The Newtown bee., 1902-08-15

 ;ards and dancing serve as very substitute for the sins that now serve as recreations?
 The intellectual life of the real ham, ct, you will learn, is directly propor- ,ional to its materi al prosperity. The chief educator, the church, gets just what it can pay for. Cut down the salary, and in place of a cultured, wide awake, stimulating preacher you get retired Salvation Army captain, or "gradua te" of some ridiculous missionary training school, UT a green boy. or a dOtard. So with the schools. That scandal of modern the little red schoolhouse, is an inevitable result of rural poverty It's ingnorant teacher-incapable of giving decent instruction or even of making the schoolhouse anything but never be replaced by better until there is money to pay better. The village library-if the village have a library at all-will, unless eco homie conditions improve continue to be stocked with the cheapest books Ob- tainable. And travel, which fills the mind with new standards of cOmpari- son and broader outlook is out of the question when whole community is tied to the cows tail. You can find country people of advanced years who have never been beyond the horizon visible from their own door steps.
 The lack of any sort of travel has a worse effect than merely cramping the mind; it also works physical harm. Having practically no interests and no acquaintances outside the little village, young people marry within the home circle, and so small is that circle that the same families intermarry, generation after generation, till melancholy brood of idiots. deaf-mutes and deformed persons makes it's ap- pearance. Make the villages rich enough to afford good roads, to induce the trolley companies to extend their lines and to patronize the railroads that already exist, and you will remove the prime cause of inbreeding, which is isolation. -
 This leads to the question of general hygienic improvement. Our farming people, in the neediest neighborhoods, are a sicklY sort. The field laborer looks older than he is; his wife is pinched and yellow; and the country girl-so buxom and red-cheeked as she appears on the stage and in sentimen- tai songs-is in real life ''an organic compound of pork and pie" The diff. | ticulty is purely economic. Bad fOOc comes of bad earnings; the men over work because they can't afford "help;' the women have almost no exercise because the town is too poor to bulle sidewalks. The whole village, with al the doctor. A farmer, instead of con sulting physician, ''goes out and con suits fence," and reading there thu big-lettered advertisements of various patent medicines, he hopefully invests Or, perhaps, having sated his thirs for that sort of "treatment, he ap pealS to the medical wisdom of a Kick apOO Indian or falls into the hands o some travelling quack. The main poin is ''to get cured cheap" Any bOoby trap that is inexpensive enough vii easily catch it's victim, who is not onl, left unhelped, but is generally not ; little injured. It is true, of course that country people live forever, bu how they suffer!
 A further problem comes up whel you see how pitifully ugly country life is. The church is bare and fOrbidding the town hall shabby, the schoolhouse beautiless, and the homes as dull with out as they are vulgarly cheap ant tawdry within. Rocks, fences, barn and horse sheds blaze with the glarins advertisements of quack medicines Nobody cares how hideouS the tOwl becomes any more than he cares hoy hideously he dresses. A general slack ness prevails-old carts standing il dOorwaYs, broken tools littering tn tery Strewn hither and yon. Indeed the sheer ugljness of a decayed villag adds by contrast meretricious glam our to urban existence and serves a an incentive incentive wher incentives already abound-towar' bOlting away citywardS. Hence tn crying need for a village improvement society. Start one, then, and whel you have made your rural hamlet tn prettiest in all the countryside, see the change won't act with the othe changes to check the outgoing tide o population and to invite newcomers gun to relieve rustic poverty by pro viding profitable employment. M own experience may serve as rathe illuminative example. 1 announced
 mass meeting to found village i'm provement society. Result, three lii tie boys and six little girls assemble' in the Town hall. tried again. Re suit, one little boy, two little girls an a crusty old gentleman; the old gen tleman indulged in furious tirad against the village storekeeper, wh : twas the worst nuisance diStigurin this here taown, an .throwin' empt
 boxes all 'raound;" the little childrel repeated the speech where it would d suit: large attendance, composed o embattled farmers-the retainers o the crusty old gentleman lined u against the retainers of the villag StOrekeeper; society organized and O1 ficerS chosen, amidst much glOWerinp but when it became evident that eacl member must pay an initiation fee c soc, the society promptly disbandec
 You see, had begun at the wron end, showing the burghers how t spend their money before I had show printer is wiser; he has taken tn mule by the muzzle, whereas 1 ha
 taken him by the tail.
 And l confess 1 am not littl
 proud of this metaphor of the mule It fits. And piouS mule it is, tOt Country people are fatalistS, holdin the crude Calvanistic idea of predesti nation: They say tacitly, "God mad : thie village, God ran it down at tn
 heel, and from the beginning Go
 mapped out it's melancholy history , You sin against God if you suggest in provement. Remember what happer ed to UzZah when he tried to stud the art of GOd.' That such philo! ophy should have taken so deep an immovable a hold upon the villager
 may seem astonishing: but observe
 fatalism is the religion of the amb
 tionless, and for generations the an
 bilious have been getting out of tn decayed hamlet.
 But still there is hope-hope il bright abundance. Plenty of norma children are growing up in the mos