_A voluntary movement._ The interest in country life is gradually assuming shape as a voluntary movement outside of government, as it properly should do. It should be in the best sense a popular movement; for if it is not a really popular movement, it can have little vitality, and exert little effect on the mass of the people. As it gets under motion, certain things will crystallize out of it for government to do; and governments will do them. As a pure matter of propagation, such a voluntary organized movement would have the greatest value; for, in these days, simple publicity often accomplishes more than legislative action. _The international phase._ If the interest in rural economics and sociology is world wide, then we should have international institutions to represent it. Several organizations now represent or include certain phases. We need such an institution not so much for propaganda as for research. A Country Life Institute has been proposed by Sir Horace Plunkett, who is so well known and admired by all students of rural situations through his far-seeing work in Ireland and his many fruitful suggestions for America. It would seem that here is an unusual opportunity for a great and productive foundation. SOME INTER-RELATIONS OF CITY AND COUNTRY Every one knows that city populations are increasing more rapidly than country populations. By some persons, this of itself is considered to be a cause for much alarm. But the relative size of the populations is not so disturbing as the economic and social relations existing between these two phases of civilization. _Some contrasts of town folk and country folk._ We know that farming is the primitive and underlying business of mankind. As human desires have arisen, other occupations have developed to satisfy the increasing needs and aspirations, the products of the earth have been assembled and changed by manufacture into a thousand forms, and these departures have resulted in more refined products, a more resourceful civilization, and a more sensitive people. Complex developments have been taken out of and away from agriculture, and have left it with the simple and undifferentiated products and the elemental contact with nature. The farmer is largely a residuary force in society; this explains his conservatism.