Economic pressure forces attention. The pain penalty, the product of bad adjustment to the demands of the occasion, commands respect. The farmer feels this pressure of economic conditions just as any other man of business. He is not free to isolate himself and enjoy the economic security of fifty years ago. Any indifference that he may assume toward the business world is likely to bring him economic punishment which will teach him his economic dependence as no argument could. It follows that the farmer's attention is driven from family and neighborhood affairs out into the modern world with all its complexities. He thinks in social terms, because from experience he has learned his social dependence in matters that concern the pocketbook. With painful evidences of his economic interrelations in mind, he tends to become tolerant regarding movements that attempt to socialize his community life. He realizes that the independence of his fathers has gone not to return and that his happiness as well as his prosperity depend upon his opportunity to become well established in social relations. No experience in the business of farming is so impressive as that of membership in a cooperative enterprise. Whether the undertaking fails or succeeds, it certainly teaches the member the meaning of social interrelations. Often it fails because the mental and moral preparation for successful working together is lacking. This is not strange, for rural life in the past has done little to build up a social viewpoint and the strain placed upon individual purposes in any cooperative effort is necessarily great. Cooperation is never so easy as it sounds in theory, but economic conditions are making it necessary in many rural localities if farming is to continue a profitable industry. Under pressure the farmers will develop the ability to cooperate. In this they are like other people, for cooperation seldom comes until circumstances press hard upon people who hopelessly try to meet individually conditions that can be successfully coped with only by a cooperative attack. We therefore must not pass hasty judgment upon the failures in cooperative efforts among country people. All such experiences have some part in the better socializing of rural thinking. Without opposition to those who are placing emphasis upon other lines of rural advance, as social workers, we must keep ever before rural leadership the enormous importance that social conditions have for the prosperity, wholesomeness, sanity, and happiness of rural life. Every agency that has social value for country life must realize to the fullest degree possible its socializing functions if it covets for itself fundamental social service. THE WORLD WAR AND RURAL LIFE XI THE WORLD WAR AND RURAL LIFE