The inaccessibility of the rural school has always been one of its greatest disadvantages. In a large proportion of cases, a walk of from a mile to a mile and a half along country roads or across cultivated fields has been required to reach the schoolhouse. During inclement weather, or when deep snow covers the ground, this distance proves almost prohibitive for all the smaller children. Wet feet and drenched clothing have been followed by severe colds, coughs, bronchitis, or worse, and the children have not only suffered educationally, but been endangered physically as well. It has been found in all instances that public conveyance of pupils to the consolidated schools greatly increases rural school patronage. It makes the school accessible. The regular wagon service does away with the "hit-and-miss" method of determining for each succeeding day whether it is advisable for the child to start for school. So important is this factor in securing attendance, that a careful study by Knorr[3] of the attendance in Ohio district and consolidated schools shows twenty-seven per cent more of the total school population in school under the influence of public conveyance and other features peculiar to consolidation than under the district system. He concludes that, broadly speaking, by a system of consolidated schools with public conveyance, rural school attendance can be increased by at least one fourth. The life in the typical rural school is not sufficiently interesting and attractive to secure a strong hold upon the pupils. The dreary ugliness of the physical surroundings has already been referred to. And even in districts where the building and grounds have been made reasonably attractive, there is yet wanting a powerful factor--the influence of the social incentive that comes from numbers. In hundreds of our rural schools the daily attendance is less than a dozen pupils, frequently not representing more than three or four families. The classes can therefore contain not more than two or three pupils, and often only one. There is no possibility of organizing games, or having the fun and frolic possible to larger groups of children. Add to this the fact that the teaching is often spiritless and uninspiring, and the reason becomes still more plain why so many rural children drop out of school with scarcely the rudiments of an education. Here, again, the consolidated school, with its attractive building, its improved equipment, its larger body of pupils, and its better teaching, appears as a solution of the difficulty. For it does what the present type of district school can never do--it makes school life interesting and attractive to its pupils, and this brings to bear upon them one of the strongest incentives to continue in school and secure an education.