ABSTRACT
There are American communities which are continuations of old democratic community tradition. Some of the most distinctive were settled by more or less organized or integrated groups from Europe which represent unbroken traditions of democratic community life from prefeudal times, or originated in localities where those prefeudal traditions had persisted. Most American villages have grown in a heterogeneous way as aggregations of dwellings, rather than as living social organisms. The United States Government divided most of the territory west of central Ohio into townships six miles square, and made these into "sections" one mile square. In the treatment of small community and rural life in America, agriculture has had almost a monopoly of attention, to the neglect of the large number of small community dwellers who are not engaged in agriculture. The great diversity of non-agricultural rural life, and the relatively small part played by each class, is the chief cause of this neglect.
