It is important to notice that, although legal divorce is frowned upon, there is often a considerable social indifference to the loose living together of men and women. Two clergymen at work in a rural community of about a thousand people recently stated that there were in the community at least forty unmarried people living together as husband and wife. Later, I was informed by another resident of the town that the clergymen had not exaggerated the situation. And yet I doubt not that the community had a rather low divorce record. It is very interesting how the moral code of a community may be strict at one point, while lenient at another. In some rural communities, at least, one may find an inconsistent public opinion that expresses very rigid hostility to divorce and little practical opposition to lax sex relations. The low attitude toward the sex element in marriage and the coarse viewpoint disclosed by conversation often surprise the country visitor who is not acquainted with the occasional inconsistency of rural ethics. Judging the standing of married life by infrequent divorces and rather early marriage, he is painfully disconcerted to discover that the marriage ideal is nevertheless mean and lacking in social inspiration. A third criticism is deserved by the rural family, namely, its failure to make use of its social opportunity. It is easy to demonstrate the greater normality of the rural family as compared with the urban family, with respect to the family conditions that make possible an efficient home life. It is not always true, however, that these superior family opportunities are of social value. It is true that children are generally valued in the rural home. This is, at times, for the supposed economic help the children are expected to be to the parents, rather than because of an unselfish regard for the children, as a moral opportunity. It is true that the home generally counts for more in the life of the country child than in that of the city child. This by no means proves that the greater home influence is always a social asset. The home may penetrate the child's life deeply and yet affect it badly. If the home means more, the character of the home comes to have a larger meaning; what the significance of the home influence may be, is determined by the type of the home. A greater opportunity for family fellowship is naturally offered by the rural home, but this fellowship opportunity works both ways. The closer contact of all the members of the family often results in bringing all of them down to a low level of culture. The base attitude of one or of both parents toward life may poison each child's aspiration as he advances into maturity. The neighborhood relation, which brings several families into close contact, often permits a vicious child of one family to initiate many children from various homes into sex experiences in such an unwholesome way that purity of mind becomes very difficult later on, whether the illicit