The Evolution of the Country Community Part 3

On his wide acres family life was replaced by boarding-houses. Schools and churches were closed, and many farmhouses built by the homesteaders rotted down to their foundations. But David Rankin was a husbandman, if not a humanist. His tillage of the soil was successful in that it maintained the fertility of the soil, that it produced large quant.i.ties of food for the consumer, and that it was profitable.

The following is a description of community life under the influence of such great landlords, by a Western observer:--

"The city of Ca.s.selton, North Dakota, was originally started about the year 1879. Thirty years ago the first settlers came to this great prairie region from the New England and Central States. It was shortly before this or about this time that the Northern Pacific Railroad was built across this western prairie. The government gave to the road every other section of land on each side of the railroad for thirty miles as a bonus. That land was sold in the early days by the railroad to purchasers for fifty cents an acre. It was some of the finest farming land in the wide world. Out of those sales grew some of the immense farms that have been so famous over the country and while they are great business concerns managed with fine business ability, yet they are not much of a help in the settling of the country. Here within one mile of Ca.s.selton is the famous Dalrymple farm of twenty-eight thousand acres.

This farm employs during the busy season what men it needs from the drifting cla.s.ses and puts no families on its broad acres. These men are here a short season in the summer, then are gone. They are rushed with work for that season, Sundays as well as other days from early morning to late at night, making it almost impossible to touch their religious life or even to count them a part of the community life.

"Another farm is the Chaffee farm of thirty-five thousand acres. Mr.

Chaffee is a thorough business man but is a fine Christian and places a good family on each section of land. He allows no Sunday work. Has a little city kept up in beautiful condition in the center of his land where he lives with his clerks and immediate helpers. Here they have a neat little Congregational church and support their own minister. His fine influence is felt all over the country. The partners in this farm also have a land and loan corporation and also a large flour mill in Ca.s.selton which employs about twenty-eight men, running day and night during the busy season.

"There are many farms smaller, from one thousand acres and up. Many also of a quarter section. Ca.s.selton was built simply as a center for this beautiful and rich farming region. It is in the center of a strip six miles long and twenty-five miles wide which is said to be one of the finest sections in the land. There are other towns sprung up in the same section also. Through the past thirty years farmers have retired, well to do, and moved into the city. Here are now maintained excellent schools."

In conclusion: the exploitation of farm lands is a process with which the church in the country cannot deal by persuasion. It is an economic condition. They who are engaged in this process or are concerned in its effects are in so far immune to the preacher who ignores or who does not understand these economic conditions. Their action is conditioned by their status. They will infallibly act with relation to the church in accordance with the motives which arise out of their condition. That is, they will act as tenant farmers, as retired farmers or as absentee landlords. They must be treated on these terms. Their whole relation to organized religion will be that of the condition in which they live and by which they get their daily bread. This is a matter independent of personal goodness. The church is dependent not on personal good influences, but upon the response which a man makes in accordance with his economic and social character.

For instance, in Wisconsin a church worker found that thousands of acres in a certain section were owned by a Milwaukee capitalist. He found that the tenant farmers on these acres were poor and struggling for a better living, and he could not, among them, finance an adequate church.

He promptly went to Milwaukee and secured five minutes of the time and attention of the absentee landlord. When he had stated the case and the reasons why this large owner should give to the country church on his acres, the man promptly said, "You have stated what I never before realized and I will give you a contribution of one hundred dollars per year for that church until you hear from me to the contrary."

In contrast to this there is in Central Illinois a large estate of five thousand acres. The owner lives in a distant city and his son tills the land. It is known among the neighbors that the son has orders to oppose all improvements of churches and of schools, "because there is no money for us in the church or the school."

It is useless to complain of the position in which a man is. The minister's duty is to utilize him in his own status and to enable him to practise the virtues which are open to him. The retired farmer can become an active and devoted evangelist, preacher or organizer. He should be made a leader in the intellectual development of the farmer's problem of the region. He has leisure and intelligence and is often a devout man. It is the business of the minister to transform this into religious and social efficiency. The temperance movement in the Middle West has had generous and devoted support from the retired farmers living in the towns. The families of these one time farmers are seeking after culture. The literary and aesthetic aspects of the community can well be committed to members of these families. Their value for the community is probably in these directions. Above all it is the business of the minister to sympathize with the life they are living and to enable them to live it to the highest advantage.

The energies of the church should be devoted to the tenant farmer. Of this more will be said in another place. He also must be treated in sympathy with his social and economic experience and the religious service rendered to him must be the complete betterment of his life as he is trying to live it. He is not a sinner because he is a tenant and what he does as a tenant is therefore not a misdemeanor, but a normal reaction upon life. The church can help him in purging his life from the iniquities peculiar to a tenant and a dependent. The n.o.blest motives must be brought out and the life he is to live should be given its own ideals.

Above all the period of exploitation must be understood by the teacher and the preacher to be a preparation, a transition through which country people are coming to organized and scientific agriculture. Gradually the influence of science and the leadership of the departments and colleges of agriculture are being extended in the country. Little by little, whether through landlord or tenant, farming is becoming a profession requiring brains, science and trained intelligence. The country church should promote this process because only through its maturity can the country church in the average community find its own establishment. The reconstruction of the churches now going on corresponds to the exploitation of the land. The duty of the church in the process of exploitation is to build the community and to make itself the center of the growing scientific industry on which the country community in the future will be founded.

The religion of the exploiter moves in the giving of money. Consecration of his wealth is consecration of his world and of himself. The church that would save him must teach him to give. His sins are those of greed, his virtues are those of benevolence. His own type, not the least worthy among men, should be honored in his religion. No man's conversion ever makes him depart from his type, but be true to his type. Therefore the religion for the exploiter of land is a religion of giving, to the poor at his door, to the ignorant in this land, and to the needy of all lands.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 7: The Conservation of Natural Resources in the United States, by Van Hise.]

[Footnote 8: J. B. Ross--"Agrarian Changes in the Middle West."]

[Footnote 9: Secretary of Agriculture, James Wilson at the United States Land and Irrigation Exposition, Chicago, Nov. 19, 1910.]

[Footnote 10: The Rural Life Problem in the United States, by Sir Horace Plunkett.]

[Footnote 11: Dean Chas. F. Curtiss, State College of Iowa.]

IV

THE HUSBANDMAN

The scientific farmer is dependent upon the world economy. He is the local representative of agriculture, whose organization is national and even international. He raises cotton in Georgia, but he "makes milk" in Orange County, New York, because the market and the soil and the climate and other conditions require of him this crop.

He is dependent upon the college of agriculture for the methods by which he can survive as a farmer. Tradition, which dominated the agriculture of a former period, is a disappearing factor in husbandry of the soil.

The changes in market conditions are such as to impoverish the farmer who learns only from the past. Tradition could teach the farmer how to raise the raw materials, under the old economy, in which the farmhouse and community were sufficient unto themselves. But in a time when the wool of the sheep in Australia goes halfway round the world in its pa.s.sage from the back of a sheep to the back of a man, the sheep farmer becomes dependent upon the scientist. He cannot afford to raise sheep unless the scientific man a.s.sures him that in the production of wool his land has its highest utility. "The American farm land is pa.s.sing into the hands of those who will use it to the highest advantage."[12]

The dependence of the scientific farmer or husbandman upon the world market and upon the scientists who are studying agriculture enlarges the circle of his life from the rural household to the rural community. In the rural community agriculture can be taught; in the household it cannot. The only teaching of the household is tradition; the teaching of the community is in terms of science. The country school and the country church take a greater place as community inst.i.tutions just so soon as the farmer pa.s.ses out of the period of exploitation into that of scientific husbandry.

The husbandman is the economist in agriculture. He is to the farm what the husband was to the household in old times. One is tempted to say also that the husbandman is he who marries the land. American farm land has suffered dishonor and degradation, but it has known all too little the affection which could be figuratively expressed in marriage. The Bible speaks of "marrying the land."--"Thy land shall be called Beulah for thy land shall be married." Side by side in this country we have the lands which have been dishonored, degraded, abandoned, dissolute, and the lands husbanded, fertilized, enriched and made beautiful.

The husbandman or rural economist cares more for qualities than for quant.i.ty. He works not merely for intensive cultivation of the soil, but also for the preservation of the soil and use of it in its own terms, at its highest values.

The principle at work is not the increase in the farmer's material gains or possessions. The husbandry of the soil is not a mere increase in market values. It is a deeper and more ethical welfare than that which can be put in the bank. "Agriculture is a religious occupation." When it sustains a permanent population and extends from generation to generation the same experiences, agriculture is productive in the highest degree of moral and religious values. In the words of Director L. H. Bailey, of Cornell, "The land is holy."

This is especially true at the present time, when the land is limited in amount. Already the whole nation is dependent upon the farmer in the degree intimated by the statement of Dean Bailey. "The census of 1900 showed approximately one-third of our people on farms or closely connected with farms, as against something like nine-tenths, a hundred years previous. It is doubtful whether we have struck bottom, although the rural exodus may have gone too far in some regions, and we may not permanently strike bottom for sometime to come."[13]

The service of the few to the many, therefore, is the present status of the husbandman. The very fact that one-third of the people must feed all the people imposes religious and ethical conditions upon the farmer.

The dependence of the greater number for their welfare upon those who are to till the soil brings that obligation, which the farmer is well const.i.tuted to bear and to which his serious spirit gives response.

This means that with the growing consciousness of the need of scientific agriculture there will arise, indeed is now arising, a new ethical and religious feeling among country people. The church which is made up of scientific farmers is a new type of church.

A notable testimony to the influence of the church in developing husbandry is by Sir Horace Plunkett,[14] who testifies to the religious influence that led to the agrarian revolution in Denmark.

"My friends and I have been deeply impressed by the educational experience of Denmark, where the people, who are as much dependent on agriculture as are the Irish, have brought it by means of organization to a more genuine success than it has attained anywhere else in Europe.

Yet an inquirer will at once discover that it is to the 'High School'

founded by Bishop Grundtvig, and not to the agricultural schools, which are also excellent, that the extraordinary national progress is mainly due. A friend of mine who was studying the Danish system of state aid to agriculture, found this to be the opinion of the Danes of all cla.s.ses, and was astounded at the achievements of the a.s.sociations of farmers not only in the manufacture of b.u.t.ter, but in a far more difficult undertaking, the manufacture of bacon in large factories equipped with all the most modern machinery and appliances which science had devised for the production of the finished article. He at first concluded that this success in a highly technical industry by bodies of farmers indicated a very perfect system of technical education. But he soon found another cause. As one of the leading educators and agriculturists of the country put it to him: 'It's not technical instruction, it's the humanities.' I would like to add that it is also, if I may coin a term, the 'nationalities,' for nothing is more evident to the student of Danish education or, I might add, of the excellent system of the Christian Brothers in Ireland, than that one of the secrets of their success is to be found in their national basis and their foundation upon the history and literature of the country."

Every observer of these Danish Folk High Schools testifies to their religious enthusiasm, their patriotism and above all to the songs with which their lecture hours are begun and ended. A graduate of these schools living for years in America, the mother of children then entering college, said, "Those songs helped me over the hardest period of my life. I can always sing myself happy with them." The spirit which pervades the schools was influential in Danish agriculture, as expressed in the t.i.tle of Grundtvig's best known hymn, "The Country Church Bells." Under such an influence as this has the agricultural life of Denmark taken the lead over its urban and manufacturing life.

The modifying influence of husbandry upon the church and its teaching is ill.u.s.trated in the following incident. A farmer in Missouri had a good stand of corn which promised all through the summer to produce an excellent crop. Abundance of sun and rain favored the farmer's hope that his returns would be large, but in the fall the crop proved a failure.

The farmer at once cast about for the cause of this disappointment. He had his soil a.n.a.lyzed by a scientist and discovered that it was deficient in nitrogen. The next year he devoted to supplying this lack in the soil and in the year following had an abundant return in corn.

"Now that experience turned me away," said he, "from the country church, because the teaching of the country church as I had been accustomed to it was out of harmony with the study of the situation and the conquest over nature. I had been taught in the country church to surrender under such conditions to the will of Providence." The country church of the husbandman must therefore be a church in harmony with the tillage of the soil by science. Like the farm households about it, the church will possess a large wealth of tradition, but the church of the scientific farmer must be open to the teachings of science and must be responsive, intelligent and alert in the intellectual leadership of the people.

A church of this sort is at West Nottingham, Maryland. The minister Rev.

Samuel Polk, had been discouraged by the inattention of his people to his message. He had come to feel that this is an unbelieving age and had surrendered himself to the steadfast performance of his duties, the preaching of the truth faithfully and the ministry to his people so far as they would receive it. In addition he had the task of tilling forty acres of land which belongs to the church. This he was doing faithfully, but without much intelligent interest.

An address on the country church in an agricultural college sent him home with new ideas. He saw that his life as a farmer and as a preacher had to be made one. He determined to preach to farmers and to till his land as an example of Christian husbandry. He began as a scholar by studying the scientific use of his land. He found at once that the farmers about him were forced to study the tillage of their soil, because it had been exhausted of fertility by methods of farming no longer profitable. In the first year the preacher raised, by means of a dust mulch through a dry summer, a crop of one hundred and seventy-five bushels of potatoes. Meantime his preaching had been enlivened with new ill.u.s.trations and he was enabled to enforce, to the amazement of his hearers, new impressions with old truths. The Scripture teaching which had become dull and scholastic became live and modern, as he preached the Old Testament to a people who were recognizing the sacredness of land. His audiences began to increase. His influence on his people very shortly pa.s.sed bounds and reserves. When at the end of the season his potato crop came in, the farmers gave sign of recognizing his leadership as a farmer and as a preacher. Within a year this man had taken a place as a first citizen, which no one else in the community could hold.

Because he was a preacher he could become the leading authority upon farming and because he must needs be a farmer he found it possible to preach with greater acceptance.

This pastor gave up the methods of bookish preparation for preaching. He preached as the Old Testament men did, to the occasion and to the event.

He spoke to the community as being a man himself immersed in the same life as theirs. On a recent occasion when a woman was very sick in one of the farm houses and had suffered from the neglect of her neighbors, his sermon consisted of an appeal to visit the sick. That afternoon the invalid was called on by thirty-eight people and sent a message before night, begging the minister to hold the people back.

There are a few ministers throughout the country who are successful farmers. Many ministers are speculators in farm land. They belong in the exploiter cla.s.s. One more instance should be given of the preacher who promotes agriculture. In a recent discussion the writer was asked, "Do you then believe that the minister should attend the agricultural college," and he replied, "No. The agricultural college should be brought to the country church."

At Bellona, New York, the ministers of two churches, Methodist and Presbyterian, united with their officers in a farmers' club, to which others were admitted. This club under the leadership of Rev. T. Maxwell Morrison, makes the nucleus of its work the study of the agriculture of the neighborhood and the improvement of it. Lecturers from Cornell University are brought throughout the year into the country community to take up in succession the various aspects of farming which may be improved. The market is studied, by chemical a.n.a.lysis the nature of the soil is determined, and the possibilities of the community are raised to their highest value by careful investigation.

This farmers' club has social features as well. Other topics besides farming are occasionally studied but the business of the club is economic promotion of the well-being of the community. Incidentally, it has furnished a social center for the countryside. The churches which have had to do with it have been enlarged, their membership extended and even their gifts to foreign missions have been increased in the period of growth of the farmers' club.

The elements of permanent cultivation of the soil are found in greater numbers among the Mormons, Scotch Irish Presbyterians, Pennsylvania Germans, who are the best American agriculturists, than among the more unstable populations of farmers. Those elements, however, are, simply speaking, the following.

A certain austerity of life always accompanies successful and permanent agriculture. By this is meant a fixed relation between production and consumption.[15] Successful tillers of the soil labor to produce an abundant harvest. They live at the same time in a meager and sparing manner. Production is with them raised to its highest power and consumption is reduced to its lowest. This means austere living. Such communities are found among the Scotch Irish farmers. Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, is peopled with them and their tillage of the soil has continued through two centuries.

A notable ill.u.s.tration is in Illinois. The permanence of the conditions of country life in this community is indicated by the long pastorate of the minister who has just retired. Coming to the church at forty-eight years of age, after other men have ceased from zealous service, he ministered forty-two years to this parish of farmers, and has recently retired at the age of ninety, leaving the church in ideal condition.

"The Middle Creek Church is distinctly a country charge, located in the Southwest corner of Winnebago Township, of the County of Winnebago.