Too long we have been training young people in the school and in the home to struggle for the best of everything--a sort of rivalry that results in envy, jealousy, and strife, and a falling apart where there should be cooperation and sympathy and a spirit of mutual helpfulness. The craze for clothes, the glare of the electric lights, and the lure of the cheap theater have struck the country people and are drawing away much of the best young blood there. It seems that we have over-done this thing of pointing to the top and urging our young people to scramble for that, until as a result no one is looking for a place to serve, while all are looking for a place to shine. Now, there may be "plenty of room at the top" for selfish scrambling, but in some respects the top is woefully over-crowded. On the other hand, there is a vast amount of good room at the bottom, acres of it, and we might well commend it to every one who may be imbued with the idea of doing some effective work in the world. All over the broad, open country, in thousands of rural districts, the situation at the bottom is literally crying out for constructive workers who will come in there with their good courage, their scientific training, and in the name of the Most High get down among the people and the common things in the midst of which the people live and lay a substantial foundation for a new and beautiful structure--an edifice erected out of the plain materials to be found in any ordinary rural community, and that by means of transforming such things and making them contributive to the high and lofty spirit-purposes for which they are really designed. RURAL CHILD-REARING We are not half awake as yet to the meaning and possibilities of the rural community as a place for rearing children. The city environment ripens youths too fast and too early and works all the spontaneity and aggressiveness out of the boys and girls before their mature judgments are ready to function. As a result of this city hot-bed, we have as a type the blase sort of young man, and a young woman who is overly smart in respect to the "proper things to do." Either of them has little power of initiative and less power of persistence. One of the greatest virtues of the somewhat isolated rural home is that it matures human character more slowly and keeps the boys and girls fresh and "green" and spontaneous while there is being gradually worked into their characters the habit of industry and the power of doing constructive work.