Excerpt from Constructive Rural SociologyInterest in the problems of rural life is wide-spread, but it is too generally uninformed. City people praise a life close to nature but avoid the life itself. Alarmists predict the early depopulation of the countryside. Optimists count upon macadamised roads, telephones, rural free delivery and moving-pictures at the school-house to make the farming population happy and contented. Despondent citizens pre dict a scarcity of food products and an early dependence upon Russia and the Argentine. Still others querulously ask why the urban unemployed refuse to accept large wages and a comfortable home as labourers upon the farms, or why the dwellers in tenements do not eagerly seek the soil and add to the national wealth.There is a zeal for agricultural education. Experiment stations, colleges of agriculture, agricultural high schools are being multiplied, and even in the common schools agri cultural subjects are being introduced. There is a deep cuing conviction that if only agricultural knowledge and skill can be widely distributed, and if the young can be given insight and enthusiasm for farming pursuits, our problems will be solved.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.