everywhere. Not every farmer or shopkeeper even in populous eastern Massachusetts, is right on a trolley road, but every one can have the telephone in his house or office, and very many of them do. No man, of course, who is on the telephone is out of the world. He can call up, or be called up by, any one of hundreds of thousands of other New Englanders. The family ten or fifteen miles out has many of the essential advantages of being in the city. The extraordinary alertness of the telephone companies in taking steps to bring forward their ideal of an era in which practically everybody in the United States can be communicated with over the lines of one interconnected system has projected the telephone into every nook and corner of New England. They have had abundant problems to solve. Installations in scantily peopled districts are expensive, and yet the rates must be low to secure business. Nothing however has checked. the solicitor's zealous efforts to convince the farm-dweller that he can get quickest to the city without leaving his own house. The services, in some instances, have been established by coöperation between the telephone people and the agriculturists. The poles have been erected and the line strung by local labor, generally performed in the less busy months. The item of labor cost in construction has in this way been reduced to a minimum. The local traffic is frequently carried on by the farmers' company, while a special arrangement admits of toll and long distance connection with the far-reaching Bell lines. More often, however, in this section it has. been discovered to be most satisfactory for the telephone companies

themselves to push their own services as they can, making the best possible inducements for rural residents to urbanize their business methods and social avocations.

A great annexation of territory by telephone has been taking place in the past few months in Rhode Island, where the Providence telephone company has been securing subscribers in practically every hamlet, from Watch Hill and Weekapaug up to the borders of that beautiful Massachusetts water, Lake Chaugbunagungamaug. A more telephonically unified district than little Rhode Island would be hard to find. The utility has done as much certainly as any one agency to make city and state identical. It is making "rural" and "rustic" no longer synonymous.

Connecticut displays the same phenomenon of widening spheres of urban influence. The isolation of wooded hills and winding valleys is disappearing. The state has long been filled with manufacturing cities, separated by intermediate stretches where the early New England conditions have been persistent. These latter are still rural, so far as charm goes, but they are no longer isolated. The whole state is bound together with an intricate network of telephone wires. As was brought out at a hearing before a committee of the Connecticut legislature a few months ago, apropos of an attempt to introduce into local telephony the extremely undesirable principle of competition, "It appears that probably nowhere else in the civilized world, and certainly not in the United States, is there a territory of the same dimensions as that covered by the Southern New England telephone company where the

Although such a comparison may appear invidious to other districts of New England, such as eastern or central Massachusetts or southwestern Maine, which are also proud of their records in ready adoption of this as of other public utilities, it is at any rate true that one travelling for business of pleasure through southern New England is constantly surprised at the evidences everywhere of use made of the telephone, not only in the cities and villages but in the most isolated settlements. In some of the hill towns of the western part of the state where there is a considerable population of summer residents, the proportion of telephones to population is better than one in ten-a rather unusual development, although the companies are looking forward to a day when there will be throughout the country an average proportion of one telephone to five persons. For the record that is being achieved in Connecticut, the industrial character of the state and the freedom from competition under legislative restrictions which have. made it incumbent on the operating company to give efficient service, are no doubt mainly responsible.

Throughout rural New England one is everywhere impressed with the fact that most of the suburbanlooking farmhouses have telephone connection. If a place is particularly prosperous and well kept up, look for the familiar wires running in from a pole in front of the house. The farmhouse, on the other hand, that is in a condition to be renovated or abandoned, rarely has the utility. So, too, the prosperous appearing country factory, employing a few score of people, always has

means of instantaneous communication with the buying and selling agencies of the outside world. The mill, on the other hand, that looks as if the next pay roll must be the last, is almost certain to be innocent of the modern convenience.

An

The amusing and strange anecdotes that go the rounds of the newspapers,showing the usefulness of the country telephone, illustrate absolutely the theme of this article. The tendency is altogether to bring those things which the city especially esteems within easy reach of the whole section so that feelings of local consciousness disappear. incident recorded the other day shows how the services of the urban physician have been made available almost anywhere by telephone. A man had been seriously hurt in the Maine woods and, in the absence of any practicing physician, his doctor in a city several hundred miles away was called up. Apprised of the nature of the injuries, the physician was able to perform a rather difficult. surgical operation by proxy, giving directions step by step to the patient's friends, who did the actual work as prescribed. In all medical history there has perhaps not been a more remarkable projection of skill than that.

And everywhere in country homes one listens to similar stories of the value of the instrument which Dr. Bell invented. The wife of a sick farmer insists on its being put in so that she may be enabled to summons the doctor at any moment, day or night, and she finds its connection with the nearby city so invaluable that she cannot dispense with it after her husband's recovery. The storekeeper installs a pay sta

tion, and it earns for itself good sums from people of the neighborhood who have never appreciated what it means to save their time. The telephone is in short about the greatest urbanizer on record.

Agricultural progress in New England is of a sort to make the modern farmer a city man rather than a rustic. That people for many years have been moving from the farms into the towns, everybody knows. That still other people have been moving from the more distant and less desirable farms into those close to the cities, has not perhaps been so generally noticed. Prosperity waits upon suburban agriculture. You don't as a rule find much degeneration within a radius of ten miles of a sizable city. The farmer within that circle has his market all made for him. Whatever of the necessities of life will thrive on his land he can easily sell in the adjacent city. The outlying districts, meantime, tend more and more to revert to woodland-a generally favorable tendency, for the growing of timber in accordance with scientific principles is likely in the near future to be exceedingly profitable in many parts of New England. Cultivation of white pine is already in progress, and the ever increasing demand for chestnut wood for telephone and telegraph poles and railway ties makes it desirable that owners of hillside property should clear out the less valuable hardwoods-the oaks, birches and hickories-in favor of this industrially indispensable lumber.

The work of the agricultural colleges and experiment stations is assisting this tendency toward the urbanization of farm life. The lead ers of agricultural practice have

probably come to understand pretty well the extreme hopefulness of much more of it. Investigations now going on at Amherst, Durham, Kingston and other stations especially encourage farming for the nearby markets. The acres of rockstrewn ridges that were in rye or oats in our grandfathers' time are now in timber. It's a question today of products for the city's needs that can be raised within easy hauling distance of the city-milk and butter;eggs and poultry; plums, apples and peaches; lettuce, celery and cauliflower; roses, violets, pansies and chrysanthemums.

The agricultural problem is one entirely of adjustment. At the Hatch experiment station, connected with the Massachusetts Agricultural college, there is going on at this writing a series of investigations into the composition of the soils of Massachusetts with a view to ascertaining with scientific precision their adaptability to different crops. This research work is more fundamental, and may lead to larger results, than the layman might at first thought suppose, for it involves the application of a principle that has only lately come into general acceptance: namely, that the mechanical composition of a soil (that is, the relative size of the particles of matter composing it) are more important than the chemical composition in determining its productivity. You cannot take any old sand heap and by application of the appropriate fertilizers make it produce any crop that will grow in the climate; you have to start with assurance that the sand is of the right quality. What can be effectively raised in a given region is to a large extent predetermined by glacial deposits

dropped in the ice age. It is this particular, almost fatalistic, character which has made the soil of Cape Cod good for cranberries, of the Connecticut valley for tobacco and of the Boston basin for celery and lettuce.

Once the possible productivity of each geological district in New England has been determined analytically, waste of effort will be inexcusable. The highest use will then be made as to an extent it already is made of the land in the neighborhood of the cities, and the population resident on the land will be less and less class-distinct from the people of the town.

A further exhibit might be made of facts showing that the New England countryside is not only being urbanized, but is becoming cosmopolitan as well; though that is

rather another story. The polygot population of the manufacturing cities is steadily overflowing upon the land. About Boston in every direction the Italians are taking up the cheaper acres and making them productive. The Poles have entered all the valleys of Connecticut and western Massachusetts. Greek mill

operatives of Lowell and Lawrence are found living on farms in the adjoining townships. The white Portuguese and black Cape Verde inlanders have spread from New Bedford throughout the Cape Cod region. Among the hills around Fitchburg you will find industrious Finish families. these alien races undoubtedly brings problems which is a part of American optimism to believe will be solved sucessfully.

The presence of

T

HE rural degeneracy horror has lately bobbed up in a new and particularly sensational form. We have heard a good deal about the decay of religion in New Hampshire, about decadent decadent hill towns in western Massachusetts, and about lost villages in Connecticut. This time the cry comes from Maine. Mr. George S. Wasson, an uncommonly painstaking student of social conditions, analyzes the depravity of a Maine fishing village and gives us the result in a novel called "The Green Shay." There is the usual shriek of disapproval, the usual charge of falsehood, the usual branding of the author as a calamity-howler out gunning for notoriety. Meanwhile Mr. Bliss Perry and Mr. William Dean Howells, both of whom know Mr. Wasson and the village he describes, vouch for his fidelity to fact. So do the men of the Life Saving Service, and if any body understands the barbarism of certain degenerate fishing villages

"down in Maine," they do, for they see it in action when wrecks come ashore.

Says Joel Kentle, of Kentle's Harbor, where the scene of "The Green Shay" is laid:

"I was quite a spell into the Life Savin' Station over acrost right handy-by to the Harbor, and the high jinks we seen to wracks sometimes was scand'lous and no mistake; but it's God's own truth that the very worst works ever we seen tried on to wracks was by them that claimed to be extry pious style of folks. Let me jest take and tell you, Elder, what I heard an old cap'n say one time in regards to them things. I heard this old sir eighty-odd year old, that had been into wracks and scrapes 'most everywhere salt water flowed, I heard him stand right up man-fashion one time and say like this: 'As true's ever I live and breathe,' says he, 'ef I was to be cast away again with my vessel, I'd lieveser take chances on the coast