intermarriage and relationship upon other groups in the community. Family relationships thus came in the land-farmer communities to be very general. Some rough and crude forms of economic co-operation also grew up in this period, as modifications of the competition on which the land-farmer type is based.

"The farmer type produced a definite social life," says Prof. Ross. "The second period, extending from 1835 to 1890, had as its chief objective the enrichment of the group life."

Fifth, the land farmer competed, by group conflict, with his neighbors. Property was regarded by the land farmer as a family possession. Competition was between group and group, between household and household. The moral strength as well as the moral deficiencies of this type of man flow from this competition. He considered himself essentially bounden to the members of his own group by obligations and free from moral obligations to others. The son received no wages from his father for work on the farm and the daughter did not dream of pay or of an allowance for her labor in the house. The land farmer conceived of his estate as belonging to his family group and embodied in himself. Therefore he had no wage obligations to son or daughter and he felt himself obliged so to distribute his property as to care for all the members of his household. This economic competition compacted the family group and formed the basis for the social economy of the country community. The land farmer had no ideal of community prosperity. His thought for generations has been to make his own farm prosperous, to raise some crop that others shall not raise, to have a harvest that other men have not and to find a market which other men have not discovered, by which he and his farm and his group may prosper. It is hard to convince the land farmer, because of his immersion in this group conflict, that the farmer's prosperity is dependent upon the prosperity of other groups in the community.

The presence of the small group is the sign of normal social life. The group is not complete in itself, but is a unit in human association. So that the farmer economy had its social life and its own type of communities. The economy of the farmer period represents the ideals born in the pioneer nation. The community of the farmer is the destination of the life of the pioneer. The farmer still practises a variety of occupations. His tillage of the soil and his household economy are the most conservative in all American population. He uses modern machinery in the fields, but to a great degree his wife uses the old mechanisms in the kitchen and in the household. The laborers employed on the farm are received into the farmer's family under conditions of social equality. The man who is this year a laborer may in a decade be a farmer. The dignifying of personality with land ownership has been such a general social experience in the country that every individual is thought of in the farmer period as a potential landowner.

The institutions of the rural community of the land-farmer type are the country store, the rural school, and the church. The country store deals in general merchandise and is a natural outgrowth of the stores of the pioneer period in which barter constituted the whole of the commerce of the community. In the pioneer store but a few commodities were imported from the outer world. The greater part of the merchandise was made in the community and distributed in the store. But the farmer's rural economy is the dawning of the world economy and the general store in the farming community becomes an economic institution requiring great ability and centering in itself the forces of general as well as local economics.

The general storekeeper of this type in the country is at once a business man, a money lender, an employer of labor and the manager of the social center. He sells goods at a price so low as to maintain his local trade against outside competition. He loans money on mortgages throughout the community, and sells goods on credit. Judgment of men and of properties is so essential to his business that if he can not judiciously loan and give credit he cannot maintain a country store. Around his warm stove in the winter and at his door in summer gather the men of the community for discussion of politics, religion and social affairs. In addition to all else, he has been usually the postmaster of the community.

The one-room rural school which is the prevailing type throughout the country is a product of the land-farmer period. Its prevalence shows that we are still in land-farmer conditions: and the criticism to which it is now subjected indicates that we are conscious of a new epoch in rural life.

It fits well into the life of the land farmer because it gives obviously a mere hint of learning. It has been the boast of its advocates that it taught only the "three Rs." Its training for life is rudimentary only: it gives but an alphabet. The land farmer expected to live in his group. Secure in his own acres and believing himself "as good as anybody," he relied for his son and daughter not upon trained skill, but upon native abilities, sterling character, independence and industry. Of all these the household, not the school, is the source. So that the one-room country school was satisfactory to those who created it.

In another chapter the common schools are more fully discussed. Here it may be said only that the creation of such a system was an honor to any people. The farmers who out of a splendid idealism placed a schoolhouse at every cross roads, on every hilltop and in every mountain valley, exact a tribute of praise from their successors. The unit of measurement of the school district, on which this system was based, was the day's journey of a child six years of age. Two miles must be its longest radius. The generation who spanned this continent with the measure of an infant's pace, mapped the land into districts, erected houses at the centers, and employed teachers as the masters of learning for these little states, were men of statesmanlike power. The country school is a nobler monument of the land farmer than anything else he has done.

The rural "academy" was the most influential school of the land farmer's time. Situated at the center of leading communities, in New England, Pennsylvania and the older Eastern States, it was often under the control or the influence of the parish minister. It generally exerted a great influence for the building of the church and the community. Its teachers were men of scholarly ideals. Its students were from the locality, being selected by ambition for learning, and by their ability to pay the tuition.

The development of the high schools has generally resulted in the abandonment of the academies. A few have survived and have adapted themselves to new times. But it is to be doubted whether the common schools have so far done as much for building and for organizing country communities, for providing local leadership, for building churches, as did the rural academies of New England, Pennsylvania and other Eastern States.

The farmer's church is the classic American type of church at its best. The farming economy succeeded to the pioneer economy without serious break. The troubles of the country church have their beginnings in the period of the exploiter which is to follow, but the farmer developed the church of the pioneer with sympathy and consistency. The church of the farmer still values personal salvation above all. The revival methods and the simplicity of doctrine