from desiring and doing the same thing. Their theological seminaries, hitherto too commonly located in the country, as if Christianity had to do only with the individual, are rapidly becoming sociological seminaries as well, wherein the common wants of all citizens are reviewed in the light of religion. Only as the churches become the church of the city community, in fact, can the Revelation of St. John the Divine become a reality in the cities of the world. Our usual test of city administration, for example, is the tax-rate. If it is low, the tax-payers are urged to continue it, in order to save their money; and too often the church in the city community is silent about the sin of the false economy which, while it lowers the tax-rate of the city, may raise its death-rate, and, while lessening the city taxrate, may raise the state rate by compelling the state to care for additional prisoners or additional insane. In New York City, in 17 years, I have met only one man who growled at the smallness of his tax-bills. There are many reformers who, like myself, perhaps, are chronically willing to advise the city to spend more money, but who themselves are taxed neither for realty nor for personal property and who have so little hope of ever acquiring any realty that they would like to see all taxes concentrated on land. But this man was different; he was a large tax-payer; and he was chronically sore at heart because the city did not put into its budget sufficient allowances for the education, recreation, and relief of citizens young and old. But a better time is coming. I have before me a sermon entitled "The City Budget and the Day of Pentecost," a combination of thenness and nowness which would have been impossible to the preachers of a generation ago. I do not myself think that the pulpit of the church in the city community should very frequently specifically deal with the economic themes which preachers have not been educated to handle as intelligently as the specialists who will come at their summons, with creditable civic spirit, to give their message as lay preachers and lay teachers on matters of interest to every citizen, and, therefore, appropriate for any gathering in a house of God. But the church which will summon its worshipers to lament over the lack

of room in the Bethlehem inn for the birth of the Babe of Bethlehem and which never exhibits any agony over the basement-born children of New York is a church which will never be visited either by the Spirit of God or regarded with respect by men; and if the pulpit should not, as in my view it should not, become a mere economic forum, the church should, in my judgment, be organized into a Laity League, of both men and women, and subdivided into committees dealing with the common needs of every citizen and committees dealing with the special wants of some citizens, while the pulpit of the church should constantly so teach the value of human life as to make the tax-payer say, not "How much can we save in city administration?" but "Where can we best spend, for the advantage of the community, through other departments, the savings we have effected in departments A and B?" or, to put it more briefly, and concretely, "If the giving of a cup of cold water to a child shall not fail of its reward, what kind of a Christian am I to work and pray for a decreased tax-rate which will impair the joy of 10,000 children?"

Were I today, therefore, the pastor of a city church I would stress in my pulpit work the divine values of human life, and would endeavor to organize my church into committees as follows:

A. Committees dealing with the common needs of every citizen, as follows:

1. Housing

2. Health

3. Education

4. Economic Success

5. Religion

6. Recreation, Art, and Love of Nature

7. Neighborhood Welfare

8. Community Efficiency

B. Committees dealing with the special needs of special citizens, as

follows:

1. Childhood

2. Old Age

3. Prisoners

4. Defectives

5. Dependents

6. The strangers within our gates

At this time I cannot develop the detail under each of these headings. Suffice it to say that this is the general outline for the work of Boston-1915 which I submitted to its directors about a year ago, and that its development is proceeding excellently, so far as I can judge at this distance, in the city on the Charles. It is my highest ambition to foster the same departmentation I then thought out in every church of the city community called New York.

DISCUSSION

EDWARD CARY HAYES, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

There is no denying that economic causes are still tending to increase the relative proportion of our population in the city and to diminish the relative proportion in the country. Yet some things can be done to induce more people to remain in the country than otherwise would do so, and what is more important, to make the life of those who live there better than it otherwise would be.

Our rural conditions are new and unfinished, even more so than are our urban conditions. Our cities are more like old world cities than our country is like the old world country, as our paved and lighted city streets are more like theirs than our country roads are like theirs. We hope that when matured our country life will surpass that of any land in the old world, because it will be the product of democratic freemen, not of peasant and squire, Grossgutbesitzer and Bauer. But as yet in our rich central region where the land is worth two hundred dollars an acre, even as an investment to one who does not intend to farm, the houses are mostly poor little makeshifts that were built by men who were paying for their land, straining every nerve to get established and thinking little of the house they lived in or the life of which it is the symbol. There is no reason now why these cottages should not be replaced with farmhouses having every "modern convenience" and surrounded with beauty. Even in the older regions, like New England, the final adjustment of rural occupations has not been reached. They have given up growing wheat and corn for market but have only imperfectly worked out the agricultural specialties that will make it profitable to till those glorious hillsides and valleys. In art galleries we see canvases no bigger than a window pane that have cost fifty thousand dollars; by the same standard there is many and many a porch, or kitchen window, in New England the view from which is worth a million.

For the development of rural life we must rely mainly upon three things: 1. Transportation and communication.-Difficulty of intercourse is the drawback of the country. With the rural mail route and the telephone the problem is partly solved; it is the cheap and rapid transportation of persons and goods that remains to be achieved. When we find the really essential things to be done we can pour out millions upon them. But the farmer, alas, doesn't want to have his taxes increased a little to make good roads. He must learn that scarcely any other expenditure of his money will yield him such high returns in comfort, convenience, and worth of life. I should not wonder if in those rich rural sections where the country roads, for months of the year, are now level stretches of mud, the road would some time be double tracks-the farmer's automobile and autotruck built with wheels to fit the rails, trouble and cost of rubber tires abolished, the cost and power of engines reduced to a mere fraction of what is now required, high rates of speed rendered safe, and crops and persons transported with little cost of money, time, or comfort.

The introduction of manufacture into the country is largely a matter of transportation. It is not necessary and may not be feasible; yet "garden villages," as the English call them, where every man sits under his own vine and fig tree, or at least in his own hired patch of ground, may be the proper and profitable location for certain seasonal industries whose period of idleness can be made to coincide with the season of harvest, so that the laborers in those garden villages, instead of loafing through the dull season of the factory in the demoralization of city slums, would become available harvest hands. Such an arrangement might not bring sufficient advantage to any single interest to secure its adoption through private initiative, but might bring such great advantages diffused among several interests as to justify governmental aid, even to the extent of such control of transportation as to afford artificial inducement to one of the parties essential to the plan. Investigation would disclose whether this suggestion of introducing seasonal manufacture into the country is practical or only visionary.

2. Public education.-The second agency in the development of rural life is public education, through the transformation of the rural school, one aspect of which has been wisely suggested by Professor Gillette, and also through the state university. The agricultural college must maintain a department of landscape gardening as well as a department of soil fertility, for in some of our rich agricultural states Nature has been very niggard of everything except black dirt, and we must learn to work with her in order to make country life beautiful and interesting. The agricultural college must in yet other ways be a cultural agency; it must teach people to live on the farm, as well as to make a living off the farm.

3. The country church.-There is almost as much need of a Protestant reformation now as there was in Luther's time, not because the church is debased but because of the practical opportunity to which it needs to become

adapted as it is not under its present denominational form of organizationthen there would not be four churches on the four corners of streets that cross in the best residential section of a city and scores of miles of streets in the neediest section of the same city without a church in sight, while churches retire and disappear from city neighborhoods in proportion as the need of churches in those neighborhoods increases, nor would there anywhere be sixteen weak and competing country churches within a radius of three miles.

Probably the ideal form of social organization is the parish organization in which the parish is a geographic unit, each parish having a single church. The country parish church should be, not merely a gateway to the life to come, but it should be the center of all the recreational, cultural, and ethical activities of the community, except those that center in the school and the home. Its organization should furnish the effective leadership pervading the actual life of the whole people for which Professor Blackmar pleads, and the lack of which, he says, has caused our projects of reform to remain, for the most part, unrealized programs.

THOMAS J. RILEY, WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

Professor Gillette has concluded that about one-tenth of the excess gain of the population of the cities of the country over the rural districts is due to the removal of persons from the country. While it seems extremely difficult to me to find out just how many "John Smiths" removed from the country village to the city, it is doubtless true that a goodly number of young men and women have made such removals. There is another aspect of this movement which might be called the interaction of the country districts and the cities in the circum-urban zones to which Professor Gillette did not call special attention. This interaction is a significant fact for the growth of the city population in numbers, but it is a much more significant fact as a social problem. Great cities grow by accretion, by the mere extension of their boundaries, without people making any removals. This has been notably true in the case of Greater New York. It is very well known that clustered around the larger municipal incorporations are many smaller towns and villages that present unusual problems of government, of the control of liquor, vice, and marriages, etc. These zones are neither urban nor rural, they are not hot or cold, they are lukewarm. Churches do not thrive, schools are generally inferior to those of the adjoining cities. Public improvements languish. There is an expectancy toward the city which is more than a state of mind of the suburbanite, for it shows itself in his institutions and his public improvements. It would be difficult to measure the width of these zones, but it is generally recognized that the influence of the city affects the social life and local activities as far out from the great cities as transportation facilities make access to the city short and easy. In the