Читать книгу The Challenge of the Country: A Study of Country Life Opportunity - Fiske George Walter - Страница 4

ITS DEVELOPMENT AND PRESENT URGENCY

I. The Problem Stated and Defined

Early in the year 1912, some five hundred leading business and professional men of the cities of New York state met at a banquet, under the auspices of the Young Men’s Christian Association. During the evening it was discovered that nine-tenths of these influential city leaders had come from country homes. They were born on farms in the open country or in rural villages of 2,500 population or less.

Facts like these no longer surprise intelligent people. They are common to most cities, at least on our American continent; and herein is the crux of the rural problem. At great sacrifice for a century the country has been making the city. Doubtless thousands of incompetent citizens have been forced off the farms by the development of farm machinery; and the country was little poorer for their loss. But in surrendering to the city countless farm boys of character and promise who have since become the city’s leaders, many a rural village has suffered irreparably. To be sure this seems to be one of the village’s main functions, to furnish leaders for the city; and it has usually been proud of its opportunity. It is the wholesale character of this generous community sacrifice which has developed trouble.

The rural problem is the problem of maintaining in our farm and village communities a Christian civilization with modern American ideals of happiness, efficiency and progress.

It is a problem of industrial efficiency, of economic progress, of social cooperation and recreation, of home comfort, of educational equipment for rural life, of personal happiness, of religious vitality and of institutional development for community service. Though the problem would exist independently of the city, its acuteness is due to city competition.

The fact that city leadership is still largely drawn from the country makes the rural problem of vital importance to the welfare of the city and in a real sense a national issue.

A Classification of Communities

The terms rural and urban, country and city, town, village and township are so variously used they cause much ambiguity. The last is primarily geographical rather than social. The word town means township in New England and nothing in particular anywhere else. The others are relative terms used differently by different people. For years the line between rural and urban was arbitrarily set at the 8,000 mark, but the thirteenth census has placed it at 2,500. It seems petty however to dub a village of 2,501 people a city! This is convenient but very inaccurate. There are 38 “towns” in Massachusetts alone having over 8,000 people which refuse to be called cities.

Cities of the first class have a population of 100,000 upwards; cities of the second class number from 25,000 to 100,000 people; and communities from 8,000 to 25,000 may well be styled small cities. The term village is naturally applied to a community of 2,500 or less. When located in the country it is a country village; when near a city it is a suburban village and essentially urban. When no community center is visible, the term “open country” best fits the case.

The disputed territory between 2,500 and 8,000 will be urban or rural, according to circumstances. A community of this size in the urban tract is by no means rural. But if away from the domination of city life it is purely country. The best term the writer has been able to find for this comfortable and prosperous type of American communities, – there are over 4,500 of them, between the village of 2,500 and the city of 8,000 people, – is the good old New England term town; which may be either rural or urban according to its distance from the nearest city.

In the last analysis the terms rural and urban are qualitative rather than quantitative. In spite of the apparent paradox, there are rural cities and urban villages; small provincial cities where the people are largely rural-minded, and suburban villages of a few hundred people whose interests are all in the life of the city. But in general, the scope of the term “country life” as used in this book will be understood to include the life of the open country, the rural village and most country towns of 8,000 people or less, whose outlook is the sky and the soil rather than the brick walls and limited horizon of the city streets.

II. City and Country

How the Growing City Developed the Problem

We can almost say the growth of the city made the country problem. It would be nearer the truth to say, it made the problem serious. The problem of rural progress would still exist, even if there were no cities; but had the city not been drafting its best blood from the villages for more than half a century, we should probably not be anxious about the rural problem to-day, for it is this loss of leadership which has made rural progress so slow and difficult.

It is well to remember that the growth of cities is not merely an American fact. It is universal in all the civilized world. Wherever the modern industrial system holds sway the cities have been growing phenomenally. In fact the city population in this country is less in proportion than the city population of England, Scotland, Wales, Australia, Belgium, Saxony, The Netherlands and Prussia.

The present gains of American cities are largely due to immigration and to the natural increase of births over deaths, especially in recent years with improved sanitation, but for many decades past the city has gained largely at the expense of the country. Chicago became a city of over two million before the first white child born there died, in March, 1907. Meanwhile, in the decade preceding 1890, 792 Illinois rural townships lost population, in the following decade 522, and in the decade 1900-1910, 1113, in spite of the agricultural wealth of this rich prairie state. Likewise New York city (with Brooklyn) has doubled in twenty years since 1890; while in a single decade almost 70 % of the rural townships in the state reported a loss. The rural state of Iowa actually reports a net loss of 7,000 for the last decade (1900), though Des Moines alone gained 24,200, and all but two of the cities above 8,000 grew.1

Naturally in the older sections of the country the rural losses hitherto have been most startling. In the rural sections of New Hampshire Dr. W. L. Anderson found serious depletion from 1890 to 1900, “a great enough loss to strain rural society”; and the 1910 census reports even worse losses. The same has been only less true of the rural districts in Maine, Vermont, eastern Connecticut and portions of all the older states. The cities’ gains cost the country dear, in abandoned farms, weakened schools and churches and discouraged communities drained of their vitality.

The Surprising Growth of Rural America

However, in spite of this story of rural depletion which has been often rehearsed, the rural sections of our country altogether have made surprising gains. City people especially are astonished to learn that our country, even if the cities should be eliminated entirely from the reckoning, has been making substantial progress. The 8,000 mark was for years reckoned as the urban point. Counting only communities of less than 8,000 people we find that in 1850 the country population numbered 20,294,290; in 1890, 44,349,747; and in 1906, 54,107,571. If we consider only communities of 2,500 or less, we find 35⅓ millions in 1880; over 45 millions in 1900; and nearly 50 millions in 1910. The last census reports almost 53½ millions of people living in villages of 5,000 or less; or 58.2 % of the population.

It is obvious that in spite of dismal prophecies to the contrary from city specialists, and in spite of the undeniable drift to the city for decades, the total country population in America has continued to grow. Rural America is still growing 11.2 % in a decade. Outside of the densely populated north-eastern states, the nation as a whole is still rural and will long remain so. Where the soil is poor, further rural depletion must be expected; but with normal conditions and with an increasingly attractive rural life, most country towns and villages may be expected to hold their own reasonably well against the city tide.

We hear little to-day about the abandoned farms of New England. In the decade past they have steadily found a market and hundreds of them have been reclaimed for summer occupancy or for suburban homes for city men. Even in rural counties where decay has been notable in many townships, there are always prosperous towns and villages, along the rivers and the railroads, where substantial prosperity will doubtless continue for many years to come.

A False and Misleading Comparison

Unquestionably a false impression on this question has prevailed in the cities for a generation past because of obviously unjust comparisons. Families coming from decadent villages to prosperous cities have talked much of rural decadence. Stories of murders and low morals in neglected rural communities have made a great impression on people living in clean city wards. Meanwhile, not five blocks away, congested city slums never visited by the prosperous, concealed from popular view, festering social corruption and indescribable poverty and vice. Let us be fair in our sociological comparisons and no longer judge our rural worst by our urban best. Let the rural slum be compared with the city slum and the city avenues with the prosperous, self-respecting sections of the country; then contrasts will not be so lurid and we shall see the facts in fair perspective.

As soon as we learn to discriminate we find that country life as a whole is wholesome, that country people as a rule are as happy as city people and fully as jovial and light-hearted and that the fundamental prosperity of most country districts has been gaining these past two decades. While rural depletion is widespread, rural decadence must be studied not as a general condition at all, but as the abnormal, unusual state found in special sections, such as regions handicapped by poor soil, sections drained by neighboring industrial centers, isolated mountain districts where life is bare and strenuous, and the open country away from railroads and the great life currents. With this word of caution let us examine the latest reports of rural depletion.

III. Rural Depletion and Rural Degeneracy

The Present Extent of Rural Depletion

The thirteenth census (1910) shows that in spite of the steady gain in the country districts of the United States as a whole, thousands of rural townships have continued to lose population. These shrinking communities are found everywhere except in the newest agricultural regions of the West and in the black belt of the South. The older the communities the earlier this tendency to rural depletion became serious. The trouble began in New England, but now the rural problem is moving west. Until the last census New England was the only section of the country to show this loss as a whole; but the 1910 figures just reported give a net rural loss for the first time in the group of states known as the “east north central.” Yet in both cases, the net rural loss for the section was less than 1 %.

Taking 2,500 as the dividing line, the last census reports that in every state in the country the urban population has increased since 1900, but in six states the rural population has diminished. In two states, Montana and Wyoming, the country has outstripped the city; but in general, the country over, the cities grew from 1900 to 1910 three times as fast as the rural sections. While the country communities of the United States have grown 11.2 % the cities and towns above 2,500 have increased 34.8 %. In the prosperous state of Iowa, the only state reporting an absolute loss, the rural sections lost nearly 120,000. Rural Indiana lost 83,127, or 5.1 %; rural Missouri lost 68,716, or 3.5 %; rural villages in New Hampshire show a net loss of 10,108, or 5.4 %; and rural Vermont has suffered a further loss of 8,222, or 4.2 %, though the state as a whole made the largest gain for forty years.

These latest facts from the census are valuable for correcting false notions of rural depletion. It is unfair to count up the number of rural townships in a state which have failed to grow and report that state rurally decadent. For example, a very large majority of the Illinois townships with less than 2,500 people failed to hold their own the past decade, – 1,113 out of 1,592. But in many cases the loss was merely nominal; consequently we find, in spite of the tremendous drain to Chicago, the rural population of the state as a whole made a slight gain. This case is typical. Thousands of rural villages have lost population; yet other thousands have gained enough to offset these losses in all but the six states mentioned.

Losses in Country Towns

New England continues to report losses, not only in the rural villages, but also in the country towns of between 2,500 and 5,000 population. This was true the last decade in every New England state except Vermont. Massachusetts towns of this type made a net loss of about 30,000, or 15 %; although nearly all the larger towns and many villages in that remarkably prosperous state made gains. This class of towns has also made net losses the past decade in Indiana, Iowa, South Dakota, South Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi, although in these last four states the smaller communities under 2,500 made substantial gains. This indicates in some widely different sections of the country an apparently better prosperity in the open country than in many country towns. Similarly in several states, the larger towns between five and ten thousand population have netted a loss in the last decade, as in New York State, although the smaller villages have on the average prospered.

The Need of Qualitative Analysis of the Census

We must not be staggered by mere figures. A qualitative analysis of the census sometimes saves us from pessimism. Someone has said “Even a growing town has no moral insurance.” Mere growth does not necessarily mean improvement either in business or morals. It is quite possible that some of the “decadent” villages which have lost 15 % of their population are really better places for residence than they were before and possibly fully as prosperous. It depends entirely on the kind of people that remain. If it is really the survival of the fittest, there will be no serious problem. But if it is “the heritage of the unfit,” if only the unambitious and shiftless have remained, then the village is probably doomed.

In any case, the situation is due to the inevitable process of social and economic adjustment. Changes in agricultural method and opportunity are responsible for much of it. Doubtless farm machinery has driven many laborers away. Likewise the rising price of land has sent away the speculative farmer to pastures new, especially from eastern Canada and the middle west in the States to the low-priced lands of the rich Canadian west.2 The falling native birthrate, especially in New England, has been as potent a factor in diminishing rural sections as has the lure of the cities.

“In the main,” says Dr. Anderson in his very discriminating study of the problem, “rural depletion is over. In its whole course it has been an adjustment of industrial necessity and of economic health; everywhere it is a phase of progress and lends itself to the optimist that discerns deeper meanings. Nevertheless depletion has gone so far as to affect seriously all rural problems within the area of its action.

“The difficult and perplexing problems are found where the people are reduced in number. That broad though irregular belt of depleted rural communities, stretching from the marshes of the Atlantic shore to the banks of the Missouri, which have surrendered from ten to forty per cent. of their people, within which are many localities destined to experience further losses, calls for patient study of social forces and requires a reconstruction of the whole social outfit. But it should be remembered that an increasing population gathers in rural towns thickly strewn throughout the depleted tract, and that the cheer of their growth and thrift is as much a part of the rural situation as the perplexity incident to a diminishing body of people.”3

Whereas the main trend in rural districts is toward better social and moral conditions as well as material prosperity, we do not have to look far to find local degeneracy in the isolated places among the hills or in unfertile sections which have been deserted by the ambitious and intelligent, leaving a pitiable residuum of “poor whites” behind. Such localities furnish the facts for the startling disclosures which form the basis of occasional newspaper and magazine articles such as Rollin Lynde Hartt’s in the Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 83, The Forum, June 1892, the St. Albans Messenger Jan. 2, 1904, et cetera.

The Question of Degeneracy in City and Country

The question has long been debated as to whether criminals and defectives are more common in the city or the country. Dwellers in prosperous, well-governed suburban cities, that know no slums, are positive that the rural districts are degenerate. Country people in prosperous rural sections of Kansas, for instance, where no poor-house or jail can be found for many miles, insist that degeneracy is a city symptom! It is obvious that discrimination is necessary. The great majority of folks in both city and country are living a decent life; degeneracy is everywhere the exception. It would be fully as reasonable to condemn the city as a whole for the breeding places of vice, insanity and crime which we call the slums, as it is to characterize rural life in general as degenerate.

In view of the evident fact that both urban and rural communities have their defectives and delinquents, in varying ratio, depending on local conditions, Professor Giddings suggests a clear line of discrimination. “Degeneration manifests itself in the protean forms of suicide, insanity, crime and vice, which abound in the highest civilization, where the tension of life is extreme, and in those places from which civilization has ebbed and from which population has been drained, leaving a discouraged remnant to struggle against deteriorating conditions… Like insanity, crime occurs most frequently in densely populated towns on the one hand, and on the other in partially deserted rural districts. Murder is a phenomenon of both the frontier life of an advancing population and of the declining civilization in its rear; it is preeminently the crime of the new town and the decaying town… Crimes of all kinds are less frequent in prosperous agricultural communities and in thriving towns of moderate size, where the relation of income to the standard of living is such that the life struggle is not severe.”4

Stages and Symptoms of Rural Decadence

In his discussion of the country problem, Dr. Josiah Strong reminds us that rural decadence comes as an easy evolution passing through rather distinct stages, when the rural community has really lost its best blood. Roads deteriorate, – those all-important arteries of country life; then property soon depreciates; schools and churches are weakened; often foreign immigrants crowd out the native stock, sometimes infusing real strength, but often introducing the continental system of rural peasantry, with absentee landlords. Then isolation increases, with a strong tendency toward degeneracy and demoralization.

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.

An illustration of “discouraged remnants” is cited by Dr. Warren H. Wilson. “I remember driving, in my early ministry, from a prosperous farming section into a weakened community, whose lands had a lowered value because they lay too far from the railroad. My path to a chapel service on Sunday afternoon lay past seven successive farmhouses in each of which lived one member of a family, clinging in solitary misery to a small acreage which had a few years earlier supported a household. In that same neighborhood was one group of descendants of two brothers, which had in two generations produced sixteen suicides. ‘They could not stand trouble,’ the neighbors said. The lowered value of their land, with consequent burdens, humiliation and strain, had crushed them. The very ability and distinction of the family in the earlier period had the effect by contrast to sink them lower down.”5

The Nam’s Hollow Case

Ordinary rural degeneracy, however, is more apt to be associated with feeble-mindedness. An alarming, but perhaps typical case is described in a recent issue of The Survey. A small rural community in New York state, which the author calls for convenience Nam’s Hollow, contains 232 licentious women and 199 licentious men out of a total population of 669; the great proportion being mentally as well as morally defective. A great amount of consanguineous marriage has taken place, – mostly without the formalities prescribed by law. Sex relations past and present are hopelessly entangled. Fifty-four of the inhabitants of the Hollow have been in custody either in county houses or asylums, many are paupers, and forty have served terms in state’s prison or jail. There are 192 persons who are besotted by the use of liquor “in extreme quantities.”

Apparently most of this degeneracy can be traced back to a single family whose descendants have numbered 800. With all sorts of evil traits to begin with, this family by constant inbreeding have made persistent these evil characteristics in all the different households and have cursed the whole life of the Hollow, not to mention the unknown evil wrought elsewhere, whither some of them have gone. “The imbeciles and harlots and criminalistic are bred in the Hollow, but they do not all stay there.” A case is cited of a family of only five which has cost the county up to date $6,300, and the expense likely to continue for many years yet. “Would you rouse yourself if you learned there were ten cases of bubonic plague at a point not 200 miles away?” asks the investigator of Nam’s Hollow. “Is not a breeding spot of uncontrolled animalism as much of a menace to our civilization?”6

A Note of Warning

These sad stories of rural degeneracy must not make us pessimists. We need not lose our faith in the open country. It is only the exceptional community which has really become decadent and demoralized. These communities however warn us that even self-respecting rural villages are in danger of following the same sad process of decay unless they are kept on the high plane of wholesome Christian living and community efficiency. What is to prevent thousands of other rural townships, which are now losing population, gradually sinking to the low level of personal shiftlessness and institutional uselessness which are the marks of degeneracy? Nothing can prevent this but the right kind of intelligent, consecrated leadership. It is not so largely a quantitative matter, however, as Dr. Josiah Strong suggested twenty years ago in his stirring treatment of the subject. After citing the fact that 932 townships in New England were losing population in 1890, and 641 in New York, 919 in Pennsylvania, 775 in Ohio, et cetera, he suggests: “If this migration continues, and no new preventive measures are devised, I see no reason why isolation, irreligion, ignorance, vice and degradation should not increase in the country until we have a rural American peasantry, illiterate and immoral, possessing the rights of citizenship, but utterly incapable of performing or comprehending its duties.”

After twenty years we find the rural depletion still continuing. Though New England in 1910 reports 143 fewer losing towns than in 1890, the census of 1910 in general furnishes little hope that the migration from the country sections is diminishing.7 Our hope for the country rests in the fact that the problem has at last been recognized as a national issue and that a Country Life Movement of immense significance is actually bringing in a new rural civilization. “We must expect the steady deterioration of our rural population, unless effective preventive measures are devised,” was Dr. Strong’s warning two decades ago. To-day the challenge of the country not only quotes the peril of rural depletion and threatened degeneracy, but also appeals to consecrated young manhood and womanhood with a living faith in the permanency of a reconstructed rural life.

Our rural communities must be saved from decadence, for the sake of the nation. Professor Giddings well says: “Genius is rarely born in the city. The city owes the great discoveries and immortal creations to those who have lived with nature and with simple folk. The country produces the original ideas, the raw materials of social life, and the city combines ideas and forms the social mind.” In the threatened decadence of depleted rural communities, and in the lack of adequate leadership in many places, to revive a dying church, to equip a modern school, to develop a new rural civilization, to build a cooperating community with a really satisfying and efficient life, we have a problem which challenges both our patriotism and our religious spirit, for the problem is fundamentally a religious one.

IV. The Urgency of the Problem

A broad-minded leader of the religious life of college men has recently expressed his opinion that the rural problem is more pressing just now than any other North American problem. He is a city man and is giving his attention impartially to the needs of all sections. Two classes of people will be surprised by his statement. Many of his city neighbors are so overwhelmed by the serious needs of the city, they near-sightedly cannot see any particular problem in the country, – except how to take the next train for New York! And doubtless many country people, contented with second-rate conditions, are even unaware that they and their environment are being studied as a problem at all. Some prosperous farmers really resent the “interference” of people interested in better rural conditions and say “the country would be all right if let alone.” But neither sordid rural complacency nor urban obliviousness can satisfy thinking people. We know there is something the matter with country life. We discover that the vitality and stability of rural life is in very many places threatened. It is the business of Christian students and leaders to study the conditions and try to remove or remedy the causes.

A Hunt for Fundamental Causes

Depletion added to isolation, and later tending toward degeneracy, is what makes the rural problem acute. It is the growth of the city which has made the problem serious. If we would discover a constructive policy for handling this problem successfully by making country life worth while, and better able to compete with the city, then we must find out why the boys and girls go to the big towns and why their parents rent the farm and move into the village.

For two generations there has been a mighty life-current toward the cities, sweeping off the farm many of the brightest boys and most ambitious girls in all the country-side, whom the country could ill afford to spare. The city needed many of them doubtless; but not all, for it has not used all of them well. Everywhere the country has suffered from the loss of them. Why did they go? It is evident that a larger proportion of the brightest country boys and girls must be kept on the farms if the rural communities are to hold their own and the new rural civilization really have a chance to develop as it should.

The Unfortunate Urbanizing of Rural Life

As a rule the whole educational trend is toward the city. The teachers of rural schools are mostly from the larger villages and towns where they have caught the city fever, and they infect the children. Even in the lower grades the stories of city life begin early to allure the country children, and with a subtle suggestion the echoes of the distant city’s surging life come with all the power of the Arabian Nights tales. Early visits to the enchanted land of busy streets and wonderful stores and factories, the circus and the theater, deepen the impression, and the fascination grows.

In proportion to the nearness to the city, there has been a distinct urbanizing of rural life. To a degree this has been well. It has raised the standard of comfort in country homes and has had a distinct influence in favor of real culture and a higher plane of living. But the impression has come to prevail widely that the city is the source of all that is interesting, profitable and worth while, until many country folks have really come to think meanly of themselves and their surroundings, taking the superficial city estimate of rural values as the true one.

A real slavery to city fashions has been growing insidiously in the country. So far as this has affected the facial adornments of the farmer, it has made for progress; but as seen in the adoption of unhospitable vertical city architecture for country homes, – an insult to broad acres which suggest home-like horizontals, – and the wearing by the women of cheap imitations of the flaunting finery of returning “cityfied” stenographers, it is surely an abomination pure and simple.

Bulky catalogs of mail-order houses, alluringly illustrated, have added to the craze, and the new furnishings of many rural homes resemble the tinsel trappings of cheap city flats, while substantial heirlooms of real taste and dignity are relegated to the attic. Fine rural discrimination as to the appropriate and the artistic is fast crumbling before the all-convincing argument, “It is the thing now in the city.” To be sure there is much the country may well learn from the city, the finer phases of real culture, the cultivation of social graces in place of rustic bashfulness and boorish manners, and the saving element of industrial cooperation; but let these gains not be bought by surrendering rural self-respect or compromising rural sincerity, or losing the wholesome ruggedness of the country character. The new rural civilization must be indigenous to the soil, not a mere urbanizing veneer. Only so can it foster genuine community pride and loyalty to its own environment. But herein is the heart of our problem.

Why Country Boys and Girls Leave the Farm

The mere summary of reasons alleged by many individuals will be sufficient for our purpose, without enlarging upon them. Many of these were obtained by Director L. H. Bailey of Cornell, the master student of this problem. Countless boys have fled from the farm because they found the work monotonous, laborious and uncongenial, the hours long, the work unorganized and apparently unrewarding, the father or employer hard, exacting and unfeeling. Many of them with experience only with old-fashioned methods, are sure that farming does not pay, that there is no money in the business compared with city employments, that the farmer cannot control prices, is forced to buy high and sell low, is handicapped by big mortgages, high taxes, and pressing creditors. It is both encouraging and suggestive that many country boys, with a real love for rural life, but feeling that farming requires a great deal of capital, are planning “to farm someday, after making enough money in some other business.”

The phantom of farm drudgery haunts many boys. They feel that the work is too hard in old age, and that it cannot even be relieved sufficiently by machinery, that it is not intellectual enough and furthermore leaves a man too tired at night to enjoy reading or social opportunities. The work of farming seems to them quite unscientific and too dependent upon luck and chance and the fickle whims of the weather.

Farm life is shunned by many boys and girls because they say it is too narrow and confining, lacking in freedom, social advantages, activities and pleasures, which the city offers in infinite variety. They see their mother overworked and growing old before her time, getting along with few comforts or conveniences, a patient, uncomplaining drudge, living in social isolation, except for uncultivated neighbors who gossip incessantly.

Many ambitious young people see little future on the farm. They feel that the farmer never can be famous in the outside world and that people have a low regard for him. In their village high school they have caught visions of high ideals; but they fail to discover high ideals in farm life and feel that high and noble achievement is impossible there, that the farmer cannot serve humanity in any large way and can attain little political influence or personal power.

With an adolescent craving for excitement, “something doing all the time,” they are famished in the quiet open country and are irresistibly drawn to the high-geared city life, bizarre, spectacular, noisy, full of variety in sights, sounds, experiences, pleasures, comradeships, like a living vaudeville; and offering freedom from restraint in a life of easy incognito, with more time for recreation and “doing as you please.” But with all the attractiveness of city life for the boys and girls, as compared with the simplicity of the rural home, the main pull cityward is probably “the job.” They follow what they think is the easiest road to making a living, fancying that great prizes await them in the business life of the town.

Superficial and unreasonable as most of these alleged reasons are to-day, we must study them as genuine symptoms of a serious problem. If country life is to develop a permanently satisfying opportunity for the farm boys and girls, these conditions must be met. Isolation and drudgery must be somehow conquered. The business of farming must be made more profitable, until clerking in the city cannot stand the competition. The social and recreative side of rural life must be developed. The rural community must be socialized and the country school must really fit for rural life. The lot of the farm mothers and daughters must be made easier and happier. Scientific farming must worthily appeal to the boys as a genuine profession, not a mere matter of luck with the weather, and the farm boy must no longer be treated as a slave but a partner in the firm.8

The Folly of Exploiting the Country Boy

An eminent Western lawyer addressing a rural life conference in Missouri a few weeks ago explained thus his leaving the farm: “When I was a boy on the farm we were compelled to rise about 4 o’clock every morning. From the time we got on our clothes until 7:30 we fed the live stock and milked the cows. Then breakfast. After breakfast, we worked in the field until 11:30, when, after spending at least a half hour caring for the teams we went to dinner. We went back to work at 1 o’clock and remained in the field until 7:30 o’clock. After quitting the fields we did chores until 8:30 or 9 o’clock, and then we were advised to go to bed right away so that we would be able to do a good day’s work on the morrow.”

No wonder the boy rebelled! This story harks back to the days when a father owned his son’s labor until the boy was twenty-one, and could either use the boy on his own farm or have him “bound out” for a term of years for the father’s personal profit. Such harsh tactlessness is seldom found today; but little of it will be found in the new rural civilization.9 Country boys must not be exploited if we expect them to stay in the country as community builders. Many of them will gladly stay if given a real life chance.

The City’s Dependence upon the Country

The country is the natural source of supply for the nation. The city has never yet been self-sustaining. It has always drawn its raw materials and its population from the open country. The country must continue to produce the food, the hardiest young men and women, and much of the idealism and best leadership of the nation. All of these have proven to be indigenous to country life. Our civilization is fundamentally rural, and the rural problem is a national problem, equally vital to the city and the whole country. The cities should remember that they have a vast deal at stake in the welfare of the rural districts.

The country for centuries got along fairly well without the city, and could continue to do so; but the city could not live a month without the country! The great railway strike last fall in England revealed the fact that Birmingham had but a week’s food supply. A serious famine threatened, and this forced a speedy settlement. Meanwhile food could not be brought to the city except in small quantities, and the people of Birmingham learned in a striking way their utter dependence upon the country as their source of supply. The philosophy of one of the sages of China, uttered ages ago, is still profoundly true: “The well-being of a people is like a tree; agriculture is its root, manufactures and commerce are its branches and its life; but if the root be injured, the leaves fall, the branches break away and the tree dies.”10

That far-seeing Irish leader, Sir Horace Plunkett, after a searching study of American conditions, is inclined to think that our great prosperous cities are blundering seriously in not concerning themselves more earnestly with the rural problem: “Has it been sufficiently considered how far the moral and physical health of the modern city depends upon the constant influx of fresh blood from the country, which has ever been the source from which the town draws its best citizenship? You cannot keep on indefinitely skimming the pan and have equally good milk left. Sooner or later, if the balance of trade in this human traffic be not adjusted, the raw material out of which urban society is made will be seriously deteriorated, and the symptoms of national degeneracy will be properly charged against those who neglected to foresee the evil and treat the cause… The people of every state are largely bred in rural districts, and the physical and moral well-being of those districts must eventually influence the quality of the whole people.”11

V. A Challenge to Faith

The seriousness of our problem is sufficiently clear. Our consideration in this chapter has been confined mainly to the personal factors. Certain important social and institutional factors will be further considered in Chapter V under Country Life Deficiencies. With all its serious difficulties and discouragements the rural problem is a splendid challenge to faith. There are many with the narrow city outlook who despair of the rural problem and consider that country life is doomed. There are still others who have faith in the country town and village but have lost their faith in the open country as an abiding place for rural homes. Before giving such people of little faith further hearing, we must voice the testimony of a host of country lovers who have a great and enduring faith in the country as the best place for breeding men, the most natural arena for developing character, the most favorable place for happy homes, and, for a splendid host of country boys and girls the most challenging opportunity for a life of service.

Test Questions on Chapter I

1. – How would you define the Rural Problem?

2. – Illustrate how the growth of the city has affected the rural problem.

3. – Explain the terms rural, urban, city, town, and village.

4. – What misleading comparisons have been made between city and country conditions?

5. – In what six states has the rural population, as a whole, shown a net loss in the last ten years?

6. – To what extent has rural America grown in population the past half century?

7. – Describe the symptoms of a decadent village.

8. – Under what conditions do you find a village improving even when losing population?

9. – Discuss carefully the comparative degeneracy of the city and the country.

10. – Describe some of the stages of rural degeneracy.

11. – What signs of rural degeneracy have come under your personal observation and how do you account for the conditions?

12. – What evidences have you seen of the “urbanizing” of rural life, and what do you think about it?

13. – Why do country boys and girls leave the farm and go to the city?

14. – What must be done to make country life worth while, so that a fair share of the boys and girls may be expected to stay there?

15. – How do you think a farmer ought to treat his boys?

16. – To what extent is the city dependent upon the country.

17. – Why do so many prosperous farmers rent their farms and give up country life?

18. – How does the village problem differ from the problem of the open country?

19. – Do you believe the open country will be permanently occupied by American homes, or must we develop a hamlet system, as in Europe and Asia?

20. – To what extent have you faith in the ultimate solution of the country problem?