farm as we have for the factory. But it is certain that when the system is perfected it will be found too complex for the farmer to keep. A proper cost system for a farm is vastly more complex than the books of a bank. The farmer could not keep it if he knew how it would take more time than he could give to it. But there seems to be no reason why the perfected rural school should not be able to keep the perfected accounts for the farm. It would constitute work of the highest educational value for the older pupils of the school. It would gradually accumulate a mass of facts as to the profits and losses in farming which would be of priceless value to economists now if accessible. It, in connection with the tasks I have mentioned, with soil analysis, and things generally which can be better done collectively than individually, will make the rural school the best business college in the world.

The rural school will thus become a farm laboratory and a domestic science school. As a continuation school in which the grown people as well as the children are enrolled - in fact if not in form - it will command the constant attention, and attract the intensest interest of every patron. New buildings will be required, better grounds, and a stronger teaching force; but these will be eagerly furnished when, in addition to giving to the children and young people a broad and practical education, the school's work will have a great, a growing, and a measurable money value. Such a school will be merged in the general society of its community, and cease to be a thing apart. The life of the school and the life of the farm will be one.

Nobody who has seen the uplift which has come to a considerable number of our rural communities through a correlation of rural school instruction with rural life can, I believe, condemn this picture as impossible. It is so far from being in the realm of the impossible as to be, in its beginnings, already in existence. Several of the states already require the teaching of agriculture and domestic economy in the rural schools. This teaching is in most schools very inadequate; but it is doing a great good

even in its imperfections. The elements of agricultural science are not more difficult than are other studies which have been from time to time imposed upon our unprepared teaching force; and such is the grip of real truth related to actual life that this teaching possesses a gratifying vitality already. In several school systems rural life and rural sentiment have been profoundly affected by the timid beginnings of the new kind of rural school. I have in mind the conditions in Page County, Iowa, as best known to me personally. In Barnes County, North Dakota, the social center seems already in promising growth from the rural schools, and is assuming the very significant form of economic coöperation - that greatest need of rural life. In parts of the South the schools are taking hold on the eternal verities of Mother Earth in a wonderful way. And all over the nation the school activities in corn, tomatoes, flowers, live stock, sewing, cooking, sanitation, debating, entertainments, picnics, and all the needful factors of a full social life are manifold and increasing. The social center which I now here suggest will inevitably grow from these seeds, if the schools take up their true work that of making themselves the social and economic laboratories of their communities.

The dream to me is a wonderful one. It means the ennobling of the rural teacher, and the magnifying of his functions and emoluments. It means the coming into its own of that longcontemned office, the county superintendency of schools. It means more money for schools, and money expended with actual financial profit to the community. It means that the school work shall be in large part economically productive work. It means a school system on which the people will spend their money with the same sense of good business judgment which they now feel in building barns. It means a longer school life for the farm boys and girls, for the reason that their work will be necessary as well as educative. It means in every way a more contented, a more efficient, fuller rural life.

It will tend to arrest the drift of the rural population to the

cities. An incident in proof of this, and I am done. Years ago in Wright County, Iowa, 157 boys and 174 girls in rural schools were asked their plans for life. All but seven of the boys and all but eleven of the girls declared that they would have nothing to do with farming. During the next three years the teaching of agriculture and domestic science was introduced. Another vote was then taken in the same schools, with 174 boys and 178 girls voting. All but eleven of the boys and all but seventeen of the girls declared their intention of remaining on the farm.

This is a revolution in sentiment, and it means much. Once let these new schools complete their work of social regeneration and the drift will turn from the cities to the farm. We shall have opened to all eyes the attraction of rural life, as well as its material rewards; and out of the coöperative intercourse of the farmers of the nation will grow the new democracy which has been the dream of reformers and humanitarians.

CITY COMFORTS FOR COUNTRY TEACHERS 1

GEORGE E. VINCENT

"COME in, friends; never mind the mud; this is your house and we want you to see every room in it." It took imagination and civic spirit for Superintendent Fred Grafelman, of the Alberta, Minnesota, Consolidated Rural School, to issue that invitation. A smaller man would have hesitated. Four hundred people were standing in front of the new Teachers' House which had just been formally dedicated to the service of rural education. An almost unprecedented February thaw had produced a slimy ooze. Within were spotless floors of wellfinished maple. The thought of the invasion was enough to make a good housekeeper shudder. But the Superintendent saw that something more vital than clean floors was at stake. These citizens and guests must not be made to feel that the building was a private house. They must from the outset think of it as a part of the public school itself. So in they flocked, with calamitous feet and glad hearts.

Civic pride was the dominant note of the dedication day. A joint reception committee from the Commercial Club and the Woman's Club welcomed at the station the visitors who came from a distance. The State Superintendent of Public Instruction journeyed from the capital. The State University sent a representative. Students and faculty from one of the University's substations and agricultural schools drove ten miles across country in bob-sleighs. Many friends and neighbors from outside the district joined in the festivities. Pupils

1 Copyright. Reprinted from the American Review of Reviews by permission of the publishers and of the author.

and their parents raised to nearly 500 the number in attendance. Congratulations from the visitors were hearty and gratifying. Alberta was being "put on the map." The citizens of the district thrilled with a sense of collective achievement. It was a great day for Alberta, a hamlet of 30 families with a school registration of 132 pupils of whom 95 are brought daily in public conveyances from the surrounding countryside.

A noon dinner for guests and officials was served in the high and well-lighted basement which in the new Teachers' House is equipped for the domestic science work of the school. The Commercial Club paid for the excellent meal which was cooked and served by the schoolgirls. The speeches were brief and to the point. The president of the school board said he had never made an address before. He had something to say, said it clearly and sincerely, and sat down. The contractor merely rose and bowed, and asked the building to speak for him. If he had ever heard of Sir Christopher Wren he would have said "Circumspice." Three or four visitors offered congratulations. The best speech was made by the president of the Woman's Club. She was witty and clever, and at the end struck a true note of social idealism. One asked: "Who is she?" "Oh, a former school teacher; I see." Let not the cynical deride the "mob of mobile maidens meditating matrimony." Alberta is only one of thousands of American communities which are the better because women trained as school teachers have married and are living in them.

How so many people were packed into the two classrooms, which thrown together make the auditorium of the Alberta school building, it would be hard to say. First the grown-ups were stowed away; then the chinks were filled with children of assorted sizes. It was a happy, well-contented company, cheerfully absorbent of the amiable things the visitors said about the spirit and enterprise of the Alberta district. Fred Grafelman was praised for his enthusiasm, and his faith that the plan, at first regarded with suspicion, could be carried