On the other hand, the static character of village life leaves the boy with little inspiration in his primary interests of play and his serious ideals of the noblest manhood.  Idle hours work demoralization and the ever-present example of the village loafer is not good.  A disproportionate number of village people lack public spirit and social ideals.  The masculine element most in evidence is not of the strongest and most inspiring kind, and the village is all too often the paradise of the loafer and the male gossip.  This, however, cannot be said of the small frontier town where the spirit of progress is grappling with crude conditions.

Furthermore, the village is sadly incompetent in the organization of its welfare and community work.  As a matter of fact, social supervision is often so lax that obscene moving pictures and cards that are driven out of the large cities are exhibited without protest in the small towns.  Usually the village is overchurched, and consequently divided into pitiably weak factions whose controlling aim is self-preservation.  Seldom can a religious, philanthropic, or social organization be developed with sufficient strength to serve the community as such.

The sectarian divisions which in the vast needs and resources of great cities do not so acutely menace church efficiency prove serious in the small town.  The saloon, poolroom, livery stable, and other haunts of the idle are open for boys; but the Christian people, because of their denominational differences, maintain no social headquarters and no institution in which boys may find healthy expression for their normal interests.  The Y.M.C.A. is impracticable, because the church people are already overtaxed in keeping up their denominational competition and so cannot contribute enough to run an association properly.  Wherever an association cannot be conducted by trained and paid officers it will result in disappointment.

The caricature of essential Christianity which is afforded by the denominational exhibit in the village works great harm to boys.  It is not only that they are deprived of that guidance which true Christianity would give them, but they are confronted from the first with a spectacle of pettiness, jealousy, and incompetency which they will probably forever associate with Christianity, at least in its ecclesiastical forms.  Villages are at best sufficiently susceptible to those unfortunate human traits that make for clique and cleavage in society, and when the Christian church, instead of unifying and exalting the community life, adds several other divisive interests with all the authority of religion, the hope of intelligent, united, and effective service for the community, on a scale that would arouse the imagination and enlist the good-will of all right-minded people, is made sadly remote.