Country people are prudish and they cover with a strict reserve all discussion of the moral relations of men and women. Yet in the same communities there is loose private conversation and coarse references are common. The strict standard of the household prevails within its limits. Books and magazines must not discuss, however seriously, the problems of life. But in the intercourse of the community there is not the same care. The moral life of country people requires cultivation of the leisure hours, the casual talk, the occasional meetings of men and women, and especially of young people. The sale of votes in every election is a fixed quantity in the life of certain country towns. It is to be counted on each year. The number of votes for sale in each town is a known proportion of the whole, and through certain counties the selling of votes is the political factor everywhere present. These uniform facts point to a common cause. That cause is the degeneration of a proportion of the rural population into peasantry. The growth of a peasant population in America is surely our greatest danger. A peasantry is a rural population whose moral and spiritual state are controlled by their material states. There may be rich peasants, though most peasants are poor. Peasants are a specialized class, incapable of self-government and controlled by some political masters who exercise for them essential rights of citizenship. The peasants in Europe are the last to receive the ballot. In America they are the first to surrender the ballot by selling their votes. A young minister called to a country parish denounced the sale of votes, in his first year, and publicly fixed the whole blame on a prominent political leader of the town, who was there present in the church. His criticism was resented by the whole community. He was right, and so were they. It is well to denounce the purchase of votes, but the duty of the country church to Americanize the peasant class is the greater duty. The presence of such a class in a town infallibly leads to this iniquity. The sale of votes is as bad as the sale of woman's virtue, and both have an automatic tendency to degrade the population. The danger sign of peasantry is a degraded standard of life. In this town there is one household in which nobody works but the mother. "How they live beats me," is the public comment of the neighbors. Through the winter into that house are crowded the father and mother, two sons and two daughters, the husband of one daughter and their two children, with three other small children, whose presence in the house is due to the loose good nature of the family. There is an indolent uncle of these children. None of the household follows any gainful occupation. The table is furnished with potatoes and pork. The attraction of the household is the easy, loose, good-nature of all its members. There is no one to complain of the indolence of the five grown men who lounge about through the winter days.