends his life. It has become plain that the agrarian resident is a nationalist; also, that the United States needs the farmer. Hence we have the proposal, which teachers and propagandists have long cherished, of a rural organization which will nationalize the rural resident and give him an outlook upon the whole country. For however the city may be a place of international interest, the country is the home of patriotism and nationalism.

This community organization has obvious practical value. Adequate schools can be had only through the consolidated unit, which is a community unit. Public health service can be given only by resident nurses and sanitarians. And the area to be reached by such a worker is a community area. Resident ministers are needed in the country and the parish served by a pastor is the same thing as the community.

The Farmer's Radius of Contacts

There is, however, such an indefinite character to this agitation, and so many of those engaged in "community work" are new, that a distinct service will be rendered by defining the country community. It is, of course, a social population having no center larger than twentyfive hundred who have things in common. By the conditions of their industry and by the nature and contour of the land they will meet for economic, social, educational and religious experience. Geographically, a country community is the habitat of a farm family. Upon this land, the community includes the roads, property, buildings and people who are located within an easy drive of one another. The rural community, which is usually agricultural, has its radius fixed by the conditions of farming; especially by this fact, that the farmer is the producer of food. There is no way to produce food save through the co-operation of domestic animals and domesticated vegetables. The grouping of man and his domestic animals and plants we call a farm. Some of these creatures which dwell with man on the farm live no longer in a wild state. All of them are dependent upon man's care and without them food cannot be made. Therefore, to be a farmer requires daily presence on the farm. The farm operator must be home at night, or at least by the second night. This gives him a short radius. It intensifies his knowledge of everything within his short tether and it makes him alien to everything outside of it.

There are communities in such a state as Kansas that have a wider radius, because the farmer does not work on the wheat crop more than a few months of the year and he enjoys the use of the automobile, so that he can range afar. But the tendency of these western grain growing states and of the southern cotton growing states is toward a diversified farming, which more and more keeps the farmer at home.

The community is further defined by the experience of the marginal people, by whom I mean those who are barely able to survive, whose attachment to the industry is weaker than that of the farm operator. Among the farm people, the women, the old men and women, the adolescents, the children, those who are sick or about to die, the immigrant, the farm hand, the farm tenant—all these are confined to the community. Their radius of action is shorter than that of the farm operator. They cannot go far from home. The community exists for them and its institutions must be provided in their interest.

There are very few consciously organized communities. In some sections it is difficult to trace the outline and draw the boundary between communities. The New England states did it in creating their town government pretty successfully. Their example has been imitated with diminishing success, as one goes west from New England. Even the Massachusetts town is nowadays unsatisfactory as a community organization and the State College of Agriculture at Amherst is trying to form community councils in which the social life of the town shall be as perfectly embodied as the civic life has been in the town meeting. Western states which imitated the New England town in a stiff academic way by surveying the map instead of surveying the people now discover that their country people are without citizenship. Professor Galpin has shown in his studies of Social Basins in Wisconsin that the farm operator in that state belongs to no community. He is laid hold of by all and naturally reacts in an evasion of all social, educational and humanitarian responsibilities. In the South the community is supposed to be identical with the county because in the past the influential people lived on horseback and enjoyed a wide radius of action. But the marginal people, the aged, the sick, the poor, the Negro, most of the women, the children, and other essential members of the household group always lived in the South in a narrow habitat. With increasing diversity and intensifaction of southern agriculture and with the emergence of the poor white man into importance, with the growth of Negro farm ownership and operation, the southern country community appears to be, if anything, smaller than that in the North and much smaller than the western community. In mountain and retarded sections of the South the country community is a mere neighborhood, sometimes only a cove or peninsula half a mile wide and a mile long, outside of which the resident will not go to church and within which alone his acquaintance and confidence are extended.

Rural Community-Wide Agencies

In all these cases diseases spread to the boundaries of the communities and stop there. The range of the epidemic is the boundary of a community. Intermarriage with its consequent effects in degeneracy or in high intellectual levels extends to the boundary of the community. The areas studied by the investigators of rural degeneracy are always community areas about the size of a township. The range of specific criminality in the country is community wide. The region affected by a leading citizen, a talented teacher or a devoted pastor is a country community.

In spite of the lack of consciously organized rural community centers in the Middle West, farmers meet monthly or more often in the grain elevator, which they own co-operatively; and every meeting of farmers has a discussion of community matters. The grange, organized generally throughout the country, is a community organization. Indeed, it has given up many of its original economic purposes in order that it may survive as an agency of social interchange, discussion, recreation and acquaintance. The country store has always been recognized because of the variety of errands which bring men to its counter as a favored meeting place. There men and even women spend some time. All the news of the community is exchanged there and every interest of the countryside is discussed. The old-fashioned store-keepers, of whom, alas, there are few survivors, wrere comiriunity leaders, for it takes high ability to manage a Marshall Field emporium in a small population. The sifting of the country population by the attractions of city business has resulted in inferior men who have no business ability succeeding to the old store-keepers. But so long as the country store is managed by a man of ability his precious executive traits gather around him the whole business of the countryside and his store serves as a satisfactory community center; until an organization has to be provided for modern scientific government and public service.

The chautauquas have been and are community centers. These strange and interesting enterprises, projected over the whole country on the example of certain great central assemblies, are universally popular. It is enough to hang out a sign over a village street, "Chautauqua August 10th to 20th," and every country resident will prepare to attend. The discussion covers the elements of all community organization; but so far the chautauqua has not put its hand to the local problem which is the essence of community life. It has not paid to do so.

In many county seat towns rest rooms are provided for women, very often in the court house, sometimes in a conveniently located church. There is a town in Illinois which has a rest room for women attached to a meeting room for men where the daily market quotations are displayed; the newspapers and the agricultural journals are on file; and a competent woman is in charge. The farmer is so practical that I venture to believe that a community center will amount to little until it has a physical and material form. A good instance of this is in the town of Vernon, New Jersey, in Sussex county. There is a board of trade that has all the value of a community legislature. It has a membership extending to all classes of the community, with a fee of $1.00 per year. It has representatives, I am told, of every society in the town except one church. I have been unable to get back to the original move which has resulted in this happy combination, but I believe it was occasioned by the discovery that the town had at its use a building well fitted and well located for a community meeting place. The use of this pleasant building has accustomed men to working together and little by little a fine and effective organization has grown up, in which one can find no single leader. Four influential families have equal share in the leadership. The community house which has occasioned and sheltered this "civic form" is the property of St. Anne's Episcopal Church. The forbearance of this parish may be the explanation of the happy community organization.

The consolidated school is an educational attempt to serve the community. Its boundaries are the same as those I have described. It has as large a district as it can for those who are to assemble daily for school, while living at home. No better community organization is so widely extended. As soon as we have high school and grammar school teachers who are animated by the community spirit we will have in the consolidated school the desired community center.

There are a few community churches throughout the country. Those that are Roman Catholic or Lutheran, while their number is small, are successful in a larger proportion of cases in bringing the people together in the church for community enjoyment. The Protestant churches have a stiff, academic distrust of a connection between the church and popular life which forbids them to house or to promote recreational or economic enterprises; so that usually if a Protestant church has a community spirit it builds a parish house or secures its erection. Sometimes there are two such parish houses competing, as in Kinderhook, New York. Sometimes the parish house is quite independent of the church, though promoted by the same people, as in Locust Valley, New York. The story of the Locust Valley movement is told in the fine book which appeared last year, "Fear God in Your Own Village!*

The city is a rural center, but it does not belong in this topic. The agrarian class arising in this country has this characteristic, to distinguish it from the mining population and from the fisherman who also produce raw materials, that the farmer has a definite relation to the city. Indeed, the city is the real dynamic center of country life. The health work for the country extends out from cities, as a rule, under the clear recognition of the mutual dependence of city and country upon one another in the