I asked the keeper who was showing me thru the insane asylum at Weston, West Virginia, "You say you have nearly two thousand insane people in this institution and only a score of guards to keep them in. Aren't you in danger? What is to hinder these insane people from getting together, organizing, overpowering the few guards and breaking out?"
The keeper was not in the least alarmed at the question. He smiled.
"Many people say that. But they don't understand. If these people could get together they wouldn't be in this asylum. They are insane. No two of them can agree upon how to get together and how to break out. So a few of us can hold them."
It would be almost unkind to carry this further, but I have been thinking ever since that about three-fourths of the small towns of America have one thing in common with the asylum folks--they can't get together. They cannot organize for the public good. They break up into little antagonistic social, business and even religious factions and neutralize each other's efforts.
A lot of struggling churches compete with each other instead of massing for the common good. And when the churches fight, the devil stays neutral and furnishes the munitions for both sides.
So the home towns stagnate and the young people with visions go away to the cities where opportunity seems to beckon. Ninety-nine out of a hundred of them will jostle with the straphangers all their lives, mere wheels turning round in a huge machine.
Ninety-nine out of a hundred of them might have had a larger opportunity right back in the home town, had the town been awake and united and inviting.
We must make the home town the brightest, most attractive, most promising place for the young people. No home town can afford to spend its years raising crops of young people for the cities. That is the worst kind of soil impoverishment--all going out and nothing coming back. That is the drain that devitalizes the home towns more than all the city mail order houses.
America is to be great, not in the greatness of a few crowded cities, but in the greatness of innumerable home towns.
The slogan today should be, For God and Home and the Home Town!
A School of Struggle Dr. Henry Solomon Lehr, founder of the Ohio Northern University at Ada, Ohio, one of Ohio's greatest educators, used to say with pride, "Our students come to school; they are not sent."
He encouraged his students to be self-supporting, and most of them were working their way thru school. He made the school calendar and courses elastic to accommodate them. He saw the need of combining the school of books with the school of struggle. He organized his school into competing groups, so that the student who had no struggle in his life would at least have to struggle with the others during his schooling.