The Country-Life Movement in the United States Part 6

If the customary subjects in a college of agriculture are organized and designed to train a man for efficiency in country life and to develop his outlook, so also is a department of home economics to train a woman for efficiency and to develop her outlook to life.

Home economics is not one "department" or subject, in the sense in which dairying or entomology or plant-breeding is a department. It is not a single specialty. It stands for the whole round of woman's work and place. Many technical or educational departments will grow out of it as time goes on. That is, it will be broken up into its integral parts, and it will then cease to be an administrative department of an educational inst.i.tution; and very likely we shall lose the terms "home economics,"

"household economics," "domestic science," and the rest.

I would not limit the entrance of women into any courses in a college of agriculture; on the contrary, I want all courses open to them freely and on equal terms with men; but the subjects that are arranged under the general head of home economics are her special field and sphere. On the other hand, I do not want to limit the attendance of men in courses of home economics; in fact, I think it will be found that an increasing number of men desire to take these subjects as the work develops, and this will be best for society in general.

Furthermore, I do not conceive it to be essential that all teachers in home economic subjects shall be women; nor, on the other hand, do I think it is essential that all teachers in the other series of departments shall be men. The person who is best qualified to teach the subject should be the one who teaches it, whether man or woman.

As rapidly as colleges and universities come to represent society and to develop in all students a philosophy of life, the home-making units will of necessity take their place with other units.

HOW SHALL WE SECURE COMMUNITY LIFE IN THE OPEN COUNTRY?

It is generally agreed that one of the greatest insufficiencies in country life is its lack of organization or cohesion, both in a social and economic way. Country people are separated both because of the distances between their properties, and also because they own their land and are largely confined to its sphere of activities. There is a general absence of such common feeling as would cause them to act together unitedly and quickly on questions that concern the whole community, or on matters of public moment.

This lack of united action cannot be overcome by any single or brief process, but as one result of a general redirection of rural effort and the stimulating of a new or different point of view toward life. It will come as a result of a quickened agricultural life rather than as an effect of any direct plan or propaganda. When the rural social sense is thoroughly established, we shall be in a new epoch of rural civilization.

It is now the habit to say that this desired rural life must be cooperative. A society that is fully cooperative in all ways is one from which the present basis of compet.i.tion is eliminated. I think that no one intends, however, in the common discussion of cooperation to take sides on the theoretical question as to whether society in the end will be cooperative or compet.i.tive; these persons only mean that cooperative a.s.sociation is often the best means to secure a given result and that such a.s.sociation may exert great educational influence on the cooperators.

Theoretically, the cooperative organization of society may be the better. Practically, a capitalistic organization may be better: it quickly recognizes merit and leadership; but if it is better, it is so only when it is very carefully safeguarded.

It cannot be contended that a cooperative organization is correct because the majority rules. Majorities show only what the people want, not necessarily what is best. Minorities are much more likely to be right, because thinking men and fundamental students are relatively few; yet it may be the best practice, in common affairs, to let the majority have its way, for this provides the best means of education.

It will now be interesting to try to picture to ourselves some of the particular means by which social connection in the open country may be brought about. It is commonly, but I think erroneously, thought that community life necessarily means a living together in centers or villages. I conceive, on the contrary, that it is possible to develop a very effective community mind whilst the persons still remain on their farms. In this day of rapid communication, transportation, and spread of intelligence, the necessity of mere physical contiguity has partly pa.s.sed away.

That is, "isolation," as the city man conceives of it, is not necessarily a bar to community feeling. The farmer does not think in terms of compact neighborhoods, trolley cars, and picture shows. The country is not "lonely" to him, as it is to a city man. He does not search for amus.e.m.e.nt at night.

_Hamlet life._

It is said that the American farmer must live in hamlets, as does the European peasant. The hamlet system that exists in parts of Europe represents the result of an historical condition. It is the product of a long line of social evolution, during which time the persons who have worked the land have been peasants, and to a greater or less extent have not owned the land that they have worked.

Some persons fear that the American farmer is drifting toward peasantry.

This notion has no doubt arisen from the fact that in certain places the man who works the land is driven to great extremity of poverty, and he remains uneducated and undeveloped; but ignorance and poverty do not const.i.tute peasantry. The peasanthood of the Old World is a social caste or cla.s.s, and is in part a remnant of feudal government, of religious subjugation, and of the old necessity of protection. The present day is characterized by the rise of the people on the land; this movement is a part of the general rise of the common people (or the proletariat). If popular education, popular rights, and the general extension of means of communication signify anything, it is that we necessarily are developing away from a condition of peasantry rather than toward it, however much degradation or unsuccess there may be in certain regions or how much inadjustment there may be in the process (page 129).

In contradistinction to the exclusive hamlet system of living together, I would emphasize the necessity that a first-rate good man must live on the farm if he is to make the most of it. Farming by proxy or by any absentee method is just as inefficient and as disastrous in the long run as the doing of any other business by proxy; in fact, it is likely to be even more disastrous in the end because it usually results in the depletion of the fertility of the land, or in the using up of the capital stock; and this becomes a national disaster. I hold that it is essential that the very best kind of people live actually on the land.

The business is conducted on the land. The crops are there. The live-stock is there. The machinery is there. All the investment is in the place itself. If this business is to be most effective, a good man must constantly be with it and manage it. A farm is not like a store or a factory, that is shut up at night and on Sunday.

The more difficult and complex the farming business becomes, the greater will be the necessity that a good man remain with it.

We must remember also that if the landowner or the farmer lives in a village or hamlet and another man lives on his farm, a social division at once results, and we have a stratification into two cla.s.ses of society; and this works directly against any community of interest. It is not likely that the farmer who has retired to town and the hired man who works his farm under orders will develop any very close personal relation. The farmer becomes an extraneous element injected into the town, and has little interest in its welfare, and he has taken his personality, enterprise, and influence out of the country. He is in a very real sense "a man without a country." The increase of his living expenses in town is likely to cause him to raise the rent on his farm, or, if the tenant works for wages, to reduce the improvements on the place to the lowest extent compatible with profit. We need above all things to produce such a rural condition as will satisfy the farmer to live permanently in the country rather than to move to town when the farm has given him a competence.

I am not to be understood as saying that farmers ought never to live in town. There will always be shifting both ways between town and country.

In some cases, small-area farming develops around a village; or a village grows up because the farms are small and are intensively handled. In irrigation regions, the whole community may be practically a hamlet or village. In parts of the Eastern states, small farmers sometimes live in the village and go to the farm each day, to work it themselves. But all these are special adaptations, and do not const.i.tute a broad agricultural system.

In time we probably shall develop a new kind of rural settlement, one that will be the result of cooperative units or organizations, and not a consolidation about the present kinds of business places; but it is a question whether these will be villages or hamlets in the sense in which we now use these words.

_The category of agencies._

My position, therefore, is that we must evolve our social rural community directly from the land itself, and mostly by means of the resident forces that now are there.

This being our proposition, it is then necessary to discover whether, given permanent residence on pieces of land, it is still possible to develop anything like a community sense. I do not now propose to discuss this question at any length, but merely to call attention to a few ways in which I think the neighborhood life of the open country may be very distinctly improved.

In this discussion, I purposely omit reference to public utilities and governmental action, because they are outside my present range. The farmer will share with all the people any needful improvement that may be made in regulation of transportation and transportation rates, in control of corporations, in equalizing of taxation, in providing new means of credit, in extending means of communication, in revising tariffs, in reforming the currency, and in perfecting the mail service.

To work out the means of neighborhood cooperation, there should be sufficient and attractive meeting places. The rural schoolhouse is seldom adapted to this purpose. The Grange hall does not represent all the people. The church is not a public inst.i.tution. Libraries are yet insufficient. Town halls are few, and usually as unattractive as possible. There is now considerable discussion of community halls.

Several of them have been built in different parts of the country to meet the new needs, and the practice should grow.

1. The mere _increase of population_ will necessarily bring people closer together, and by that much it will tend to social solidarity.

2. The natural _dividing up of large farms_, which is coming both as a result of the extension of population and from the failure of certain very large estates to be profitable, will also bring country people closer together. The so-called "bonanza farms" are unwieldy and ineffective economic units; and many farmers are "land poor."

3. We shall also _a.s.semble farms_. The increasing population on the land will not always result in smaller farms. Most of the richer and more profitable lands will gradually be divided because, with our increased knowledge and skill, persons can make a living from smaller areas. The remoter and less productive lands will naturally be combined into larger farm areas, however, because a large proportion of such lands cannot make a sufficient profit, when divided into ordinary farm areas, to support and educate a present-day family (page 38). Contiguous areas of the better lands will be combined with them, in order to make a good business unit. As several farms come together under one general ownership, this owner will naturally gather about him a considerable population to work his lands.

The probability is that, under thoroughly skillful single management, a given area of remote or low-productive lands will sustain a larger population than they are now able to sustain under the many indifferent or incompetent ownerships. It is to be hoped that some of these amalgamated areas will develop a share-working or a.s.sociative farming of a kind that is now practically unknown.

4. The _re-creative life_ of the country community greatly needs to be stimulated. Not only games and recreation days need to be encouraged, but the spirit of release from continuous and deadening toil must be encouraged. The country population needs to be livened up. This will come about through the extension of education and the work of ministers, teachers, and organizations. All persons can come together on a recreation basis (pp. 173, 211).

The good farmer will have one day a week for recreation, vacation, and study.

5. _Local politics_ ought to further the entire neighborhood life, rather than to divide the community into hostile camps. All movements, as direct nominations, that stimulate local initiative and develop the sense of responsibility in the people will help toward this end.

6. _Rural government_ is commonly ineffective. It needs awakening by men and women who have arrived at some degree of mastery over their conditions. We talk much of the need of improving munic.i.p.al government, but very little about rural government; yet government in rural communities is inert and dead, as compared with what it might be, and there is probably as much machine politics in it, in proportion to the opportunities, as in city government. Very much of the lack of gumption in the open country is due to the want of a perfectly free and able administration of the public affairs.[3]

[3] See "The Training of Farmers," pp. 26-28, and "The State and the Farmer," p. 125.

The whole political organization of rural communities needs new attention, and perhaps radical overhauling. As I write these sentences, I have before me a newspaper in which a progressive surgeon expresses his opinion (which he has verified for me) on the question of supervision of health in a rural county in an Eastern state. He found the statistics too inaccurate and too indefinite to enable him to draw exact conclusions, but these are approximately the facts:

"No township seems to have deliberately paid its health officer, and but one town deliberately paid its poor physician. The others paid various bills for 'quarantine' and 'fumigating' and 'fees' and other misleading items. There was no way in which to distinguish between the care of the poor and the sick-poor except to guess and to figure on what I happened to know about. A----, the richest and largest township, has no health officers, and spent $200 for the poor in a population of 4000 people living in an area of 93 square miles. B----, the poorest township, with a population of 1000, and an area of 36 square miles, paid her health officer $28 and her poor physician $23.

"One township has 2170 inhabitants living in 51 square miles of territory, worth one and one-eighth million dollars. Its supervisor is paid $352.95 a year for a few days' work; its officers are paid $612.95.

It costs $274.79 each year to elect these officers, and I understand each township is to spend about $5000 for good roads. The health officer that cares for these 2000 people over 51 miles of territory gets $42.53 a year, and the poor physician $34; while the sick-poor get helped to the munificent sum of $59.36, or two and one-half cents from each citizen. The health officers get almost exactly two cents a head for caring for the inhabitants over 51 square miles of land. The supervisor gets out of each inhabitant seventeen cents a year, the officers get thirty cents, while the sick-poor take from each citizen almost three cents. The discrepancy is too glaring to need comment. A community a.s.sessed a million dollars and probably worth two millions spends $40 a year on public health, and $60 a year on one-sixteenth of its population for sickness."

The physician proposes a county commission to take the place of the board of supervisors. He declares that the members of the board have outgrown their usefulness. "They should be junked along with other stagecoaches and a nice, new 60 h. p. county commission put in their place. The fact is that the system is wrong. Our 'government' is a survival of early times, and our science is up to date. They do not fit.

You cannot expect supervisors who were useful in the time of Adam, when there were no cities, no problems, no roads, to serve in the twentieth century with its surgical treatment of degenerates, its germs and prophylactics, its preventive medicine and its scientific spirit.

Supervisors could look after noxious plants and animals in the old days, and they could paper the court-house and eat fat dinners at the poor-house. They did fairly well at settling line fences, drinking sweet cider, and blarneying with insurgents. But they are out of place when it is a question of constructing roads of macadam, of building a tuberculosis hospital for an $18,000,000 county, and especially they are out of place when it is a question of dozens of defectives in the jails and thousands outside who ought to be in hospitals."

7. A _community program for health_[4] is much needed. The farmer lives by himself in his own house, on his own place. If a disease arises in his neighbor's family, it is not likely to spread to his family.

Therefore, disease has seemed to him to be a personal rather than a neighborhood matter. There is the greatest need that the farmer possess a community sense in respect to disease and sanitary conditions. If the city is the center of enlightenment, it should help the country to get hold of this problem.

[4] Another discussion of rural health will be found in my "Training of Farmers," pp. 46-68. The Century Co.

We should have a thoroughgoing system of health supervision and inspection for the open country as well as in the city. Health inspection should run out from the cities and towns into all the adjoining regions, maintaining proper connections with state departments of health. It should be continuous. It should include inspection of animals as well as of human beings. In other words, the whole region is a unit, one part depending on the other. The remarks of the physician, just quoted, indicate how great is the need of an organized health supervision for country communities.

We need meat inspection laws for meat killed and sold within the states, to supplement the inter-state law. We need community slaughter-houses in which all slaughtering of animals shall be under proper inspection. We need state milk inspection programs. It is not right that any large city should be compelled to inspect the milk throughout the state in order to protect itself. It is not right to the farming districts that such inspection should center in the city.