The Evolution of the Country Community Part 6

The community is sometimes corrupted by vicious principles in its construction; and then its members are in proportion defective. It produces in excessive degree idiots, blind, deformed, neurotic, insane or criminal individuals.

The community, thus defined, is normally furnished with certain inst.i.tutions essential to the life of the people. In earlier days the community was sufficient unto itself. Very little was imported.

Everything for use in the community was raised therein and manufactured in the households. A system of exchange gradually was effected through the country store. The country store of 1770 in d.u.c.h.ess County, New York, had an amazing relation to a wide population. The radius of the life dependent upon it was the same as the radius around the Quaker Meeting, beside which this store was placed, and all the goods used in the community with few exceptions were produced and manufactured in this radius of the team haul of ten miles.[25]

Nowadays the country community has normally a store, a blacksmith shop, a church and a school. In the recent past certain cla.s.ses of peddlers regularly visited the country community, though their place in the rural economy is diminishing. The country store in many communities is already closed and its maintenance is surrounded with increasing difficulty. So long, however, as the horse drawn vehicle is the type of transportation in the country, the elements of the country community must remain substantially the same.[26]

The economic life of the community is necessarily a part of the general economic life of the population as a whole. The world economy has in the past hundred years, with the perfection of the means of transportation, taken the place of the communal economy. In 1810 every country community was obliged to manufacture its own raw products so far as possible within its own limits. In 1910 it was no longer profitable for even a country community to do so. The result is that the economic life of the community is usually expressed in a specified industry to which the whole community is primarily devoted. If it be a rural community this organization takes the form of a "money crop." In the corn belt there are other products raised from the soil besides corn, but the world economy a.s.signs to that fertile section the producing of corn as the most profitable and the simplest task. In the coal region it tends to the highest efficiency for the labor of the region to be concentrated upon the supply of this fuel, although in addition the surface of the soil may be cultivated and in the larger population centers other industries are coming in to exploit the superfluous labor. None of these competes with the primacy of the coal industry, which the world economy a.s.signs to that community.

It is essential that in every community there should be one or more industries by which men may live. It tends to the highest well-being of the community, that is, to its possession of a maximum of vital attraction for individuals, that this industry should supply a variety of sources of income; that is, wages, profits and interest. If the community can retain in its own bounds the owners of its industries, at least in some numbers, and the capitalists whose wealth is invested in these industries, it is of great service. If it can make life attractive for wage-earners in these industries, the completeness of that community has its testimonial in this variety and wealth of attraction. The weakness of many American communities is shown in their inability to retain within their bounds the owners of the businesses and the employers of labor. The ideal character of some communities in Ma.s.sachusetts is due to the fact that in the same streets there daily meet capitalists, superintendents, foremen and wage-earners who are alike interested in the local industries.

This power of the community to attract and hold individual lives, supplying them with the vital necessities for which the individual craves, is dependent in America upon educational inst.i.tutions more than upon any other factor. The French philosopher Desmoulin has said that the Anglo-Saxon supremacy is due to the Anglo-Saxon love of the land and of education. The American represents these two pa.s.sions, and of the two the love of education is at present, the stronger. The community which is weak in its schools will not hold its people. The generation who at present are the largest owners of American wealth are eager for educational advantage: and the incoming stream of immigration promises that in the days to come this craving for education will not diminish, but will increase.

The country community has been peculiarly weak in its educational facilities, by a strange dullness and inertia due to the economic prostration of the farming industry. For the two decades following 1880 the country schools have failed to keep pace with the city schools.

Prof. Foght says, "While the public attention has been centered on work and plans for the improvement of the city schools a great factor for or against the public weal has been sadly neglected. This is the rural school. One-half of our entire school population attend the rural schools, which are still in the formative stage. The country youth is ent.i.tled to just as thorough a preparation for thoughtful and intelligent membership in the body politic as is the city youth. The State, if it is wise, will not discriminate in favor of the one as against the other, but will adjust its bounties in a manner equitable to the needs of both. Heretofore the rural schools have received very little attention from organized educational authority."[27]

The effect of this neglect of the country school in the face of the constructive statesmanship which has led in perfecting the city school is seen in the exodus from the country community of very large numbers of the most successful farmers. Evidences are abundant that this exodus from the country community is primarily a quest of educational advantage. Not in every case would the departing family confess that they were seeking better schools: but it is probable that the majority of them while giving a variety of primary reasons for moving would a.s.sign the desire for education as the uniform secondary reason for departing from the country community.

It is impossible for the country church to retain its best ministers.

Many reasons enter into this, but always at the top of the list is the desire for better educational opportunities for the ministers' children.

The advice has become proverbial in theological seminaries, "Go to the country for five years." It is said that in New England there are three cla.s.ses of country ministers and the first of them is the bright young man who will not long be in the country.

The ethical, sometimes called the social factor in the community's life, is no less essential. Organized work requires organized recreation.

Every community which has a systematic economy by which its residents get their living is found to have a systematic though usually informal and unrecognized provision for recreation. Somewhere in the bounds of every working town in America is a playground. It is not the result of "the playground movement," but of the play necessity in human nature.

The open lots where the town is not built up, the railroad yard, the yard of a factory or the town common are used by common consent by the young people and the working-people of the town as a playground.

The departure of many persons from country communities is due to the lack of social life: and the fascination of the city for bright and energetic young men and women is due to the variety of recreation and interest which it provides to those who expect to work and are willing to work. Regular work means regular play. This fact cannot be too well learned by those who study the religious and moral life of modern men.

The need of play is as real as the need of food or of sleep.

This recreational life is highly ethical. The craving of the young and of working-people for common places of recreation is a normal craving due to the development of conscience as well as to weariness of body.

The exactions of modern labor create a craving for free and voluntary movement. Those who are hired to work, and those who if they are employers are bound to the routine of the desk or of the bench, seek to breathe deeply the air of happy and self-expressive action. The result is that play, especially team work, is highly moral. It is not only personal and self-expressive, but it involves co-operation, self-surrender, obedience and the correlation of one's own life with other lives in a glorious complex of experiences, unexampled elsewhere in modern life for their ethical value in developing adolescent minds in the common humanities and moralities. The playground is an essential field in the preparation of good citizens and it is not to be wondered at that in country communities, where all provision of recreation is difficult, and no public provision of playgrounds is thought of by those in authority, that young people and working people, indeed all cla.s.ses of the population, tend to move away.

The religious attraction of the community has just as real a value for the satisfaction of individual life as the economic or ethical or the educational. "Mankind is incurably religious," and the life from birth to death cannot be complete in average cases without religious experience. Indeed the conscious testimony of men to the community's religious value for them is greater than any of the others. Religious experience is indeed a form of community conscience. To many men the church and the community are one. We cannot within our definition grant this; but the testimony to the religious character of the country community is a cla.s.sic in American thought. The early days of every community are hopeful and optimistic. The tendency has been therefore for each religious communion to establish its own church. These early Protestant churches were expressions of the community sense on behalf of these people. The average American can best think of the community in terms of a church and a school. For building up the community, therefore, the maintenance of religious inst.i.tutions is essential.

We are concerned in these chapters most of all with the American community in the country. Not because it is more important, but because it is easier to understand and affords a better model for interpreting other communities more complex and highly organized. In it one may see the processes which affect the town and city communities; shifting of population, economic changes, educational improvement or retrogression and the processes of social life which express themselves in moral conditions. The community is the field in which may be observed the prosperity of the people as a whole. It is the local exhibit in which the average man shows what has come to pa.s.s throughout the commonwealth as a whole.

American rural communities have been under the influence of swift and sudden changes during the years of railroad development. This is exhibited in the country community very clearly. There almost all the causes which are at work in the city are seen and their operation is easier to observe and to measure than in a city community. It is the general impression that the country community has suffered greatly though the loss of population. This is probably due to the diminishing agricultural activity of the country. Thirty-four counties in Ohio are producing less than the same counties were producing before the Civil War. It is natural that the population of these counties should be on the whole smaller than at that time. But it is more probable that the social, educational and moral life of the people of these counties who stayed in the country is slacker and less vigorous than in 1860.

Sometimes the population of a community remains stationary but the economic weakness expresses itself in a r.e.t.a.r.ded social, ethical and religious life.

There is high authority for the statement that the sifting of the country community in recent years has on the whole improved it. Wilbert L. Anderson says, "If this emigration of the best were the whole story, it would be impossible to refute the charge of degeneracy. There is, however, another aspect of the matter. The industrial revolution has put a pressure upon rural life that is more important even than the attraction of cities. That pressure has aggravated the severity of the struggle for existence, and this grinding of the mill of evolution has crushed the weaker strata of the population. Among those who have gone are laborers and their families, the owners and occupants of the poorest lands--the famous abandoned farms, and the weaklings and dependents.

Many of these have swollen the crowds of the factory towns; others have supplied unskilled labor to the cities; in not a few cases they have gone to their destruction in the slums, where residues of decadent folk finally disappear. The human material that was most susceptible to alcohol has gone into the mills of the G.o.ds. When all is summed up, the clearance at the bottom is not less significant than the loss at the top of the social scale. Natural selection works as effectually in toning up the species by weeding out the worst as 'natural selection reversed'

works for degeneracy through the removal of the best. This purgation has been overlooked; whether it offsets the injury in the highest stratum is a fair question, but obviously no man is wise enough to answer it. The opinion may be hazarded that when the two influences are compounded, it will be found that the average child has moved but a little way up or down the scale. This is a local question to which there are as many answers as communities. The net result of these changes is a gain in h.o.m.ogeneousness; in the country town the dream of equality is nearer realization to-day than ever before."[28]

It is the writer's belief that, allowing for local variation, this statement is the best generalization of the condition throughout the country. The rural population has been specialized. The country community is finding its own kind of people. It has not yet, through suitable inst.i.tutions, learned to cultivate its problems and to train its own leaders. That is precisely what will be accomplished through the building up of the country community with which we are here concerned.

But already the country population is h.o.m.ogeneous and is selected with a view to fitness for the environment of the rural community. As the city is breeding its own stock, who are possessed with the problem of city life and devoted to the interests of the city, so the country in the shifting of modern populations is coming to have its own kind of people; among whom the problems of the country community are beginning to be discussed and the interests of the country community are being provided for by suitable organizations.

The building of communities, therefore, will provide the positive agencies requisite for the needs of the present population in the country. The purpose of those who serve the country population shall be the construction of suitable inst.i.tutions by which country life shall be made worth while. These inst.i.tutions must be economic, for the securing of prosperity to country people, social inst.i.tutions which shall build up their moral character and life, educational inst.i.tutions whereby the problems of country life shall be understood in the light of all human life, and religious inst.i.tutions which shall crown the life of country people with hope and animate the individual with the spirit of self-sacrifice on behalf of all the people of the community and of the world.

The church should be a community center. There may be other centers of the community where other functions are a.s.sembled, but the church should lift up her eyes to the horizon in which she lives and comprehend all the people in her service and affection. This does not mean that they shall all be members of that church. The community spirit is itself growing. Frequently the country community has attained a unity which the churches ignore. For the church to become a community center means that it represents in itself the united life of the people. Whatever be their common interest that interest dwells in the church.

In Hernando, Mississippi, the people are united. The interest of one is the concern of all. Under the leadership of the families of old land-owners the whole community responds to common impulses and is organized under common ideals. No poor child of either a white or a negro household is neglected or is overlooked. Yet in this community churches have no federation and ministers have no regular means of working together. A charity organization was recently formed in this community as an organ by which the community should care for its poorer members. This society was formed outside of the churches, no one of which had the right to be a center for the community. It is true that ministers and members of these churches were leaders in this community enterprise, but the churches as organizations were not a part of it, although its purposes are purely Christian.

Prof. Alva Agee insists that "The country church does not serve the community's needs as the community sees those needs." His meaning is that when a community enterprise is to be launched the promoter of it finds it necessary in the country to avoid the churches, lest his enterprise be entangled in their differences. He is embarra.s.sed also by their lack of a community spirit. Frequently the same persons who to the church contribute no community spirit are in the community itself leaders of common enterprises.

In contrast to these conditions the instance of Du Page Church at Plainfield, Illinois, of which Rev. Matthew B. Mc.n.u.tt was recently the minister, exhibits the power of a country church to make itself the center of a whole community. This church, which in a year became famous throughout the land, has earned its repute by ten years of devoted service of its minister and the growing affection and union of its people. The church serves so well the social needs of the community that a social hall once popular has been closed and three granges in succession have attempted to organize in the community and have failed.

Yet Du Page Church is pa.s.sionately devotional and intensely missionary.

Its social life is but a legitimate expression of its community sense.

The minister and his people have had the power to see and to inspire a common life among the people in the countryside.

This chapter has been intended as a definition of the country community.

Its radius is the team haul, because the horse has been the means of transportation in the country. The community is the round of life in which the individual in the country pa.s.ses his days: it is his larger home. The definition of this greater household of the country must be flexible, but however it be defined, it is the characteristic unit of social organization among country people. The map of the United States outside the great cities is made up of little societies bordering sharply upon one another, differing from one another socially and religiously. These little societies are the proper fields in which the life of the church and the school is lived. Of these small societies the church and the school are the expressions. In church and school the country community has its highest life.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 24: The author expresses his indebtedness for this definition to Dr. Willet M. Hays of the Department of Agriculture at Washington.]

[Footnote 25: Quaker Hill, by Warren H. Wilson.]

[Footnote 26: Professor C. J. Galpin of University of Wisconsin has done precise work of great value, in defining the country community, as it centers in the village. See his pamphlet, "A Method of Making a Social Survey of the Rural Community," a bulletin of the Agricultural Experiment Station of the University of Wisconsin.]

[Footnote 27: "The American Rural School," by Harold W. Foght.]

[Footnote 28: "The Country Town," by Wilbert L. Anderson, D.D.]

VIII

THE MARGIN OF THE COMMUNITY

The change of ethical consciousness among church people in recent years takes the form of a transference of interest from the individual to the community. The literature of religious and ethical thought is full of appeal to "serve the community." The working out of any religious or ethical force in modern society is guided by the closely compacted and highly organic character of present-day social life.

In the old times in America, which have so recently gone, men were of one cla.s.s; the community was h.o.m.ogeneous; universal acquaintance prevailed.

The unit of value in American life until recent years was the successful man, because we faced a continent unexplored. Unpossessed commercial resources were before the people. The standard of the time of Horace Greeley was the standard of individual success, of initial utility. The town boasted of the man it had "turned out." The church measured its value by the rich and benevolent farmer or merchant, and by the individuals whose piety or literary success seemed to express the life of the church. There was an opportunity for all, because crude resources, numberless openings offered themselves to every one who had character, industry and brains.

Within a decade the American people have become conscious that their resources are numbered. The free lands of the West are a.s.signed. The tons of coal under the ground are estimated. The amount of timber, of copper and of iron still unexploited is known, and public discussion is centered upon the limits to the growth of the American population, and the possibilities of more economical organization of life. We can no longer waste as once we could. The problem is now a problem of economy.

Instead of the standards of a time of plenty we are confronted with problems of bare subsistence.

In times of plenty, when resources are not yet exhausted, men's lives diverge and the individual is the unit of thought and feeling. The natural result of a time of plenty is the development and the endowment of personality. But in times when a bare subsistence is the condition with which many are confronted, men are drawn together and the community becomes the unit of thought and feeling. Industry as it matures brings men together. It becomes evident that they depend upon one another.

Men who in a time of plenty would seek an independent fortune, under conditions of bare subsistence are contented to secure employment and to become dependent upon others. The problems of subsistence open opportunities for exploitation and the stronger become related to great numbers of weaker members of the community. Thus men's lives are intensified, and the conditions out of which thought and feeling arise are social conditions rather than individual.

The country community under these circ.u.mstances rises into new significance. In the early pioneer days the country community for a similar reason was much in thought and feeling, because then men were seeking a bare subsistence in the contest with nature. This consciousness was lost as soon as the pioneer days were past and the abundance of nature began to enrich mankind instead of antagonizing him.

Now, again, the country community has come into prominence because men are confronted with a struggle to maintain an acceptable standard of living.

In dealing with a social whole, to accomplish certain purposes one must deal with it in social terms. Social service is not quant.i.tative, but qualitative. Ministry to a community is not uniformly applied to all the members. In social service there is no such thing as equality of all the population. The differing values of men in a social population are determined, as other values are measured, by the working of the law of diminishing returns.