Читать книгу Rural Wealth and Welfare: Economic Principles Illustrated and Applied in Farm Life - Geo. T. Fairchild - Страница 9

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Ideal manliness.—Every community has highest efficiency and best civilization when each individual member has the largest range of abilities to meet wants, and the largest range of wants to be met. An ideal civilization involves the distinct aim of gaining for each mature person in any association the fullest development of all abilities and all materials and tools for their use. This is amply illustrated in a family of well grown, well trained, well educated, trustworthy men and women with sufficient capital under control to maintain the highest activity of every personal power and attainment. Childhood and old age must always be provided for by exertions of those whose abilities are in their prime, and accidental weakness of every kind is met from the same strength.

Any mature person is best equipped for productive industry when, sound in both body and mind, he has the accumulated energy of the past for his use in the shape of capital and hereditary traits, together with skill, education and established character. Such a man is recognized at once to have his place among “the heirs of all the ages in the foremost files of time.” Any [pg 050] people claiming leadership among nations must depend upon its representatives of such a fully equipped body of men for that leadership.

From savage to enlightened.—The increasing importance of such full manliness, as society becomes more complex in both wants and efforts, is easily seen. In ruder life muscular energy and endurance, with some slight ingenuity, are sufficient to meet the ruder needs, with some chance of saving for future wants of a growing family, which will continue the same round of muscular contest with savage conditions.

The American Indians have given the fairest exhibition of the kind of welfare which such exertion and accumulation afford. The weak disappear quickly, because the strong have too little surplus of energy to care for them. Among those left, both burdens and means of satisfaction are quite equally distributed, because of essentially equal powers of exertion. But in older and more civilized communities large portions of the people are dependent upon the rest for knowledge, ingenuity and skill to keep the very much larger supply of material needed for maintaining the civilization. At this stage of progress a man with only muscular development finds himself entirely dependent upon some one else for the plans by which all must live. A savage cannot share equally with the wise man either in the burden of caring for the community or in the welfare which the community enjoys.

It is easy to see that the relative importance of accumulated wealth in the shape of capital or of skill or of the character which results from generations of training, [pg 051] becomes more and more distinct as the community becomes more developed. Any man, then, who is lacking capital, skill and morals, or all three, is in some respects like the savage, and will find his equals among the savages. For this reason a pioneer country affords opportunity for a youth without skill or personal attainments of any kind “to grow up with the country;” and the famous advice, “Go west, young man, go west,” applies strictly to such a youth, and with less and less directness in proportion as the young man has control of himself and of accumulated wealth.

A simple diagram (Chart III) may illustrate the progress of civilization from the general poverty and inefficiency of rude pioneer life to the power of a thoroughly organized and developed community. The poor man, in the sense of one whose abilities are undeveloped and who has no visible means of support, is relatively less able to care for himself in the enlightened community than in the ruder pioneer life. In this sense, and this alone, the poor man grows poorer with advancing civilization. This may easily be seen by comparing a thrifty farming community of today and all the accumulated stock, machinery and tools of the farms, with the same community sixty years earlier, when all was practically wilderness. A strong man with an ax and a hoe could enter the wilderness anywhere and live nearly as well as any of his neighbors. Such a man in the higher country life of our times must work for some one else at wages, or must be supported at public expense. In either case he feels his poverty. At the same time, the extreme of suffering is less likely [pg 053] to be reached in the richer community. The poorest man has comforts of which the pioneers never dreamed. Even a tramp can live on the fat of the land, but not by his own exertions. The failure of a crop in the pioneer country means starvation for a large portion of the few inhabitants. A failure in the older community means suffering for a few in diminished food and clothing, but all live on the accumulations of the past.

Chart III. Illustrating the relative importance of labor and saving, in the progress of civilization from its beginnings in pioneer life.

Developing civilization.—This essential advantage of accumulating power in individuals, as civilization advances, is necessarily connected with the very nature of civilization and growth. As no conceivable device can make a babe as efficient as a man, so no contrivance, political or social, can make an undeveloped man equal to a fully developed one.

The intense community of interests in high civilization makes even more important the individual abilities of each sharer in those interests. For this reason every device for universal education, development of skill and strengthening of character, and every check upon deterioration of personal strength or wisdom or virtue is to be considered. Any neglect of the individual in his development of personal attainments retards the development of the community. Any device for the equal distribution of wealth which does not increase individual thrift in the use of wealth at least retards the growth of the community, and may very quickly reduce the power of the community as a whole until it reaches the inefficiency of savage life.

All true charity, even equity, requires that the object of distribution of wealth shall be the greater efficiency [pg 054] of each individual. If there shall ever be a community of individuals gaining equal enjoyment, it will be made up of those possessing essential equality in personal powers and attainments, and in accumulated capital as well.

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