The editor’s greatest concern should be to serve the interests of his parish. The people look to him for leadership and help. They want the community exploited. They want their share of everything going. They want the prices of their products kept up and their taxes kept down. They want good roads, good schools, good markets, attractive churches. And they appreciate an excellent newspaper. There are hundreds of villages and hamlets, especially in the South and in the West, that are far removed from any large city. Their inhabitants lose interest in the doings of the great outside world, but their own needs are sensed with no shallow understanding.
Village life throughout our country is taking on the attractions of intellectual uplift and refinement that long have been the pride and the boast of New England communities. The New England village, made attractive by its imitation of the beautiful village of Old England, has spread far across the continent. Poets and story tellers have idealized its shady streets, gilded its church spires and praised its intelligence with every felicity of language. It has its libraries, its study clubs, its improvement associations, its lecture courses, its high schools, its churches, its every facility for liberal education. Usually there is a college close at hand.
It is something of a fad at the moment for our young writers of novels to exaggerate the repulsive features of the American village, to magnify its unpleasant aspects, to ignore its excellences. But just as the measure of a man’s greatness should rest on his highest achievements rather than on his lowest, so should the beauty of a village be judged by its tidy lawns, its fragrant flower gardens, its artistic vistas of shaded streets, instead of by its back yards, its ash and garbage heaps, and its dumps for old tin cans. The degree of its intelligence and refinement should include the people of education and culture in the measurement as well as the louts, the clowns and the vulgar ignorant.
The modern village has many of the essential advantages possessed by the city: facilities for the development of intellectual life, for study, for personal ease and comfort, for the enjoyment of social life. You have a more wholesome existence; live a little nearer to nature; your friendships are finer and more lasting. Your very environment persuades to a greater appreciation of community comradeship.