The Challenge of the Country: A Study of Country Life Opportunity

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Fiske George Walter. The Challenge of the Country: A Study of Country Life Opportunity

CHAPTER I. THE RURAL PROBLEM

CHAPTER II. COUNTRY LIFE OPTIMISM

CHAPTER III. THE NEW RURAL CIVILIZATION

CHAPTER IV. TRIUMPHS OF SCIENTIFIC AGRICULTURE

CHAPTER V. RURAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION

CHAPTER VI. EDUCATION FOR COUNTRY LIFE

CHAPTER VII. RURAL CHRISTIAN FORCES

CHAPTER VIII. COUNTRY LIFE LEADERSHIP

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This study of country life opportunity and analysis of various phases of the rural problems in America has been written at the request of the International Committee of Young Men’s Christian Associations, particularly for their County Work and Student departments. The former desired a handbook for the training of leaders in rural Christian work and the latter a textbook for the use of college students in Christian Associations wishing to study the fundamentals of rural social service and rural progress. It is the sincere hope of those who have asked for this book that it may bring to very many earnest young men and women, and especially in the colleges of the United States and Canada, a challenging vision of the need of trained leadership in every phase of rural life, as well as a real opportunity for life investment.

Being the first book in the field which makes available the results of the Thirteenth U. S. Census, it is hoped that its fresh treatment of the latest aspects of the rural problems will commend itself to general readers who are interested in the Rural Life Movement and the welfare of the rural three-fifths of America.

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Where this process is going on we are not surprised to find such conditions as Rev. H. L. Hutchins described in 1906 in an address before the annual meeting of the Connecticut Bible Society at New Haven. From a very intimate experience of many years in the rural sections of Connecticut, he gave a most disheartening report, dwelling upon the increasing ignorance of the people, their growing vices, the open contempt for and disregard of marriage, the alarming growth of idiocy, partly the result of inbreeding and incest, some localities being cited where practically all the residents were brothers and sisters or cousins, often of the same name, so that surnames were wholly displaced by nicknames; the omnipresence of cheap whiskey with its terrible effects, the resulting frequency of crimes of violence; the feebleness and backwardness of the schools and the neglect and decay of the churches, resulting in inevitable lapse into virtual paganism and barbarism, in sections that two generations ago were inhabited by stalwart Christian men and women of the staunch old New England families.

Doubtless similar illustrations of degradation could be cited from the neglected corners of all the older states of the country, where several generations of social evolution have ensued under bad circumstances. In all the central states, conditions of rural degeneracy now exist which a few years ago were supposed to be confined to New England; for the same causes have been repeating themselves in other surroundings.

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