The discontent of rural parents with reference to their environment or occupation, due to their natural urban tendencies, or to their failure to succeed, or to the hard conditions of their farm life, has some influence in sending rural youth to the city. Accidental or incidental suggestion often repeated is especially penetrating in childhood, and no one who knows rural people can fail to notice parents who are prone to such suggestions expressing rural discontent. In the same way, suspiciousness or jealousy with reference to particular neighbors or associates leads, when it is often expressed before children, to general suspiciousness or trivial sensitiveness. The emotional obstacles to the get-together spirit--obstacles which vex the rural worker--in no small degree have their origin in suggestion given in childhood. The country is concerned with another source of suggestion which has more to do with the efficiency of the rural mind than its content, and that is the matter of sex. Students of rural life apparently give this element less attention than it deserves. As Professor Ross has pointed out in "South of Panama," for example, the precocious development of sex tends to enfeeble the intellect and to prevent the largest kind of mental capacity. It is unsafe at present to generalize regarding the differences between country and city life in matters of sex, but it is certainly true, when rural life is empty of commanding interests and when it is coarsened by low traditions and the presence of defective persons, that there is a precocious emphasis of sex. This is expressed both by early marrying and by loose sex relations. It is doubtful whether the commercializing of sex attraction in the city has equal mental significance, for certainly science clearly shows that it is the precocious expression of sex that has largest psychic dangers. In so far as the environment of a rural community tends to bring the sexual life to early expression, we have every reason to suppose that at this point at least the influence of the community is such as to tend toward a comparative mental arrest or a limiting of mental ability, for which the country later suffers socially. Each student of rural life must, from experience and observation, evaluate for himself the significance of this sex precociousness. When sex interests become epidemic and the general tendency is toward precocious sex maturity, the country community is producing for itself men and women of inferior resources as compared with their natural possibilities. Even the supposed social wholesomeness of earlier marrying in the country must be scrutinized with the value of sex sublimation during the formative years clearly in mind. PSYCHIC CAUSES OF RURAL MIGRATION IX PSYCHIC CAUSES OF RURAL MIGRATION