Читать книгу The Country-Life Movement in the United States - L. H. Bailey - Страница 6

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The present revival of rural interest is immediately an effort to improve farming; but at bottom it is a desire to stimulate new activity in a more or less stationary phase of civilization. We may over-exploit the movement, but it is sound at the center. For the next twenty-five years we may expect it to have great influence on the course of events, for it will require this length of time to balance up society. Politicians will use it as a means of riding into power. Demagogues and fakirs will take advantage of it for personal gain. Tradesmen will make much of it. Writers are even now beginning to sensationalize it.

But there will also arise countrymen with statesmanship in them; if not so, then we cannot make the progress that we need. The movement will have its significant political aspect, and we may look for governors of states and perhaps more than one President of the United States to come out of it. In the end, the farmer controls the politics because he makes the crops on which the wealth of the country depends. There is probably a greater proportion of tax-payers among voting farmers than among city people.

Considered in total results, educational and political as well as social and economic, the country-life movement in North America is probably farther advanced than in any other part of the world. It may not have such striking manifestations in some special lines, and our people may not need so much as other peoples that these particular lines be first or most strongly attacked. The movement really has been under way for many years, but it has only recently found separate expression. Most of the progress has been fundamental, and will not need to be done over again. The movement is well afoot among the country people themselves, and they are doing some of the clearest thinking on the situation. Many of our own people do not know how far we have already come.