This fundamental fact, so obvious, yet so seldom fully recognized, gave form and force to the Conference on Education in the South, recently held in Richmond. Farmers, business men, country preachers, officials, writers, editors, physicians, plain citizens, and school teachers—some 2,300—met together to discuss the problems which are common to them all. Wonder of wonders, the “conference” was a real conference; spell binding addresses were conspicuous by their absence. To a remarkable extent, the program consisted of concise and vigorous statements of actual accomplishments and constructive pleas for needed accomplishments. At one meeting Virginia Pearl Moore of Tennessee would tell how a mountain girl had made at the cost of a dollar or so a home canner with which she had won a prize—and rebuilt a whole community; at another E. M. Tousley of Minnesota would tell how the farmers’ corporation at Dassel in his state had procured for the consumer his share of the price of his crops—and rounded out and made full the life of the neighborhood. These men and women who met at Richmond had their faces set toward the village and the open country. They realized that American life was becoming a pyramid set wrong end up. To turn the pyramid over, so that at the bottom supporting the whole structure will be a satisfied and satisfying country life, was the large task to which these southerners gave vigorous attention. The conference took note of the fact that the “great American contortion” of the fed trying to support the feeder cannot be perpetuated. It realized, too, that the general assumption that all country people are or are to become men is wholly wrong; that it is many generations past the time when in an organized and comprehensive way, educational and social agencies should have begun to help the farmer’s wife and daughter so that they could help themselves. To be sure, wife and daughter will not have their due until the farmer is economically efficient, but what are the chances that he will increase his yield if he has to eat poorly cooked food, to say nothing of putting up with a nagging wife and a discontented daughter? As the most tangible and immediate method of making the farmer more efficient economically, the conference emphasized better business methods. Here again Dr. Albert P. Bourland, executive secretary, showed discernment, in that he related the subject of agricultural co-operation and better farm credits to the other topics discussed—school, church, home and business in the large. The conference had the right to preach co-operation for it was practicing it! All the discussions were illuminated by honesty—the recognition of problems and the characterization of evils by their right names. Indeed, this meeting made the few visitors from north of Mason and Dixon’s line again wish that in their sections of the country there were the same hearty frankness joined to tact.