women, and would more quickly stimulate personal interest than could be done in any other way. County activities such as civic leagues, with departments covering the fields particularly applicable to rural life, and coöperating with the county agents of the agricultural department, through the organizations which they have established for boys and girls, have immense possibilities, and the development of them would appeal to the women particularly, holding, as they do, future possibilities for a broader life for the boys and girls. Women recognize in them the opportunities for remaining in the country and there training the children for the larger life which they dream of for them. Even if this dream is never realized by this training, the child is better fitted for a continuation of the country life.

The realm of practical life in the country from a decent woman's standpoint is equally hopeless. The two prime necessities for living, water and light, are often lacking in the country. If you wish to speak the last word in condemning a city tenement, you say it has not an adequate water supply. The country home that has is a rara avis. I do not mean to insinuate that country people are not clean, but the psychological difference between taking a bath and washing is as great as having something to eat and dining. The unnecessary labor and privations which women endure from lack of a convenient water supply are of themselves herculean. Equipment for suitable lighting is almost as inadequate. The primitive tallow dip of our ancestors was not much worse than the smoky kerosene lamp found in most country homes. These deficiencies can be partly overcome under the most adverse conditions, if the men are properly impressed with the necessity of so doing.

They usually are impressed when they live under conditions that make it impossible for them to get women to do the drudgery for them, as I can testify from the remarkably ingenious methods which are used in railway construction camps. Temporary in character though they be, they often outrank, in point

of hygiene and comfort, homes which women have had to occupy and rear a family in for a hundred years!

Men who have never before given any thought to the equipment of the domestic ménage, so long as it was run by women, suddenly discover that masculine strength is too valuable to be ruthlessly wasted, and as if by magic a few empty molasses barrels to catch the rain-water from the roof, with some rude plumbing, or wooden spills fastened together with green withes, suddenly transform a leafy bower into a kitchen sink or a bathroom. In such temporary establishments even acetylene gas is not unknown, and you never visit a camp where you do not find fine gasoline lamps whose brilliancy and steadiness rival electricity; but who ever heard of a poor farmer's wife having money to buy such a lamp, looked upon as a luxury or an extravagance rather than as a prime necessity?

Water and light must become common possessions of country life before women will be satisfied to rear families in the country, if they can help themselves.

The material for leadership among country women is not lacking; they have proved this by the way they have quietly but persistently led the men (almost unconsciously on the part of the men) from the country to the city. They will even more readily lead them back to the country when conditions justify their doing so, for women know that under proper conditions the country is the best place for growing children, and that every child loses something from his life that nothing in the way of after-success can atone for, if he has not spent a large part of his life in the country. One of the good things which has come from the border service of our militia is that many of these soldiers for the first time have lived away from the artificiality of city life and have come in touch with nature and life in primitive forms. The plumber, the carpenter, the salesman, the artist, the lawyer, will all take back to their respective tasks a new inspiration and a vision of their activities as an integral part of the whole scheme of the universe. If the wives

of these same men had been similarly impressed, we might have had an exodus of these men to the country permanently, for upon the woman largely depends the selection of the home of the family.

That the material for leadership is not lacking among country women is also shown by the avidity with which they avail themselves of every opportunity which comes to them. All educational, moral, and civic movements in the country depend upon the support of the women, and if it were not for the good spreads which the women provide and serve at the men's gatherings, I fear the attendance would decrease woefully. For be it known that the chief attraction of educational and social functions is a good meal! Rail at the lack of culinary education as much as you please and decry the frying pan and the lard jar, but the fact remains that no one can compete with the rural woman in cooking a feast fit for Lucullus!

It is touching to see how the rural woman, in spite of her starved and undeveloped life, eagerly avails herself of any call which comes to her for service. The fact so long overlooked, that she is needed, seems to act as a stimulus. The Civil War in our own country, both North and South, illustrated this. No sacrifice was too great, no work too arduous, pain was pleasure because it gave an opportunity for service. The present European war is developing the same conditions, as is proved by the millions of stitches that have been taken by neverceasing knitting needles, and the wonderful way in which this old art of knitting, which had almost gone out of fashion, has been standardized, by these rural women to meet the needs of modern warfare. The "Queen Mary toe" and the "Kitchener heel" are words as familiar in the allied trenches to-day as are aëroplanes and caterpillars. The German women have evolved a fashion of knitting, the most up-to-date, labor-saving, efficient method, which has been adopted by the women of the allied countries also, although they name it the "Continental style." Many other instances could be cited to prove that with the

least encouragement the rural woman would make valuable contributions to progress.

All this valuable material is at present going to waste because there is no attention paid to its development and no atmosphere created to stimulate its dormant possibilities.

Again, I repeat, the rural problem is the problem of the rural woman, and the solving of this problem lies in the hands of the rural man.

"NATURA IN MINIMIS EXISTAT"1

JOHN BURROUGHS

I

THIS saying of Aristotle's is usually translated from the Greek as if it meant that Nature is seen only, or more fully, in "leasts," whereas it is more probable that Aristotle meant to say that Nature is as complete in the small as the great, that she is whole in all her parts as much in evidence in the minute as in the gigantic, in the plant as in the oak, in the gnat as in the elephant, in the pond as in the sea. In the clay bank washed by rains, by the roadside, you may perceive the same sculpturing and modeling that you see in vast mountain chains. In California I have seen in a small mound of clay by the roadside, that had been exposed to the weather for a few years, a reproduction in miniature of the range of mountains that towered above it the Sierra Madre.

A rivulet winding through a plain loops the same loops and oxbows that the Mississippi makes traversing the prairie states. The physical laws at work are the same in both cases. Has not some poet said that the same law that shapes a tear-drop shapes a planet? The little whirlwind that dances before you along the road in summer, and maybe snatches your hat from your head, is a miniature cyclone, and in our hemisphere it rotates in the same direction - in opposition to the hands of a clock.

Mere size does not count for much with Nature; she is all there, in the least as in the greatest. A drop of dew reveals

1 Copyright. Reprinted from The Art World, by permission of the publishers.