_Lack of Wholesome Social Life for Young People_ In three adjoining townships in Indiana there are 21 country churches, all but four of which are dead or dying. The average membership is 52. One of the local leaders significantly said, "We don't believe in any social life in our church. Socialism never saved anybody." Exactly. Such churches ought to die and certainly will. The perfectly natural craving in all healthy young people for social life is a fact the rural districts fail to appreciate. By years of drudgery the farmers and their wives may starve to death this social craving in themselves. The work-slave forgets how to play and outlives his social hungers. But his children are not born that way. They have natural human instincts and appetites and these imperiously demand opportunity for expression. The religion that imagines that these things are born of Satan and must be repressed, is a religion of death not life. It is worse than useless for the church to discourage the social life among its young people. If it tries to starve their social hungers and furnishes no chance in the church for young people to meet freely in friendly intercourse, those young people will meet elsewhere, as surely as the moon shines. To put the ban of the church on dancing and all other popular amusements, and then offer no substitute whatever, is not only unreasoning cruelty, it is pure foolishness. You cannot hope to dam a stream and make no other outlet. Undoubtedly the country dance is usually a bad social enterprise; but the only way to fight it successfully is with social competition, not opposition. The loyalty of young people to the church often begins when they discover the church people really understand their social cravings and are doing something sensible to meet them. Happy the village where the young people have all their best times under Christian leadership. But unfortunately rural life is seriously lacking, both in and out of the church, in social opportunities; and the condition is far worse than in generations past. To begin with, farmers' families are perhaps only two-thirds as large as they used to be.[25] There are fewer children in the home and in the school. Farm machinery has displaced three-fourths of the hired men. Fewer older boys are really needed on the father's farm; so they are free to go to the city where the social life strongly attracts them. The same is all too true of the farm daughters.