The Evolution of the Country Community Part 7

Roughly stated, this law is that successive additions of any valued thing bring ever diminished returns. The first quant.i.ty of anything is of infinite value. For later increments the value is measurable, and ever less with the increase. The application of this law in economics is stated as follows by Professor John Bates Clark:

"Labor, as thus applied to land, is subject to a law of diminishing returns. Put one man on a quarter section of land, containing prairie and forest, and he will get a rich return. Two laborers on the same ground will get less per man; three will get still less; and, if you enlarge the force to ten, it may be that the last man will get wages only."

"Modern studies of value, show that doses of consumer's goods, given in a series to the same person have less and less utility per dose. The final utility theory of value rests on the same principle as does the theory of diminishing returns from agriculture; and this principle has a far wider range of new applications."

"We have undertaken to generalize the law that is at the basis of the theory of value. In reality, it is all-comprehensive. The first generalization to be made consists in applying the law, not to single articles, but to consumers' wealth in all its forms. The richer man becomes, the less can his wealth do for him. Not only a series of goods that are all alike, but a succession of units of wealth itself, with no such limitation, on its forms, becomes less and less useful per unit.

Give to a man not coats, but 'dollars,' one after another, and the utility of the last will still be less than that of any other. The early dollars feed, clothe and shelter the man, but the last one finds it hard to do anything for him."[29]

By this law successive deposits of immigrants and successive gains in the American population are reducing the valuation of men for religious, moral and educational use. The first man in any historic experience is of infinite value. The first American, Columbus, will be famous forever, but not because of any talents or enterprises of his. As a matter of fact he blundered in discovering America and died ignorant of the feat he had actually accomplished. But because he was the first white man on a new continent he had infinite historical value. When the early Europeans were increased to ten or to one thousand each of them entered into fame, though men like John Smith were commonplace enough in their performances. Their fame is measurable, but still great. When the number of Americans was increased to eight millions everyone thought himself a great citizen, the founder of a family and a potential millionaire.

Those were still the days of exceptional personality. The type of man in those times was the landowner, the pioneer and the statesman. But now there are ninety million Americans, all the valuable lands are a.s.signed, all the best positions are filled, every job is taken, and ten million of the population are concerned about the problem of daily bread. These ten million people are the marginal Americans. They are breadwinners, and the breadwinner is the unit of value on whom the standard of American social and religious life is measured. So far as there can be an American type on whom policies in public life are measured, that type is today the breadwinner. In the city the breadwinner is a working man or an immigrant. In the country the marginal man is the tenant farmer; or a working farmer, though he be the owner. The marginal man represents the value of all men in the community.

The law of diminishing returns works in the factory for fixing the wages in any scale which prevails throughout a level of pay. It is equally efficient in leveling men in the community. The employer does not pay the working man on any level of wages in accordance with the value of the few brilliant, trusty or inventive men in that group, but he pays each man just that wage which he must offer to the last man he hires.

The marginal man standardizes the wage. The religious values of men are standardized not upon the brilliant or saintly or accomplished, not upon the well-to-do members of the community, but upon the poor who are just able to stand and maintain themselves in the life of that community.

The working of this law is not a matter of persuasion. It is the inflexible condition with which religious and ethical inst.i.tutions are confronted. Churches should therefore estimate their policies by the responses of the marginal people of the community. Religious standards of value should be measured by final utility, not initial utility. The complaint against the church today is reducible to this: that she standardizes her ideals and her policies in accordance with the prosperous and well-to-do. The eloquence and the character of her ministers, the kind of music with which G.o.d is worshipped, the comfortable pews, the carpets on the floor, are all of them unlike the public hall which is supported by the dues of the poor. The taste expressed in church matters is rather literary and aesthetic than popular. The church which would appeal to the whole community must standardize her work upon the poor man, and make her appeal to him.

This principle is not only scientifically correct, but it works out in practise. A minister who came into a well organized country community, where there were a few land-holders, many tenants and numbers of farm lands, found that the only appeal by which the whole community could be reached was an appeal directed to the marginal people in the community.

When he sought the tenant farmer, he secured with him the land-holder, and when he went after the hired man on the farm, he secured the farmer who employed him. When he gained the adherence of the boys and girls he secured the support of their parents, and when he rendered service to little children, he could safely rely upon the grat.i.tude and loyalty of their mothers and fathers.

This was the kind of work which Jesus did. He frankly made a selection of the people to whom he should minister.[30] He knew no phrases about all men being equal, and he made no profession of impartiality such as today causes many ministers to loiter among the well-to-do, who care not for them. Jesus said he had no time to spend with well people, because he was sent to the sick. But the philosophy of his action was seen in the fact that when he ministered to the sick he himself helped the well.

He "preached the gospel to the poor," but not because he had any prejudice against the rich. By ministering to the poor he applied his gospel to the margin of the community. That gospel has been of equal value to the rich man, because the spiritual experiences of the poor are the experience also of the rich. The modern minister who goes after rich men specifically, or who goes after them with the same vigor with which he seeks the poor, will receive but a grudging welcome. But if he awakens the grat.i.tude and support of the poor, he will find himself sought by the rich, and sustained by their abundant gifts.

Mr. Gilbert K. Chesterton, the English critic, has somewhere finely said that the Master in his words to Simon Peter, "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church," clearly recognized that Peter was a shuffler and a weakling and a coward and it was upon just such common material that the church was founded. It was not to be an aristocratic organization. Its foundations were not laid upon skill and genius in human character, but upon the weaker and commonplace traits, which universal mankind possesses.

So definite was the appeal of Jesus to the marginal people of his time, that he has been twice criticized unjustly; once in his own time by the Pharisees, and again in our time by the Socialists. The latter have claimed that Jesus was "cla.s.s conscious," that he was a partisan of the poor, a proletarian radical. The unscientific character of Socialism is displayed in this comment upon Jesus. His appeal was to the whole community, as through Christian history his message has come uniformly to men of all degrees, rich and poor, ignorant and learned, bad and good. The religious genius of Jesus is shown in the fact that he recognized what the Socialist does not, that to appeal to the whole community a prophet must address his plea to the people on the margin of the community. His measure of value must be final utility.

One may go at large into this tempting field in ill.u.s.trations. The artistic experience of mankind is abundant in ill.u.s.tration of it. There is no beauty of the ocean save in its sh.o.r.es--the margin of the boundless expanse. Literary descriptions of the experiences of human love are made up of descriptions of the margins of love. Married life is depicted in courtship, and the sentiments of affection are described in scenes of parting and meeting, which are the margins of companionship.

This principle should be fundamental in all policies of reconstruction of religious and ethical inst.i.tutions. In the training of men for religious service and for ethical leadership they should be accustomed to think in terms of communal wholes, and this thinking will use as its units of measure the characteristics of the marginal life. It is for this reason that temperance reform in America has been so influential within the past two decades. It is a communal form of ethics. It demands that the community should act together in safeguarding the weaker members of the community, the young men, and the working people. The old temperance propaganda was individualistist. It recorded its results in the number of persons who signed the pledge. Its results were almost as gratifying if the pledges were signed by well-doing and orderly people as if they were signed by drunkards. The modern temperance movement draws its influence from its proposed effect upon the agricultural laborer.

The theological seminary of the past has been a literary inst.i.tution.

During the period of its development the typical Christian was the bright and aspiring young man in a community of boundless resources. To such a man books are the interpreters of life. But in the modern period with the congested population and close social organization, human fellowship is an experience of greater value to most men than books.

Since the time of the invention of printing successive quant.i.ties of literature have been given to the world, and under the law of diminishing returns literature has come to have for many very small returns. At the time of the Protestant Reformation the value of books in the hands of the common people was infinite. For several generations along with the extension of universal education this infinite value of books continued for the people on the margin of the educated world. But nowadays everybody in American progressive communities can read and write: and in a universally educated population we arrive at the final utility of books in human use. Great ma.s.ses of poor people and also many people of means use books within narrow limits only. They do not buy them, they do not read them, they do not think in literary terms. Yet they have access to books and they turn from them with a clear sense of intelligent preference for other human values. Books are to them but an alphabet and social life is the story.

My own impression is that the life of the marginal man is social rather than literary. His religion will be a social religion rather than a biblical religion. The weakness of Protestantism is that it stubbornly insists upon literary interpretation of G.o.d and upon a biblical ministry, while the population around these Protestant churches exemplifies the diminished value of literature for spiritual uses.

The religious and ethical service of the days to come must interpret the social life of the people. The great ma.s.s of the people care as little for wealth as they do for books. The same argument as to the diminished returns of literature may be repeated to describe the diminished returns of private property. The economic revolution since feudal days has exhausted the values of private property in satisfying human need. The time was when property had an infinite value for expressing personality. In days to come private property will still have this value for many individuals. But among common folks generally private property does not seem to have boundless value for human satisfaction. Working men as I have known them do not take pains to get rich. They know the way to wealth by economy and acc.u.mulation, but they do not take it. They have a vast preference for the social intercourse, friendly interchanges and mutual dependence by which their life is refreshed, strengthened and sustained. Ethical policies of the future while using literature and private property as efficient implements must interpret social life itself as a flowing spring of religion and morality.

The training of religious and ethical leaders should be undertaken in the theological seminary and in the university in such manner as to standardize the influence of these inst.i.tutions, by the life not of the exceptional man, but of the common man. The influence of educated men must be used to reconstruct churches and societies upon the standards not of the wealthy, the learned, the genius and the well-to-do, but by the experiences of the poor, the workingman and the immigrant. The standard in all religious and ethical inst.i.tutions which profess to represent the community is today graded up to the professional and exceptional. The reconstruction necessary is to grade down so that the appeal shall be to the poor and struggling man whose condition is in jeopardy, and whose status in the community is as yet undetermined.

Inst.i.tutions which appeal to the community as a whole must standardize their policy to the level of the margin of the community.

The reconstruction of the theological seminaries is necessary, if they are to fit men for service in communities. They render now a service which is so valuable that one cannot pa.s.s over them lightly. They train the candidate for the ministry by a process which develops and engages his piety. Other university courses either ignore his religious feeling, or if they develop it, do not harness it to the task of social improvement. The theological seminary lays the yoke of service upon the neck of prayer. This alone justifies its existence as a servant of the church in the community. However, the instruction in the seminary is rigidly grouped around courses in dead languages; which are jealous of instruction in a living tongue. The history of discarded doctrines and of discredited teachers is minutely taught through months, to the exclusion of courses upon modern, living people, whose religious experience is rich and striking. The purpose of seminary instruction is personal culture instead of efficiency. It is the theory of the teachers wherein they disagree with all other professional teachers, that "We do not make preachers: the Lord makes them." They try therefore to impart culture and personal distinction.

The seminaries need first of all flexibility of courses. The whole traditional schedule should be made elective. The demands of the time would then have free course in the seminary, and would rearrange the instruction according to actual present need. The cultivation of practical piety should receive more attention. The social life of the students, in close a.s.sociation with their professors and under religious stimuli, should be made a more powerful force than it usually is, in creating a common ideal of service to which the seminary should commit itself. Above all, the seminary of theology should teach sociology and economics, as a religious interpretation. Students should after a year's cla.s.s-room work be made to investigate and report upon actual conditions, should be delegated to study social movements, report upon them, and to lead in discussing them. They should be trained in the use of statistics, in graphic display of conditions, and in the use of public reports. In the senior year they should be employed definitely in practical work for populations, under instructors. After graduation the young minister should, more generally than now, be employed as an a.s.sistant to an older minister, in a large organization.

The influence of such social training would itself reform seminary instruction. Thrust into a present-day curriculum, social science is a foreign and alien intruder; but its value would soon be demonstrated and other courses would be made over in new harmony with it. If some courses be dropped, even if whole chairs be abandoned, it is better than that the whole theological seminary be abandoned by students--which is the apparent fate hanging over certain seminaries! What has here been said is true of the schools of theology in all denominations, and applies alike to both the conservative and the liberal.

In conclusion, the writer believes that the church's future is with the self-respecting poor. Jesus and nearly every leader of a great religious movement was of the poor and labored with the poor. The sources of religion are those named in the Beat.i.tudes: poverty, meekness, sorrow, hunger, ostracism; and those are all social experiences. The service of the church should be to these; and in serving the marginal people, whose life is composed of the Beat.i.tudes, the church will serve all men.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 29: "The Distribution of Wealth," by John Bates Clark.]

[Footnote 30: Luke, 6:20 ff; 15:1 ff.]

IX

NEWCOMERS IN THE COMMUNITY

One general cause is bringing new people into the average country community. The exploitation of land expresses the transition from the period of the land farmer to that of the scientific farmer or husbandman. The signs of this exploitation are the retirement of farmers from the land, the incoming of new owners in some numbers and of tenant farmers in a large degree, into the country community. The influence of the absentee landlord begins to be felt in communities in which the landowner was until 1890 the only type. In most of the older states immigration from foreign lands has not greatly affected the country community. In Wisconsin, Minnesota and other states of the Northwest substantial sections of the community are invaded by people of st.u.r.dy Germanic and Norse extraction. In New England the Poles, French, Portuguese and some Jews are settling in the country. But throughout the states of the Union as a whole the population, both the newcomers and older stock, are American.

The dates of this exploitation of land are, generally, from 1890 onward.

Reference is made elsewhere to the description of this process in the Middle West.[31]

Independent of these causes the same process has appeared in the South, in Georgia, Mississippi and in West Tennessee, as well as other states.

In sections in which the values of land have not been doubled, as in Illinois and in Indiana they have, the same exodus from the farm and invasion of the country community by new people has taken place.

One cause of this exploitation of land is the shrinkage in size of the older families. Everywhere the exploitation of land is the greatest where the soil is the richest and the farmers the most prosperous. Even in the exceptional populations such as the Scotch Presbyterians and Pennsylvania Germans, this effect of agricultural prosperity is slowly at work.

In Chester County, Pennsylvania, and in Washington County, where the most substantial farmers in the country are found, the families in the present generation are small. Many of the older stock have no children.

Families which have retained the t.i.tle of their land for eight generations are losing their hold upon the soil, by the fact that they have none to inherit after them.

Another cause of this exploitation of land is the increasing number of small farms in certain regions. This means that in certain sections the farming population has a new element, for the holders of these small farms are many of them new to the community.

The process, which is made clear by the census of 1910, is this. The earlier retirement from the farms was by sale, the farmer taking money instead of land. The second stage of retirement from the farm was through absentee landlordism and the placing of tenants on the farm.

This process has come to an end in many sections of the Middle West, with the return of the sons of the landlord to the family acres in the country, so that there is a sort of rhythm in the flow of population from the country into the town and backward to the land. In this process there is no invasion by new people, except the temporary residence of the tenant farmer in the country, and some of these have in the process gained a footing by ownership of land. But this ebb and flow of population out of the country community and back again has weakened and strained the country church and school and has not yet begun to strengthen them. There is every evidence that with a pleasant and agreeable country life the country community can retain the best elements of this population, which comes and goes. The country church and school ought to take measures to retain the best of the country population through these changes.

Through all these causes the presence of a large proportion of aliens in the community who are American born, but locally unattached by birth or ownership, has effected great changes in the country church, and other community inst.i.tutions. The State of Illinois, which has a tenant farmer population of more than 50 per cent in its richest sections, has suffered severely through the loss of many country churches. There is no precise measure of this loss, but a sociological survey recently made in Illinois indicates that in the past twenty years more than fifteen hundred country churches have been abandoned in the State. This statement must be accepted as approximate, but the number is likely to be greater rather than less. This abandonment of country churches has come in the same period in which the proportion of tenant farmers has greatly increased. Reference is made elsewhere to a similar condition in the State of Delaware, in which the churches of the old land-owners have been abandoned and replaced at heavy expense with poorer churches built by the incoming tenant farmers.

Everywhere in the United States this process has in some measure affected the country. It does not much matter whether the proportion of tenants is increasing or decreasing, the present effect is one of instability. In New England where in the past ten years tenantry has been diminished ten per cent, the country churches are weakened as elsewhere. The churches have not yet had time to recover while the population is in a state of change.

The old order in the country is crumbling. The church is an expression of stability. The people on whom the church always depends for its audiences, its enthusiasm and its largest accessions, are marginal people, working men, adolescent youths and those who are coming to a position in the community. The exodus of these from the country community, or the incoming of persons in these cla.s.ses into the country community, has been unfavorable to the country church at the present time.

It may be said at this point that a state of transition is for the time being unfavorable to ethical and moral growth. Moral conditions are sustained by custom, and where customs are in change, moral standards must themselves be in transition. The country community is moral so far as adhering to the standards of the past is concerned. But the population themselves who have to do with the country are undergoing extraordinary moral change, with incidental loss, and many of the problems of the United States as a whole are made more acute by the waste of the country community. Among these should be cited the amus.e.m.e.nt question in the small town, the decadence of the theatre in the cheaper vaudeville, the white slave traffic and the social disorders peculiar to unskilled laborers, many of whom come from country communities of the United States and Europe.

It must be remembered, too, that the rural free delivery and the telephone have entered the country community in the past twenty years and their effect has not yet been recorded. It has probably been in the direction of chilling instead of warming the social life of the country. The old acquaintance and the intimate social relations of the country community have not been helped by the telephone: and along with the presence of aliens in the community, one-fourth or one-half or three-fourths of the population, the telephone has had the effect of lowering the standards of intimacy and separating the households in the country one from another. The rural free delivery has put country people into the general world economy and for the time being has loosened the bonds of community life.

In those states in which the trolley system has been extended into the country, for instance Ohio and Indiana, the process of weakening the country population has been hastened. Sunday becomes for country people a day of visiting the town and in great numbers they gather at the inter-urban stations. The city and town on Sunday is filled with careless, hurrying groups of visitors, sight-seers and callers, who have no such fixed interest as that to be expressed in church-going or in substantial social processes. For the time being inter-urban trolley lines have dissipated the life of the country communities.

The duty of the church in the country under these conditions can be accomplished only under a widened horizon. The minister and the leaders of the church must lift up their eyes. They need not be discouraged if for the time being they accomplish little, for the period of exploitation must come to an end normally with the exhaustion of its forces, before the better day can come. But this period is one of enlargement. The units of social life will be s.p.a.ced farther apart. The country community will advance as soldiers say, "in open order." This is true for the family life, in which the father, the mother and the children have greater freedom from one another; as well as in the community, in which neighbors become less intimately dependent on one another. The church must therefore preach the world idea. At this time of transition the country church should undertake its foreign missionary service. The great causes of the Kingdom which are world-wide should be presented to country people when they are lifting up their eyes from local confines to look at the world and the city and the nation. As the daily paper comes into the farmer's household the farmer's church should interpret the history of the time in missionary terms. The literature of the great missionary agencies should be distributed in the farm household. Wherever the catalogue of the big store in Chicago or New York is found on the center table, beside it should be placed a modern book expressive of missionary evangelism. As the mind of the countryman develops to comprehend the world in his daily thought under the impetus of a daily newspaper, his conscience and his religious experience should be expanded correspondingly.

In a time of exploitation of land the country church should regenerate its financial system. The system of barter pa.s.ses away in the day of speculation in farm land; and the country church which can find means to endure the period of exploitation must put its financial system on a new basis. The tenant farmer is crudely striving through problems of scientific agriculture. He may, indeed, be a soil robber, but by his waste of economic values he and other men are learning to conserve. The financial system of the church should be placed at this time on a basis of weekly contribution, for with the tenant farmer comes system, cash payments, regular commercial processes. The business administration of the church must be made to correspond.

The country minister and schoolteacher must therefore become prophets of the intellect and of the spirit, in the new order. If they cannot minister to the new intelligence of the farmer and his children, their inst.i.tutions will necessarily decay. The farmer who succeeds in the new social economy of the country will not endure old sermons which were appropriate in his father's time. The emphasis must not be placed on tradition, but upon inductive study. The preacher must not feed the people on special instances, but upon representative cases. The intelligence of the new type of farmer will not be satisfied with sensations and with the unusual; but he demands to be trained in standards of the new day, when science, system, organization and world economy are making their demands on him and his very soul is concerned in his response to those demands.