In one of its districts, nearly half of the twenty or thirty ministers of the largest denomination in the State did not have a common school education. It is usual to find ministers intellectually inferior to a number of families whom they are supposed to lead and teach. In some districts a considerable proportion of the preachers have had no more than three or four grades of common school instruction. Some cannot write their own names correctly. Accordingly religious education is neglected. The people apparently have been untouched by the general advance in religious knowledge during the past century. Many intelligent people in the Eighteen Counties deplore these conditions and would be glad to have churches of a different type. But it is also very common to find among the more prosperous, especially in the fertile river valleys, a spirit of utter indifference towards religion, and often of gross materialism. Under such circumstances it is not surprising to find that in several sections much hostility to institutional religion exists. It is given expression by rural hoodlums who cut to pieces harnesses and slash tires belonging to ministers or laymen who attend religious gatherings, while in some communities stones are thrown through the windows of buildings where public worship is being held. While it is true that out of the poorest and most unfortunate districts bright boys and girls frequently emerge, escape their surroundings, and become good citizens, it is none the less true that a large proportion of those who remain have no reasonable chance for wholesome development. The bad influence of the Eighteen Counties extends far beyond their borders. Out of them many farm laborers have gone to communities to the north and northwest, often with deplorable results to the social, religious, and moral conditions of the communities where they are employed. (See Table B.) It is calculated that no less than 61,000 persons emigrated in the ten-year period from 1900 to 1910 from the strictly rural districts of _sixteen_ of the Eighteen Counties. In Madison, a fertile county near the center of the State, in an area sixteen miles long and from seven to eleven miles wide, there are three closed and no active churches. One of the causes of this condition is the fact that the farm laborers imported by the owners of large tracts of lands were never made familiar, before they came, with a normal type of religion. These men come from the Eighteen Counties or from sections across the Ohio River where the conditions are very much the same. In parts of several other counties the situation brought about by similar immigration is extremely bad.