social sanitation. There are attempts at organization to teach people to take advantage of science, of law, of education, of the ideals of social betterment, but their leadership is fitful, uncertain, and usually inadequate. The single purpose of this paper is to emphasize social leadership in the art of right living.

THE CHURCH AND THE RURAL COMMUNITY

WARREN H. WILSON

Superintendent Department of Church and Country Life of the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions

The country church is responsive to every stimulus which affects the country community. It is a sensitive register of the economic experience and of the social welfare of the country population. Three phases of economic experience in America have recorded themselves in the country churches.1 Each of them has created a social type. The pioneer has been followed by the exploiter of the land. The exploiter is giving way to the husbandman, or agricultural economist. Each of these has had his church, following one another in the order of the development of American farming; and the faithfulness of the church to the American economy would require that in no other order should the church in the rural community develop. changes are those of the population which she serves.

Her

The pioneer type was a lonely man. In the woods his ax alone sounded. From his cabin no other was reached with the eye, or by even a far cry of the voice. He lived and thought and battled alone. His theology was therefore a doctrine of personal salvation. It was the dogma of freedom and responsibility. He was moreover a man of impulse, emotional; for he practiced all the trades, from shoemaking to cutting grass. Adam Smith made clear the dependence of the worker at varied trades upon impulse. The pioneer used rum as a stimulant for his great feats. His religion was the experience of emotion. Yearly or periodic revivals were his only or his primary method of church work. Finney and Nettleton made a fine art of the pioneer religion; but neither of them could so revive rural people today, because the pioneer economy is gone forever.

The second type of economic life was that of the exploiter. He was a man who saw the value of wealth for man's use. He 'Professor J. B. Ross in the Political Science Quarterly for December, 1910, traces the successive changes for the Middle West.

went to California in 1849, not to settle but to scoop up a fortune and come back. In all the states he turned from farming to mining and oil prospecting. Coal or iron, mica or even a clay bed gave him promise of a fortune. His church is the church whose chief doctrine is giving, building, endowing. His has been a great and valid stage of American church life.

The third period which is just now beginning is that of husbandry or cultivation of the soil. The Bible speaks of "marrying the land." I never knew its meaning till I saw it in the mountains of Tennessee and the prairies of Illinois. There side by side is the outraged land and the land cherished, cultivated, economized. The systematic farmer loves the land and studies it; he trains it, he fertilizes it, he educates it. Economist and husbandman are the same in meaning, though diverse in derivation. The husbandman is to be the greatest economist in our history.

The church of the husbandman has come in some places. It is institutional, social, using qualities more than quantities; it determines every policy upon a comprehension of the entire problem. It serves the whole population. It builds for the future, for the permanence of all values, as well as for immediate results. The same population who are scientific and systematic on the farm may be trained to be systematic and progressive in the church.

The history of American rural churches contains, in addition to the progress of typical churches referred to above, certain peculiar narratives of country life. In those communities the influences are economic-religious. These communities, while varying somewhat in their type, are represented by the Pennsylvania "Dutch" and Quaker communities. Omitting, therefore, extended reference to Shaker or Mormon communities and other such extravagant variations of the religious community, let us observe the history of the Mennonite and Quaker communities in Pennsylvania. The so-called "Pennsylvania Dutch" are better described for our understanding them here under the general term Mennonite. For the Mennonites and the

See Kuhns, German and Swiss Settlements of Pennsylvania; Sachse, The German Pietists of Pennsylvania and The German Sectarians of Pennsylvania.

Quakers have much in common. Quakerism was descended by a line of direct social causation from the Mennonite sects. And when William Penn started his "Holy Experiment" for the peopling of the territory in the new world which came to him. by grant from Charles II, he enlisted the Mennonites on the continent of Europe and the Quakers in England, finding them responsive in common to his advertisements and other appeals for settlers. William Penn used German and Dutch in addition to English. He journeyed on the Continent in the Dutch and German territories and started the stream of immigration to Pennsylvania at a time when persecution on the Continent and unrest in England supplied the expulsive forces which selected the Mennonites and the Quakers for settlement in America. With the Mennonites came other sects, whose social character is illustrated in the Mennonites.

These people were selected by common economic, social, and religious experiences. They settled in the wilderness which came to be called Pennsylvania, under conditions of poverty, intense social sympathy and religious idealism. These they shared with one another in such degree as to consolidate them into settlements and communities. In order to survive they were obliged to intensify in America a social unity which in the old world had protected them against persecution and enabled them to get a living in a hostile social environment. In America they perfected their economic methods and their forms of social organization, and in harmony with these their religious societies, into such community life as still to survive.

The complete history of these Mennonite and Quaker sects has yet to be written from a sociological point of view. They have produced few historians, but their communities have been highly successful in accomplishing certain results. The weakness of their community life need not engage us at present. They suppressed individual genius and uniformed their population by discouraging individual talent. They repressed the artistic, inventive variations which appeared in individuals. This may be forgiven them when one remembers the bitter economic 'Warren H. Wilson, Quaker Hill, a Sociological Study.

struggle in which they fought their way to survival as communities. We are more interested here in the elements of positive social strength which these Mennonite and Quaker communities exhibit.

The first of these is their economic success. In every territory where the Pennsylvania Mennonites are found they stand out in contrast to other farming populations by their success as farmers. Other Americans in the representative northern and eastern states have not been successful as farmers. The success of American farming in typical instances has tended to the elimination of the farmer as a farmer. Not so among the Pennsylvania sects. Their communities are permanently agricultural. They maintain the fertility of the soil; they increase the total products which they have for sale as years pass, and they make farming profitable.

Second, these Mennonite communities have eliminated pauperism. Among them there is none poor. "They take care of their own people," as their neighbors say. Actually this is accomplished by a form of social control in which their communities promptly act for the sustaining of the marginal members of the community who suffer any incidental loss or are weakened in the competition of life. This seems to me to be the greatest triumph of these Mennonite communities. They have exhibited in America the possibility of sustaining a population, originally very poor, so that no section of its members, through two centuries, has lapsed into pauperism.

I believe that this process also extends to the prevention of degeneracy, though of this I cannot speak so confidently. In recent years I dare say they are found wanting in adherence to sanitary ways of living. But so far as I have been able to study them there are among them very few insane, idiotic, or degenerate members.

In the third place, the "Pennsylvania Dutch"-to use their common name-maintain their social organization. Their communities do not so rapidly disintegrate under the influence of economic success. They do, indeed, suffer losses, but the process of rural degeneration which shows elsewhere throughout the