So it is with most of the laws and movements of America. The rural sections have but to will them and they become in due time established facts. An idea merely has to take root in the mind of some socially oppressed individual. He talks it over with his friends at lodge meeting or during an informal hour at a board of trade meeting. He receives encouragement. He imparts the idea to his wife, who carries it to her literary club, where it is given further airing. It spreads to the volunteer firemen’s clubrooms, to the grange picnics and the church socials. It is discussed in the pulpits. Finally it reaches the ears of the village and county politicians who, impressed by its appeal to the moral force of the community, decide after hours in the back room of the post-office or the national bank to interest the congressman or assemblyman from their district in its merits as a possible law upon the statute books. The congressman and assemblyman, acutely aware of the side on which their bread is buttered, agree to do “everything within their power” to put the measure through. Having the assistance of other congressmen and assemblymen, most of whom are from rural districts, their tasks assuredly are not difficult. Before the appearance of the automobile and the movie upon the national horizon, the small town was chiefly characterized by a distinctly rural and often melancholy peacefulness. A gentle air of depression hung over it, destructive of the ambitious spirit of youth and yet, by very reason of its existence, influencing this spirit to seek adventure and livelihood in wider fields. Amusements were few and far between. It was the day of the quilting party, of the Sunday promenade in the cemetery, of buggy-riding, of the ice-cream festival and the spelling bee. The bucolic note was ever present. Such an environment, while joyous to the small boy, became hopelessly dull and lifeless to the youth of vitality and imagination. Restlessness with it tormented him day and night until it grew into an obsession. Especially did he dislike Sunday, its funereal quiet with stores closed and other possible avenues of excitement and adventure forbidden. He began to cherish dreams of a life strange and teeming in distant cities. As he grew older and a measure of independence came to him he fled, provided there was no business established by a patient and hard-working ancestry which might lure him into remaining home. And even that did not always attract him. He was compelled to go by his very nature--a nature that desired a change from the pall of confining and circumscribed realism, the masks of respectability everywhere about him, the ridiculous display of caste, that saw a rainbow of fulfilled ideals over the hills, that demanded, in a word, romance.