Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/835

 PROBLEM OF RURAL COMMUNITY 815

confined to New England. Every state that shows a marked decrease in rural population reveals an accompanying decrease in farm values. This loss, moreover, increases with the farmer who remains. The road deteriorates. The taxes increase. As the roads deteriorate, the farmer is pushed farther and farther back from the village. The value of the farm falls in propor- tion; the cost of transportation increases, until in some com- munities, it is said, it costs the farmer as much to haul his produce six miles as he pays the railroad to carry it five hundred.

Moreover, the social, intellectual, and religious life likewise degenerates as the farmer is pushed in time farther back from the village. The church and school have always been prized for their value to inspire a longing for the highest life. It is a great loss for a community when the standards of these institu- tions fall. But as the migration grows and the roads deteriorate, this inevitably follows. The belief is growing today that the little country schoolhouse offers small opportunity for the far- mers' children, and must be abandoned.

The church, not endowed with government support as is the school, suffers still more. Deprived of the best element of the community through removal, separated from the farming com- munity through poor roads, the church rapidly goes to pieces. It is said with authority that there are ninety-five towns in Maine where no religious services are held, and that there are more villages in Illinois without the gospel than in any other state in the Union. Over one-half of Vermont, so purely agri- cultural and intensely American, never goes to church. Yet the church there spends annually one dollar and a half for every man, woman, and child in the population. Statistics show that people living over two miles from church in fourteen of the states east of the Mississippi river never go to church. This is largely true of the large rural populations in the South and West as well as the North. " During the past thirty years," said Josiah Strong in 1893, "thousands of churches have died from exhaus- tion in the rural districts of the United States." This is seen especially in the back towns of New England, which have wandered far from the Puritan traditions of their founders and