One can scarcely become deeply interested in the future of his own child without coming intimately into touch with the child welfare problems at large. Even country parents, isolated though they may be, will discover that serious study of the matter of bringing up a family of good children will require that they study the lives of other human young. Moreover, they will need the use of other children as "laboratory" material for training their own. All this will gradually lead the way to a fuller social sympathy in such parents and to the inculcation of more wholesome social ideals in the minds of their offspring. Finally, the rural parents who are seeking a full and adequate development of the young members of their own family will most probably see their way clear to assume a helpful leadership of the young people of the neighborhood as advocated in Chapter X of this volume. While many agencies for the betterment of rural youth have been discussed,--such as the County Y.M.C.A., the Boy Scout Movement, and the Social and Economic Clubs,--the neighborhood which has at least one of these agencies intensively at work may be considered fortunate. And it may be said that such a neighborhood is well on the way to economic improvement as well as social improvement. THE OUTLOOK VERY PROMISING Throughout the United States there is being manifested a general tendency to accept the theory that our human stock is relatively sound. While there are seemingly large numbers of the criminal, delinquent, and dependent classes, they are in reality comparatively few in proportion to the entire population. And when we accept the estimate of the experts that about ninety per cent of the cases included in the classes just named are preventable through wise foresight and training, the outlook for a better race of human beings becomes most cheering. "The proper study of mankind is man," says the poet. But for many generations we have regarded this statement as mere poetry and not necessarily truth. Our policy up to the recent past has been rather this: The proper study of mankind is everything _except_ man, leaving the all-important problems of child-rearing to the decisions of wise old grand-mothers and debating societies. But a radical change has come, and that within this present generation. Men and women highly trained in the colleges and universities are now applying their scientific methods to the study of man with no less zeal and earnestness than that which has characterized the student of the non-human problems for many generations of time. [Illustration: PLATE. XXXII. FIG. 39.--Sowing the seed, all by herself. FIG. 40.--Thinning the vegetables. New York Scenes.]