176. Broad Opportunities.—A leader such as that described has an almost unlimited field of opportunity to mould social life. In the city the opportunity for leadership may seem to be larger, but few can dominate more than a small group. In the country the start may be slower and more discouraging, but the goal reaches out ahead. From better agriculture the leader may draw on the people to better social ideals, to a new appreciation of education and broad culture, to a truer understanding of ethics and religion. He may refashion institutions that may express the new in modern terms. But when this is accomplished his work is not done. He may reach out over the countryside and make his village a nucleus for wider progress through a whole county. Even then his influence is not spent. The rural communities in America are feeders of the cities; in them is the nursery of the men and women who are to become leaders in the larger circles of business and professional life, in journalism and literature, in religion and social reform. Many a rural teacher or pastor has built himself into the affections of a boy or a girl, incarnating for them the noblest ideals and stimulating them to achievement and service in an environment that he himself could never hope to fill and with a power of influence that he could never expect to wield. The avenues of opportunity are becoming more numerous. The teacher and the minister have advantages of leadership over the county Young Men's Christian Association secretary and the village nurse, but since personal qualities are the determining factors, no man or woman, whatever their position, can make good the claim without proving ability by actual achievement. Any man or woman who enters a particular community for the first time, or returns to it from college, may become a dynamo of blessing to it. There waits for such a leader the loyalty of the boys who may be won for noble manhood, of the girls who may become worthy mothers of a better generation of future citizens, of men and women for whom the glamour of youth has passed into the sober reality of maturer years, but who are still capable of seeing visions of a richer life that they and their children may yet enjoy. There are ready to his hand the institutions that have played an important part, however inefficiently in rural life, the heritage of social custom and community character that have come down from the past, and the material environment that helps or hinders but does not control human relations and human deeds. These constitute the measure of his world; these are clay for the potter and instruments for his working; upon him is laid the responsibility of the product.
READING REFERENCES
Curtis: Play and Recreation for the Open Country, pages 195-259.
Fiske: The Challenge of the Country, pages 225-266.
Cooley: Human Nature and the Social Order, pages 283-325.
McNutt: "Ten Years in a Country Church," World's Work, December, 1910.
McKeever: Farm Boys and Girls, pages 129-145.
Carney: Country Life and the Country School, pages 1-17, 302-327.