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Horace Curzon Plunkett
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Title: The Rural Life Problem of the United States
Notes of an Irish Observer
Author: Horace Curzon Plunkett
Release Date: November 21, 2008 [EBook #27305]
Language: English
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THE RURAL LIFE PROBLEM OF THE UNITED STATES
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THE RURAL LIFE PROBLEM OF THE UNITED STATES
NOTES OF AN IRISH OBSERVER
BY
SIR HORACE PLUNKETT
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1919
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1910,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1910. Reprinted October, 1910;
January, 1911; October, 1912; September, 1913; January, 1917.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
PREFATORY NOTE
The thoughts contained in the following pages relate to one side of the
life of a country which has been to me, as to many Irishmen, a second
home. They are offered in friendly recognition of kindness I cannot hope
to repay, received largely as a student of American social and economic
problems, from public-spirited Americans who, I know, will appreciate
most highly any slight service to their country.
The substance of the book appeared in five articles contributed to the
New York _Outlook_ under the title "Conservation and Rural Life."
Several American friends, deeply interested in the Rural Life problem,
asked me to republish the series. In doing so, I have felt that I ought
to present a more comprehensive view of my subject than either the space
allowed or the more casual publication demanded.
I have to thank the editors of the _Outlook_ for the generous
hospitality of their columns, and for full freedom to republish what
belongs to them.
HORACE PLUNKETT.
THE PLUNKETT HOUSE, DUBLIN,
April, 1910.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
THE SUBJECT AND THE POINT OF VIEW
PAGE
The subject defined--A reconstruction of rural life in
English-speaking communities essential to the progress of
Western civilisation--A movement for a new rural
civilisation to be proposed--The author's point of view
derived from thirty years of Irish and American
experience--The physical contrast and moral resemblances in
the Irish and American rural problems--Mr. Roosevelt's
interest in this aspect of the question--His Conservation
and Country Life policies 1
CHAPTER II
THE LAUNCHING OF TWO ROOSEVELT POLICIES
The sane emotionalism of American public opinion--Gifford
Pinchot as the Apostle of Conservation--His test of
national efficiency--Mr. James J. Hill's notable
pronouncements upon the wastage of natural resources--The
evolution of the Conservation policy--Historical and
present causes of national extravagance--The Conference of
Governors and their pronouncement upon Conservation--Mr.
Roosevelt's Country Life policy--His estimate of the lasting
importance of the Conservation and Country Life ideas--The
popularity of the Conservation policy and the lack of
interest in the Country Life policy--The Country Life
Commission's inquiries and the reality of the problem--The
need and opportunity for reconstruction of rural life 17
CHAPTER III
THE ORIGIN AND CONSEQUENCES OF RURAL NEGLECT
The origin of rural neglect in English-speaking countries
traced to the Industrial Revolution in England--Effect of
modern economic changes upon the mutual relations of town
and country populations--Respects in which the old relations
ought to be restored--Three economic reasons for the study
of rural conditions--The social consequences of rural
neglect--The political importance of rustic experience to
reënforce urban intelligence in modern democracies--The
analogue of the European exodus in the United States--The
moral aspects of rural neglect--The danger to national
efficiency of sacrificing agricultural to commercial and
industrial interests--The happy circumstance of Mr.
Roosevelt's interest in rural well-being 35
CHAPTER IV
THE INNER LIFE OF THE AMERICAN FARMER
Reasons why the rural problem resulting from urban
predominance exists only in English-speaking
countries--Neglect of farmer more easily excused in the
United States than elsewhere owing to his apparent
prosperity--Country Life Commission's pronouncement on rural
backwardness--Why the matter must be taken up by the
towns--A survey of American rural life--The problem
economically and sociologically considered in the Middle
West--Causes and character of rural backwardness in the
Southern States--The boll-weevil and the hookworm as
illustrations of unconcern for the well-being of rural
communities--The problem in the New England States not
typically American--The progressive attitude of some
communities in the Far West in rural reform 57
CHAPTER V
THE WEAK SPOT IN AMERICAN RURAL ECONOMY
The three elements of a rural existence--Mr. Roosevelt's
formula: "Better farming, better business, better living"--A
comparative analysis of urban and rural business methods
shows that herein lies chief cause of rural
backwardness--Reasons why farmers fail to adopt methods of
combination--A description of the coöperative system in its
application to agriculture--The introduction and development
of agricultural coöperation in Ireland--The Raiffeisen
Credit Association successful in poorest Irish
districts--Summary of coöperative achievement by Irish
farmers--British imitation of Irish agricultural organising
methods--A criticism of American farmers'
organisations--Lack of combination for business purposes the
cause of political impotence--Urgent need for a
reorganisation of American agriculture upon coöperative lines 83
CHAPTER VI
THE WAY TO BETTER FARMING AND BETTER LIVING
The retarded application of science to agriculture and
neglect of agricultural education--Present progress in
agricultural education--Full benefit of education must await
coöperative organisation--Connection between coöperation and
social progress--Mr. Roosevelt on the cause and cure of
rural discontent--Two views upon the principles of rural
betterment--The part coöperation is playing in Irish rural
society--General observations on town and country
pleasures--The social necessity for a redirection of rural
education--The rural labour problem--The position of women
in farm life--The reason why the remedy for rural
backwardness must come from without--The paradox of the problem 117
CHAPTER VII
THE TWO THINGS NEEDFUL
Summary of diagnosis and indication of treatment--Chief aim
the coördination of agencies available for social work in
the country--Numerical strength and fine social spirit
abroad, but leadership needed--Mutual interest of advocates
of Conservation and of rural reform--The psychological
difficulty due to predominance of urban idea--Roman history
repeating itself in New York--The natural leaders of the
Country Life movement to be found in the cities--The objects
of the movement defined--Two new institutions to be created;
the one executive and organising, the other academic--The
National Conservation Association qualified to initiate and
direct the movement--Possibly an American Agricultural
Organisation Society should be founded for the work--The
chief practical work the introduction of agricultural
coöperation--Necessity for joining forces with existing
philanthropic agencies--Suggested enlistment of country
clergy in coöperative propagandism--The Country Life
Institute, its purpose and functions--Reason why one body
cannot undertake work assigned to the two new
institutions--The financial requirements of the
Institute--Summary and conclusions 145
THE RURAL LIFE PROBLEM
CHAPTER I
THE SUBJECT AND THE POINT OF VIEW
I submit in the following pages a proposition and a proposal--a
distinction which an old-country writer of English may, perhaps, be
permitted to preserve. The proposition is that, in the United States, as
in other English-speaking communities, the city has been developed to
the neglect of the country. I shall not have to labour the argument, as
nobody seriously disputes the contention; but I shall trace the main
causes of the neglect, and indicate what, in my view, must be its
inevitable consequences. If I make my case, it will appear that our
civilisation has thus become dangerously one-sided, and that, in the
interests of national well-being, it is high time for steps to be taken
to counteract the townward tendency.
My definite proposal to those who accept these conclusions is that a
Country Life movement, upon lines which will be laid down, should be
initiated by existing associations, whose efforts should be supplemented
by a new organisation which I shall call a Country Life Institute. There
are in the United States a multiplicity of agencies, both public and
voluntary, available for this work. But the army of workers in this
field of social service needs two things: first, some definite plan for
coördinating their several activities, and, next, some recognised source
of information collected from the experience of the Old and the New
World. It is the purpose of these pages to show that these needs are
real and can be met.
Two obvious questions will here suggest themselves. Why should the
United States--of all countries in the world--be chosen for such a theme
instead of a country like Ireland, where the population depends mainly
upon agriculture? What qualifications has an Irishman, be he never so
competent to advise upon the social and economic problems of his own
country, to talk to Americans about the life of their rural population?
I admit at once that, while I have made some study of American
agriculture and rural economy, my actual work upon the problem of which
I write has been restricted to Ireland. But I claim, with some pride,
that, in thought upon rural economy, Ireland is ahead of any
English-speaking country. She has troubles of her own, some inherent in
the adverse physical conditions, and others due to well-known historical
causes, that too often impede the action to which her best thoughts
should lead. But the very fact that those who grapple with Irish
problems have to work through failure to success will certainly not
lessen the value to the social student of the experience gained. I
recognise, however, that I must give the reader so much of personal
narrative as is required to enable him to estimate the value of my
facts, and of the conclusions which I base upon them.
To have enjoyed an Irish-American existence, to have been profoundly
interested in, and more or less in touch with, public affairs in both
countries, to have been an unwilling politician in Ireland and not a
politician at all in America, is, to say the least, an unusual
experience for an Irishman. But such has been my record during the last
twenty years. Soon after graduating at Oxford, I was advised to live in
mountain air for a while, and for the next decade I was a ranchman along
the foothills of the Rockies. To those who knew that my heart was in
Ireland, I used to explain that I might some day be in politics at home,
and must take care of my lungs. In 1889 I returned to live and work in
my own country, but I retained business interests, including some
farming operations, in the Western States. Ever since then I have taken
my annual holiday across the Atlantic, and have studied rural
conditions over a wider area in the United States than my business
interests demanded.
For eight years, commencing in 1892, I was a Member of Parliament. My
legislative ambition was to get something done for Irish industry, and
especially Irish agriculture. Having secured the assistance of an
unprecedented combination of representative Irishmen, known as the
Recess Committee (because it sat during the Parliamentary recess), we
succeeded in getting the addition we wanted to the machinery of Irish
Government. The functions of the new institution are sufficiently
indicated by its cumbrous Parliamentary title, "The Department of
Agriculture and other Industries and for Technical Instruction for
Ireland." I mention this official experience because it not only
intensified my desire to study American conditions, but it also brought
me frequently to Washington to study the working of those Federal
institutions which are concerned for the welfare of the rural
population. There I enjoyed the unfailing courtesy of American public
servants to the foreign inquirer.
On one of these visits, in the winter of 1905-1906, I called upon
President Roosevelt to pay him my respects, and to express to him my
obligations to some members of his Administration. I wished especially
to acknowledge my indebtedness to that veteran statesman, Secretary
Wilson, the value of whose long service to the American farmer it would
be hard to exaggerate. Mr. Roosevelt questioned me as to the exact
object of my inquiries, and asked me to come again and discuss with him
more fully than was possible at the moment certain economic and social
questions which had engaged much of his own thoughts. He was greatly
interested to learn that in Ireland we have been approaching many of
these questions from his own point of view. He made me tell him the
story of Irish land legislation, and of recent Irish movements for the
improvement of agricultural conditions. Ever since, his interest in
these Irish questions--to _the_ Irish Question we gave a wide berth--has
been maintained on account of their bearing upon his Rural Life policy,
for I had shown him how the economic strengthening and social elevation
of the Irish farmer had become a matter of urgent Irish concern. I
recall many things he said on that occasion, which show that his two
great policies of Conservation and Country Life reform were maturing in
his mind. I need hardly say how deeply interesting these policies are to
me, embracing as they do economic and social problems, the working out
of which in my own country happens to be the task to which I have
devoted the best years of my life.
I must now offer to the reader so much of the story of the Country Life
movement in my own country as will enable him to understand its
interest to Mr. Roosevelt and to many another worker upon the analogous
problems of the United States. Ireland is passing through an agrarian
revolution. There, as in many other European countries, the title to
most of the agricultural land rested upon conquest. The English attempt
to colonise Ireland never completely succeeded nor completely failed;
consequently the Irish never ceased to repudiate the title of the alien
landlord. In 1881 Mr. Gladstone introduced one of the greatest agrarian
reforms in history--rent-fixing by judicial authority--which was
certainly a bold attempt to put an end to a desolating conflict,
centuries old.
The scheme failed,--whether, as some hold, from its inherent defects, or
from the circumstances of the time, is an open question. It is but fair
to its author to point out that a rapidly increasing foreign
competition, chiefly from the newly opened tracts of virgin soil in the
New World, led to a fall in agricultural prices, which made the first
rents fixed appear too high. Quicker and cheaper transit, together with
processes for keeping produce fresh over the longest routes, soon showed
that the new market conditions had come to stay. A bad land system on a
rising market might succeed better than a good one on a falling. The
land tenure reforms begun in 1881, having broken down under stress of
foreign competition, and Purchase Acts on a smaller scale having been
tentatively tried in the interval, in 1903 Parliament finally decreed
that sufficient money should be provided to buy out all the remaining
agricultural land. In a not remote future, some two hundred million
pounds sterling--a billion dollars--will have been advanced by the
British Government to enable the tenants to purchase their holdings, the
money to be repaid in easy instalments during periods averaging over
sixty years.
Twenty years ago this general course of events was foreseen, and a few
Irishmen conceived and set to work upon what has come to be Ireland's
Rural Life policy. The position taken up was simple. What Parliament was
about to do would pull down the whole structure of Ireland's
agricultural economy, and would clear away the chief hindrance to
economic and social progress. But upon the ground thus cleared the
edifice of a new rural social economy would have to be built. This work,
although it needs the fostering care of government, and liberal
facilities for a system of education intimately related to the people's
working lives, belongs mainly to the sphere of voluntary effort.
The new movement, which was started in 1889 to meet the circumstances I
have indicated, was thus a movement for the up-building of country life.
It anticipated the lines of the formula which Mr. Roosevelt adopted in
his Message transmitting to Congress the Report of the Country Life
Commission--better farming, better business, better living: we began
with better business, which consisted in the introduction of
agricultural coöperation into the farming industry, for several reasons
which will appear later, and for one which I must mention here. We found
that we could not develop in unorganised farmers a political influence
strong enough to enable them to get the Government to do its part
towards better farming. Owing to the new agricultural opinion which had
been developed indirectly by organising the farmer, we were able to win
from Parliament the department I have named above. This institution was
so framed and endowed that it is able to give to the Irish farmers all
the assistance which can be legitimately given by public agencies and at
public expense. The assistance consists chiefly of education. But
education is interpreted in the widest sense. Practical instruction to
old and young, in schools, upon the farms, and at meetings, lectures,
experiments, and demonstrations, the circulation of useful information
and advice, and all the usual methods known to progressive governments,
are being introduced with the chief aim of enabling the farmer to apply
to the practice of farming the teachings of modern science. Better
living, which includes making country life more interesting and
attractive, is sought by using voluntary associations, some organised
primarily for business purposes, and others, having no business aim, for
social and intellectual ends. But Irish rural reformers are agreed that
by far the most important step towards a higher and a better rural life
would be a redirection of education in the country schools. To this I
shall return in the proper place.
I can now proceed with my American experiences without leaving any doubt
as to the point of view from which I approach the problem of rural life
in the United States. Having engaged in actual work upon that problem in
Ireland, where a combination of economic changes and political events
has made its solution imperative, and having been long in personal
touch with rural conditions in some Western States, my interest in
certain policies which were maturing at Washington may be easily
surmised. There I found that, with wholly different conditions to be
dealt with, the thoughts of the President and of others in his
confidence were, as regards the main issue, moving in the same direction
as my own. They too had come to feel that the welfare of the rural
population had been too long neglected, and that it was high time to
consider how the neglect might be repaired. In his annual message to
Congress in 1904, Mr. Roosevelt had made it clear that he was fully
conscious of this necessity. "Nearly half of the people of this
country," he wrote, "devote their energies to growing things from the
soil. Until a recent date little has been done to prepare these millions
for their life work." I did not realise at the time the full import of
these sentences. Nor did I foresee that the problem of rural life was
to be forced to the front by the awakening of public opinion, upon
another issue differing from and yet closely related to the subject of
these pages. Mr. Roosevelt was thinking out the Conservation idea, which
I believe will some day be recognised as the greatest of his policies.
CHAPTER II
THE LAUNCHING OF TWO ROOSEVELT POLICIES
Although somebody has already said something like it, I would say there
is a tide in the thoughts of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to
action. We make the general claim for our Western civilisation, that,
whatever the form of government, once public opinion is thoroughly
stirred upon a great and vital issue, it is but a question of time for
the will to find the way. But in the life of the United States, the
passage from thought to action is more rapid than in any country that I
know. Nowhere do we find such a combination of emotionalism with sanity.
No better illustration of these national qualities could be desired than
that afforded by the inception and early growth of the Conservation
policy.
I have already shown how my inquiries at Washington gave me access to
the most accessible of the world's statesmen. At the same time there
came into my life another remarkable personality. To the United States
Forester of that day I owe my earliest interest in the Conservation
policy. In counsel with him I came to regard the Conservation and Rural
Life policies as one organic whole. So I must say here a word about the
man who, more than any other, has inspired whatever in these pages may
be worth printing.
I first met Gifford Pinchot in his office in Washington in 1905. I was
not especially interested in forestry, but the Forester was so
interesting that I listened with increasing delight to the story of his
work. I noticed that as an administrator he had a grasp of detail and a
mastery of method which are not usually found in men who have had no
training in large business affairs. I thought the secret of his success
lay between love of work and sympathy with workers, which gained him
the devotion and enthusiastic coöperation of his staff. It is, however,
as a statesman rather than as an administrator that his achievement is
and will be known.
When I first knew the Forester, I found that already the conservation of
timber was but a small part of his material aims: every national
resource must be husbanded. But over the whole scheme of Conservation a
great moral issue reigned supreme. He clung affectionately to his task,
but it was not to him mere forestry administration. In his far vision he
seemed to see men as trees walking. The saving of one great asset was
broadening out into insistence upon a new test of national efficiency:
the people of the United States were to be judged by the manner in which
they applied their physical and mental energies to the conservation and
development of their country's natural resources. The acceptance of this
test would mean the success of a great policy for the initiation of
which President Roosevelt gave almost the whole credit to Gifford
Pinchot.
There is one other name which will be ever honorably associated with the
dawn of the Conservation idea which Mr. Roosevelt elevated to the status
and dignity of a national policy. In September, 1906, Mr. James J. Hill
delivered (under the title of "The Future of the United States") what I
think was an epoch-making address. It is significant that this great
railway president opened his campaign for the economic salvation of the
United States by addressing himself, not to politicians or professors,
but to a representative body of Minnesota farmers. This address
presented for the first time in popular form a remarkable collection of
economic facts, which formed the basis of conclusions as startling as
they were new. Let me attempt a brief summary of its contents.
The natural resources, to which the Conservation policy relates, may be
divided into two classes: the minerals, which when used cannot be
replaced, and things that grow from the soil, which admit of
indefinitely augmented reproduction. At the head of the former category
stands the supply of coal and iron. This factor in the nation's industry
and commerce was being exhausted at a rate which made it certain that,
long before the end of the century, the most important manufactures
would be handicapped by a higher cost of production. The supply of
merchantable timber was disappearing even more rapidly. But far more
serious than all other forms of wastage was the reckless destruction of
the natural fertility of the soil. The final result, according to Mr.
Hill, must be that within a comparatively brief period--a period for
which the present generation was bound to take thought--this veritable
Land of Promise would be hard pressed to feed its own people, while the
manufactured exports to pay for imported food would not be forthcoming.
It should be added that this sensational forecast was no purposeless
jeremiad. Mr. Hill told his hearers that the danger which threatened the
future of the Nation would be averted only by the intelligence and
industry of those who cultivated the farm lands, and that they had it in
their power to provide a perfectly practicable and adequate remedy. This
was to be found--if such a condensation be permissible--in the
application of the physical sciences to the practice, and of economic
science to the business, of farming.
In spite of the immense burden of great undertakings which he carried,
Mr. Hill repeated the substance of this address on many occasions. Lord
Rosebery once said that speeches were the most ephemeral of all
ephemeral things, and for some time it looked as if one of the most
important speeches ever delivered by a public man on a great public
issue was going to illustrate the truth of this saying. It seems
strange that his facts and arguments should have remained unchallenged,
and yet unsupported, by other public men. Perhaps the best explanation
is to be found in a recent dictum of Mr. James Bryce. Speaking at the
University of California, the British Ambassador said: "We can all think
of the present, and are only too apt to think chiefly about the present.
The average man, be he educated or uneducated, seldom thinks of anything
else." There are, however, special circumstances in the history of the
United States which account for the extraordinary unconcern about what
is going to happen to the race in a period which may seem long to those
whose personal interest fixes a limit to their gaze, but which is indeed
short in the life of a nation. After the religious, political, and
military struggles through which the American nation was brought to
birth, there followed a century of no less strenuous wrestling with the
forces of nature. That century stands divided by the greatest civil
conflict in the world's history; but this only served to strengthen in a
united people those indomitable qualities to which the nation owes its
leadership in the advancement of civilisation. The abundance (until now
considered as virtual inexhaustibility) of natural resources, the call
for capital and men for their development, the rich reward of conquest
in the field of industry, may explain, but can hardly excuse, a National
attitude which seems to go against the strongest human instinct--one not
altogether wanting in lower animal life--that of the preservation of the
race. It is an attitude which recalls the question said to have been
asked by an Irishman: "What has posterity done for me?" But this was
before Conservation was in the air.
I have now told what I came by chance to know about the origin of the
Conservation idea. The story of its early growth was no less remarkable
than the suddenness of its appearance. In the spring of 1908 matters
had advanced so far that the governors of all the States and Territories
met to discuss it. Before the Conference broke up they were moved to
"declare the conviction that the great prosperity of our country rests
upon the abundant resources of the land chosen by our forefathers for
their homes," that these resources are "a heritage to be made use of in
establishing and promoting the comfort, prosperity, and happiness of the
American people, but not to be wasted, deteriorated, or needlessly
destroyed; that this material basis is threatened with exhaustion"; that
"conservation of our natural resources is a subject of transcendent
importance which should engage unremittingly the attention of the
Nation, the States, and the people in earnest coöperation"; and that
"this coöperation should find expression in suitable action by the
Congress and by the legislatures of the several States."
It is, of course, not with Conservation, but with Rural Life, that we
are here directly concerned; but it should be borne in mind that the
chief of all the nation's resources is the fertility of the soil. More
than one competent authority declared at the Conference of Governors
that this national asset was the subject of the greatest actual waste,
and was at the same time capable of the greatest development and
conservation. This interdependence of the two Roosevelt policies--the
fact that neither of them can come to fruition without the success of
the other--makes those of us who work for rural progress rest our chief
hopes upon the newly aroused public opinion in the American Republic.
To my knowledge this view is shared by President Roosevelt, who always
regarded his Conservation and Rural Life policies as complementary to
each other. The last time I saw him--it was on Christmas Eve, 1908--he
dwelt on this aspect of his public work and aims. I remember how he
expressed the hope that, when the more striking incidents of his
Administration were forgotten, public opinion would look kindly upon his
Conservation and Rural Life policies. I ventured upon the confident
prediction that he would not be disappointed in this anticipation.
Already the authors of the Conservation policy have been rewarded by a
general acceptance of the principle for which they stand. The national
conscience now demands that the present generation, while enjoying the
material blessings with which not only nature but also the labour and
sacrifices of their forefathers have so bounteously endowed them, shall
have due regard for the welfare of those who are to come after them.
Americans, who are accustomed to rapid developments in public opinion,
will hardly appreciate the impression made by the story I have just told
upon the mind of an observer from old countries, where action does not
tread upon the heels of thought. But surely an amazing thing has
happened. In the life of one Administration a great idea seizes the mind
of the American people. This leads to a stock-taking of natural
resources and a searching of the national conscience. Then, suddenly,
there emerges a quite new national policy. Conceived during the last
Administration, when it brought Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Bryan on to the
same platform, Conservation at once rose above party, and will be the
accepted policy of all future Administrations. It has already secured
almost Pan-American endorsement at its birthplace in Washington. The
fathers of Conservation are now looking forward to a still larger sphere
of influence for their offspring at an International Conference which it
is hoped to assemble at the Hague.
But it must be admitted that no such reception was accorded to Mr.
Roosevelt's other policy, to which our attention must now be turned. The
reasons for the comparative lack of interest in the problem of Rural
Life are many and complex, but two of them may be noted in passing.
Conservation calls for legislative and administrative action, and this
always sets up a ferment in the political mind. The Rural Life idea, on
the other hand, though it will demand some governmental assistance, must
rely mainly upon voluntary effort. The methods necessary for its
development, and their probable results, are also less obvious, and thus
less easily appreciated by the public. Whatever the reason, while
Conservation has rushed into the forefront of public interest and has
won the status and dignity of a policy, the sister idea is still
struggling for a platform, and its advocates must be content to see
their efforts towards a higher and a better country life regarded as a
movement.
This estimate of the relative positions of these two ideas in the public
mind will, I think, be borne out when we contrast the quiet initiation
of the movement with the dramatic début of the policy. For all the
officialism with which it was launched, President Roosevelt's Country
Life Commission might as well have been appointed by some wealthy
philanthropist who would, at least, have paid its members' travelling
expenses,[1] and private initiation might also have spared us the
ridicule which greeted the alleged proposal to "uplift" a body of
citizens who were told that they were already adorning the heights of
American civilisation. The names of the men who volunteered for this
unpaid service should have been a sufficient guarantee that theirs was
no fool's errand.[2]
How real was the problem the commissioners were investigating was
abundantly proved to those who were present when they got into touch
with working farmers and their wives, and discussed freely and
informally the conditions, human and material, to which the problem of
Rural Life relates. I shall refer again to their report. But I may here
say I am firmly convinced that a complete change in the whole attitude
of public opinion towards the old question of town and country must
precede any large practical outcome to the labours of the Commission. It
has to be brought home to those who lead public opinion that for many
decades we, the English-speaking peoples, have been unconsciously guilty
of having gravely neglected one side, and that perhaps the most
important side, of Western civilisation.
To sustain this judgment I must now view the sequence of events which
led to the subordination of rural to urban interests, and try to
estimate its probable consequences. It will be seen that the neglect is
comparatively recent, and of English origin. I believe that the New
World offers just now a rare opportunity for launching a movement which
will be directed to a reconstruction of rural life. It is this belief
which has prompted an Irish advocate of rural reform to turn his
thoughts away for a brief space from the poorer peasantry of his own
country and to take counsel with his fellow-workers in the United States
and Canada on a problem which affects them all.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] These, as a matter of fact, were defrayed by the trustees of the
Russell Sage Foundation.
[2] The Commission consisted of L. H. Bailey, of the New York State
College of Agriculture at Cornell University (chairman); Henry Wallace,
editor of _Wallace's Farmer_, Des Moines, Iowa; Kenyon L. Butterfield,
President of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, Amherst,
Massachusetts; Walter H. Page, editor of _The World's Work_, New York
City; Gifford Pinchot, United States Forester, and Chairman of the
National Conservation Commission; C. S. Barrett, President of the
Farmers' Co-operative and Educational Union of America, Union City,
Georgia; W. A. Beard, of the _Great West Magazine_, Sacramento,
California.
CHAPTER III
THE ORIGIN AND CONSEQUENCES OF RURAL NEGLECT
The most radical economic change which history records set in during the
last half of the eighteenth century in England, as the result of that
remarkable achievement of modern civilisation, the Industrial
Revolution. Mechanical inventions changed all industry, setting up the
factories of the town instead of the scattered home production of the
country and its villages. In the wake of the new inventions economic
science stepped in, and, scrupulously obeying its own law of demand and
supply, told the then predominant middle classes just what they wished
to be told. Adam Smith had made the wonderful discovery that money and
wealth were not the same thing. Then Ricardo, and after him the
Manchester School of economists, made division of labour the cardinal
virtue in the new gospel of wealth. In order to give full play to this
economic principle all workers in mechanical industries were huddled
together in the towns. There they were to be transformed from
capricious, undisciplined humans into mechanical attachments, and
restricted to such functions as steam-driven automata had not yet
learned to perform. That was the first stage of the Industrial
Revolution, with its chief consequences, the rural exodus and urban
overcrowding. It is a hideous nightmare to look back upon from these
more enlightened days. Well might the angels weep over the flight of all
that was best from the God-made country to the man-made town.
Before the middle of the last century the clouds began to lift. For a
while the good Lord Shaftesbury seemed to be crying in the wilderness of
middle-class plutocracy, but it was not long before the crying of the
children in their factories stirred the national conscience. The health
of nations was allowed to be considered as well as their wealth. Social
and political science rose up in protest against both the economists and
the manufacturers. There followed a period of beneficent social changes,
no less radical than those which the new mechanical inventions had
produced in the economics of industry. The factory town of to-day
presents a strange contrast to that which sacrificed humanity to
material aggrandisement. What with its shortened hours of labour,
superior artisan dwellings, improved sanitation, parks, open spaces and
playgrounds, free instruction and cheap entertainment for old and young,
hospitals and charities, rapid transportation, a popular Press, and full
political freedom, the modern hive of industry stands as a monument of
what, under liberal laws, can be done by education and organisation to
realise the higher aspirations of a people.
During this second period, another economic development produced upon
the attitude of the urban mind towards the rural population an effect to
which, I think, has not been given the consideration it deserves. Better
and cheaper transportation, with the consequent establishment of what
the economists call the world-market, completely changed the
relationship between the townsman and the farmer. A sketch of their
former mutual relations will make my meaning clear. Within the last
century every town relied largely for its food supply on the produce of
the fields around its walls. The countrymen coming into the weekly
market were the chief customers for the wares of the town craftsmen. In
this primitive state of trade, townsmen could not but realise the
importance to themselves of a prosperous country population around them.
But this simple exchange, as we all know, has developed into the complex
commercial operations of modern times. To-day most large towns derive
their household stuff from the food-growing tracts of the whole world,
and I doubt whether any are dependent on the neighbouring farmers, or
feel themselves specially concerned for their welfare. I do not think
the general truth of this picture will be questioned, and I hope some
consideration may be given to the conclusions I now draw.
In the transition we are considering, the reciprocity between the
producers of food and the raw material of clothes on the one hand, and
manufacturers and general traders of the towns on the other, has not
ceased; it has actually increased since the days of steam and
electricity. But it has become national, and even international, rather
than local. Town consumers are still dependent upon agricultural
producers, who, in turn, are much larger consumers than formerly of all
kinds of commodities made in towns. Forty-two per cent of materials used
in manufacture in the United States are from the farm, which also
contributes seventy per cent of the country's exports. But in the
complexity of these trade developments townsmen have been cut off more
and more from personal contact with the country, and in this way have
lost their sense of its importance. My point is that the shifting of the
trade relationship of town and country from its former local to its
present national and international basis in reality increases their
interdependence. And I hold most strongly that until in this matter the
obligations of a common citizenship are realised by the town, we cannot
hope for any lasting National progress.
Whatever be the causes which have begotten the neglect of rural life, no
one will gainsay the wisdom of estimating the consequences. These are
economic, social, and political; and I will discuss them briefly under
these heads. There are three main economic reasons which suggest a
closer study of rural conditions. First, there is the interdependence of
town and country, less obvious than it was in the days of the local
market, but no less real. Any fall in the number, or decline in the
efficiency, of the farming community, will be accompanied by a
corresponding fall in the country sale of town products. This is
especially true of America, where the foreign commerce is unimportant in
comparison with internal trade. To nourish country life is the best way
to help home trade. And quite as important as these considerations is
the effect which good or bad farming must have upon the cost of living
to the whole population. Excessive middle profits between producer and
consumer may largely account for the very serious rise in the price of
staple articles of food. This is a fact of the utmost significance, but,
as I shall show later, the remedy for too high a cost of production and
distribution lies with the farmer, the improvement of whose business
methods will be seen to be the chief factor in the reform which the
Rural Life movement must attempt to introduce.
The essential dependence of nations on agriculture is the second
economic consideration. The author of "The Return to the Land," Senator
Jules Méline (successively Minister of Agriculture, Minister of Commerce
and Premier of France), tells us that this remarkable book is "merely an
expansion of a profound thought uttered long ago by a Chinese
philosopher: 'The well-being of a people is like a tree; agriculture is
its root, manufacture and commerce are its branches and its life; if the
root is injured the leaves fall, the branches break away and the tree
dies.'"
This truth is not hard to apply to the conditions of to-day. The income
of every country depends on its natural resources, and on the skill and
energy of its inhabitants; and the quickest way to increase the income
is to concentrate on the production of those articles for which there is
the greatest demand throughout the commercial world. The relentless
application of this principle has been characteristic of the nineteenth
century. But the augmentation of income has in one special way been
purchased by a diminution of capital. The industrial movement has been
based on an immense expenditure of coal and iron; and in America and
Great Britain the coal and iron which can be cheaply obtained are within
measurable distance of exhaustion. As these supplies diminish, the
industrial leadership of America and Great Britain must disappear,
unless they can employ their activities in other forms of industry.
Those, therefore, who desire that the English-speaking countries should
maintain for many ages that high position which they now occupy, should
do all in their power to encourage a proper system of agriculture--the
one industry in which the fullest use can be made of natural resources
without diminishing the inheritance of future generations--the industry
"about which," Mr. James J. Hill emphatically declares, "all others
revolve, and by which future America shall stand or fall."
The third economic reason will hardly be disputed. Agricultural
prosperity is an important factor in financial stability. The
fluctuations of commerce depend largely on the good and bad harvests of
the world, but, as they do not coincide with them in time, their
violence is, on the whole, likely to be less in a nation where
agricultural and manufacturing interests balance each other, than in one
depending mainly or entirely on either. The small savings of numerous
farmers, amounting in the aggregate to very large sums, are a powerful
means of steadying the money market; they are not liable to the
vicissitudes nor attracted by the temptations which affect the larger
investors. They remain a permanent national resource, which, as the
experience of France proves, may be confidently drawn upon in time of
need. I have often thought that, were it not for the thrift and industry
of the French peasantry, financial crises would be as frequent in France
as political upheavals.
As regards the social aspect of rural neglect, I suggest that the city
may be more seriously concerned than is generally imagined for the
well-being of the country. One cannot but admire the civic pride with
which Americans contemplate their great centres of industry and
commerce, where, owing to the many and varied improvements, the townsman
of the future is expected to unite the physical health and longevity of
the Boeotian with the mental superiority of the Athenian. But we may
ask whether this somewhat optimistic forecast does not ignore one
important question. Has it been sufficiently considered how far the
moral and physical health of the modern city depends upon the constant
influx of fresh blood from the country, which has ever been the source
from which the town draws its best citizenship? You cannot keep on
indefinitely skimming the pan and have equally good milk left. In
America the drain may continue a while longer without the inevitable
consequences becoming plainly visible. But sooner or later, if the
balance of trade in this human traffic be not adjusted, the raw material
out of which urban society is made will be seriously deteriorated, and
the symptoms of National degeneracy will be properly charged against
those who neglected to foresee the evil and treat the cause. It is
enough for my present purpose if it be admitted that the people of every
state are largely bred in rural districts, and that the physical and
moral well-being of these districts must eventually influence the
quality of the whole people.
I come now to the political considerations which, I think, have not been
sufficiently taken into account. In most countries political life
depends largely for its steadiness and sanity upon a strong infusion of
rural opinion into the counsels of the nation. It is a truism that
democracy requires for success a higher level of intelligence and
character in the mass of the people than other forms of government. But
intelligence alone is not enough for the citizen of a democracy; he must
have experience as well, and the experience of a townsman is essentially
imperfect. He has generally a wider theoretical knowledge than the
rustic of the main processes by which the community lives; but the
rustic's practical knowledge of the more fundamental of them is wider
than the townsman's. He knows actually and in detail how corn is grown
and how beasts are bred, whereas the town artisan hardly knows how the
whole of any one article of commerce is made. The townsman sees and
takes part in the wonderful achievements of industrial science without
any full understanding of its methods or of the relative importance and
the interaction of the forces engaged. To this one-sided experience may
be attributed in some measure that disregard of inconvenient facts, and
that impatience of the limits of practicability, which many observers
note as a characteristic defect of popular government.
However that may be, there is one symptom in modern politics of which
the gravity is generally acknowledged, while its special connection with
the towns is an easily ascertainable fact; I mean the growth of the
cruder forms of Socialism. The town artisan or labourer, who sees
displayed before him vast masses of property in which he has no share,
and contrasts the smallness of his remuneration with the immense results
of his labour, is easily attracted to remedies worse than the disease. A
fuller and more exact understanding of the means by which the wealth of
the community is created is, for the townsman, the best antidote to
mischievous agitation so far as it is not merely the result of poverty.
But the countryman, especially the proprietor of a piece of land,
however small, is protected from this infection. The atmosphere in which
Socialism of the predatory kind can grow up does not exist among a
prosperous farming community--perhaps because in the country the
question of the divorce of the worker from his raw material by
capitalism does not arise. The farm furnishes the raw material of the
farmer; yet he cannot be said to spend his life creating the alleged
"surplus value" of Marxian doctrine. For these reasons I suggest that
the orderly and safe progress of democracy demands a strong agricultural
population. It is as true now as when Aristotle said it that "where
husbandmen and men of small fortune predominate government will be
guided by law."
I have now shown that for every reason the interests of the rural
population ought no longer to be subordinated to those of the city. That
such has been the tendency in English-speaking countries will hardly be
questioned. In Great Britain the rural exodus has gone on with a
vengeance. The last census (1901) showed that seventy-seven per cent of
the population was urban, and only twenty-three per cent rural. A few
years ago there were derelict farms within easy walk of the outskirts
of London. In Ireland the rural exodus took the form of emigration,
mainly to American cities, and this has been the chief factor in the
reduction of the population in sixty years from more than eight millions
to a trifle above four. But it may be thought that in the United States
no similar tendency is in operation. Certainly those who admit the
townward drift of country life may fairly say that it does not present
so urgent a problem in the New World as in parts of the Old. Even
granting that this is so, the fact remains that the town population of
America is seriously outgrowing the rural population; for, while the
towns are growing hugely, the country stands still. Moreover, we must
not forget that, Australia apart, America is even still the most
underpopulated part of the globe. We are accustomed to think Ireland
underpopulated, owing to emigration, yet even to-day the scale of
population is almost six times greater than that of the United States.
If the Union were peopled as thickly as Ireland even still is, the
population would be nearly five hundred millions. There is still a vast
deal of filling-up to be done in America, mostly in the rural parts.
But the main consideration I wish to emphasise throughout is that the
problem under review is moral and social far more than economic, human
rather than material. This is the natural view of an Irish worker, who
knows that the solution of _his_ problem depends upon the possibility of
endowing country life with such social improvements as will provide an
effective compensation for a necessarily modest standard of comfort. But
the citizens of the United States may be pardoned for being physiocrats.
The statistical proof, annually furnished, of the growing agricultural
wealth, is apt to obscure other essentials of progress. The astronomical
proportions of the figures stagger the imagination, and engender the
kind of pride a man feels when he is first told the number of red
corpuscles luxuriating in his blood. How can there be agricultural
depression in a country whose farm lands Secretary Wilson, in his
notable Annual Report for 1905, declared to have increased in value over
a period of five years at the astounding rate of $3,400,000 per day? Yet
to the deeper insight, the same moral influence through which we in
Ireland are seeking to combat the evils of material poverty may in the
United States be needed as a moral corrective to a too rapidly growing
material prosperity. The patriotic American, who thinks of the life of
the Nation rather than of the individual, will, if he looks beneath the
surface, discern in this God-prospered country symptoms of rural
decadence fraught with danger to National efficiency.
The reckless sacrifice of agricultural interests by the legislators of
the towns is condemned by the verdict of history. We need not now fear
that invading hordes of hardy barbarians will mar the destiny of the
great Western Republic, as they ended the career of the Roman Empire.
There are, however, other clouds upon the horizon. Only a few years ago,
the American people could well treat with contempt the bogy of the
Yellow Peril. With a transformation unprecedented in history, the
situation has been changed. Japan is already devoting to the arts of
peace qualities but yesterday displayed in war, to the amazement of the
Western world. In another Eastern empire there are vast
resources--especially coal and iron in juxtaposition--awaiting only
industrial leadership to utilise a practically limitless labour supply
for their development. These are facts worthy of consideration for their
potential bearing upon the industrial and commercial standing of the
United States.
To the onlooker, it does seem a happy circumstance that there has just
been, for seven critical years, at the head of American affairs the
strenuous advocate of the strenuous life. I read through his Messages
the warning that in the struggle for preëminence the ultimate victory
will lie with those nations who found their prosperity on the high
physical and ethical condition of the people. That is the oldest, as it
is the latest, wisdom of the East. It is in this spirit that the
neglected problem of Rural Life should now be given some share of the
attention hitherto devoted to the life of the towns.
CHAPTER IV
THE INNER LIFE OF THE AMERICAN FARMER
I recently asked a German economist if he could tell me the best books
to read upon the problem of rural life in Germany. His reply was: "There
are no books, because there is no problem." It is generally true, no
doubt, that the Rural Life problem, in so far as it consists in the
subordination of the country to the town, is peculiar to the
English-speaking countries, where it seems to be mainly attributable to
three causes. The chief of these was no doubt the Industrial Revolution
in England, of which enough has already been said. Secondly, in the
United States and in some portions of the British Empire, the opening up
of vast tracts of virgin soil led not unnaturally to the postponement of
social development until the pioneer farmers had settled down to the
new life. The third cause was immunity from the danger of foreign
invasion, which eliminated the military reasons for maintaining a
numerous, virile, and progressive rural population.
There are many in England who regret that it should have been forgotten
how the English owed their commercial supremacy to the fighting
qualities of the old yeoman class. In the United States it should be
remembered that nowadays peace strength is quite as important as war
strength, and it may be questioned whether there can be any sustained
industrial efficiency where the great body of workers who conduct the
chief--the only absolutely necessary--industry are wasting the resources
at their command by bad husbandry. We may, however, concede that the
neglect of rural life is much easier to explain and excuse in the United
States than in the older English-speaking countries. Quite apart from
the abundance of agricultural resources which the American farmers
enjoy, it might well be thought that the rural communities are keeping
pace with the progress of urban civilisation. The citizens who now
occupy the farm lands of the United States have been largely drawn from
the pick of the European peasantries. In the days of their coming, it
took courage and enterprise to face the now almost forgotten terrors of
the Atlantic Ocean. These immigrants, and the migrants from the Eastern
States, have profited enormously by their change of residence. Their
material well-being has already been admitted, and, with rare
exceptions, they have displayed no overt symptoms of agrarian
discontent.
It must not, however, be imagined that the apparent apathy of American
farmers is due to contentment. Like others of their calling, they keep a
full stock of grievances in their mental stores. They have very definite
opinions as to what is wrong, but to these opinions no formal expression
is given. They vaguely feel that they would like to remould "the sorry
scheme of things entire," but they lack the public spirit which is
required before concerted action can be taken successfully. The Country
Life Commission held a series of conferences throughout the United
States, which brought them into the closest touch with every type of
American farm life. They received written replies from some 125,000
rural folk to whom they had sent a circular with a dozen questions
covering the essential heads of inquiry. The Commissioners say in their
report: "We have found by the testimony, not only of the farmers
themselves, but of all persons in touch with farm life, more or less
serious unrest in every part of the United States, even in the most
prosperous regions."
The truth is that, while judged by the standard of living of European
peasantries, the farmers of the United States are prosperous, in
comparison with the other citizens of the most progressive country in
the world they are not well-off. Their accumulation of material wealth
is unnaturally and unnecessarily restricted; their social life is
barren; their political influence is relatively small. American farmers
have been used by politicians, but have still to learn how to use them.
This may be due to the fact that my countrymen elected to devote their
genius for organisation to the problems of city government. And in the
sphere of private action they are, as will be seen when I discuss the
need for a reorganisation of their business, even less effective than in
public affairs.
It will be conceded that any hopeful plan to put things right will have
to rely upon the organised efforts of those immediately concerned. Both
in the sphere of governmental action, and in the vastly more important
field of voluntary effort, the moving force will have to be public
opinion. But the thought of the farming communities has long ago joined
the rural exodus; and before the country life idea can find expression
in an effective country life movement, those who are thinking out the
problem will have to commend their arguments to the thought of the
towns. Therefore I address these pages, not to farmers only, but to the
general reader--who, I may observe, does not generally read if he
happens to live in the open country.
In the course of my own studies of American rural life I have found it
convenient to divide the United States into four sections, each of them
more or less homogeneous. As this method of treatment may help my
readers, I will give them a look at my map of American rural life. The
four sections may be called the North Eastern, the Middle Western, the
Southern, and the Far Western. The division has no pretensions to be
scientific; the boundaries can be adjusted to fit in with the experience
of each reader.
In my North Eastern section I include the New England States, New York,
New Jersey, and most of Pennsylvania. This is a section where
manufacturing communities have long been established, where migration
from country to town has been most marked, and where the competition of
the newly settled Western farm lands has been followed by effects upon
agricultural society very similar to those produced by the same causes
in many a rural community on the Continent of Europe. Second comes the
Middle Western section, consisting mainly of the Mississippi Valley,
with its vast area of high average fertility, the greatest
food-producing tract on the continent. Third, I place the Southern
section, where the governing factors in rural economy are the climate,
the numerical strength of the colored population, the two staple
industrial crops--cotton and tobacco--the comparatively recent abolition
of slavery, and the long-drawn-out effects of the Civil War. My fourth
division, the Far Western section, includes the ranching lands of the
arid belt with their irrigation oases, and the fruit-growing and farming
lands of the Pacific Coast.
As we are discussing the problem chiefly in its human aspect, which
affects alike communities wealthy and impoverished, large and small,
old-settled and newly established, it will not matter essentially where
we first direct our attention for the purpose of illustration. But if,
as I hold, nothing less than a reconstruction of rural civilisation is
called for, our inquiries will be more profitably directed to those
sections where agricultural society is permanently established, or where
the rural population might abandon the migratory habit if the conditions
were more favorable to an advanced civilisation. At the present stage I
feel that the whole subject can be most profitably discussed in its
application to the Middle Western and the Southern sections. Here the
intimate relationship of the Conservation and the Country Life ideas is
best illustrated. Here, too, we get into touch with the problem at its
two extremes of prosperity and poverty, each in its own way retarding
the progress of rural civilisation. In both sections the conditions are
typical, and distinctively American.
Let us then consider first the general course of rural civilisation in
the great food-producing tract of the Middle West. I have in my mind the
portion I know best, the last-settled part of the corn belt. Thirty
years ago I saw something of the newcomers who settled in this section,
where there was still much raw land. These settlers, knowing that the
land must rise rapidly in value, almost invariably purchased much larger
farms than they could handle. They often sank their available working
capital in making the first payments for their land, and went heavily
into debt for the balance. They became "land poor," and, in order to
meet the instalments of purchase and the high interest on their
mortgages, they invented a system of farming unprecedented in its
wastefulness. The farm was treated as a mine, or, to use Mr. James J.
Hill's metaphor, as a bank where the depositors are always taking out
more than they put in. A corn crop, year after year, without rotation or
fertilisers, satisfied the new conception of husbandry--the easiest and
least costly extraction of the wealth in the soil. Land, labour,
capital, and ability I had been taught to regard as the essentials of
production; but here capital was reduced to the minimum, and ability
left to nature. Many of the young men who took Horace Greeley's advice
and went West knew nothing about farming. I remember writing home that I
was in a country where the rolling stone gathered most moss. Possibly
the method adopted was the quickest way to get rich; living on capital
is all right provided somebody will replace the squandered resources.
While there were ample unoccupied lands, Uncle Sam looked kindly upon
these enterprising pioneers. It was only in the second Roosevelt
Administration that it dawned upon the national conscience that the
nation had some claim to be considered as well as the individual. Of
course all this is changed now; although I am not sure that western
Canada is not being educated in soil exhaustion by some of these
extemporised husbandmen whose habits and temperament lead them to seek
"fresh fields and pastures new." "We are not out here for our health,"
was the reply I got when I showed that my old-fashioned economic sense
was shocked by this substitution of land speculation for farming.
I am aware that this very uneconomic procedure is capable of some
plausible explanations. The opening up of the vast new territory by the
provision of local traffic for transcontinental lines was an object of
national urgency and importance. Nevertheless, I think it must now be
regretted that a little more thought was not given to the general
problem of rural economy, of which transit is but one factor. This may
be that irritating kind of wisdom which comes after the event, but I
cannot help regarding the policy of rewarding railroad enterprises with
unconditional grants of vast areas of agricultural land as one of the
many evidences of the urban domination over rural affairs.
Of the earlier settled portions of this section I cannot speak from
personal knowledge. But a recent magazine article,[3] "The Agrarian
Revolution in the Middle West," follows closely the line of my own
thoughts. In this article Mr. Joseph B. Ross, of Lafayette, Indiana, who
is making a special study of the evolution of American rural life,
considers it in three periods: from 1800 to 1835, from 1835 to 1890, and
from 1890 to the present time. In the middle period he shows how the
most progressive families raised their standard of living steadily with
the growing prosperity of the country. They built themselves stately
homes with substantial barns. The farmer was developing into a citizen
with the solid virtues, the virile independence, the strong political
opinions, religious interest, and social instincts which characterised
the English yeoman of the preceding century. The social life which these
communities built up, as soon as their economic position was assured,
was a reflection of the best English traditions--it centred round the
churches and the Sunday-school. There was a growing distribution of
literature as well as organisation for intellectual, educational and
social purposes. Mr. Ross notes the winter excursions to Florida and
California, the adornment of the homes, and many other evidences of a
social progress developing a character of its own. During this period
there was a migration from the country homes to the cities; but it was
only the natural outflow of the surplus members of the rural families
into the professional and business life of the growing centres of
commerce and industry.
In the period through which we are now passing a transformation is
taking place. The rural exodus is no longer that of individuals, but of
whole families. The farms thus vacated are let to tenants, generally on
a three years' lease, at a competition rent. The Country Life Commission
says that this tendency to move to the cities "is not peculiar to any
region. In difficult farming regions, and where the competition with
other farming sections is most severe, the young people may go to town
to better their condition. In the best regions the older people retire
to town because it is socially more attractive, and they see a prospect
of living in comparative ease and comfort on the rental of their lands.
Nearly everywhere there is a townward movement for the purpose of
securing school advantages for the children. All this tends to sterilize
the open country and to lower its social status." The Commission points
out that the new addition of what is likely to be a stationary element,
whose economic interests lie elsewhere, to the citizenship of the town,
may create there a new social problem, while the tenant in the country
will not have that interest in building up rural society which might be
expected in the owners of land. Mr. Ross's studies lead him very
definitely to the same conclusion. Churches and educational
institutions, he tells us, are being starved, and rural society is fast
reverting to the type which was prevalent from thirty to fifty years
ago. But there is one great difference between then and now. Then, rural
civilisation was passing through a stage of marked social advancement
which was common throughout the country; now, there are distinct
indications of social degeneration, which Mr. Ross regards as the
inevitable consequence of the new landlord and tenant system. Many
members of these communities must have left the Old World to escape from
the selfsame conditions which they are reproducing in the New.
Rural society in the Middle West, as it presents itself to the observer
whose authority I have cited, is obviously in a transitional stage. The
lack of farm labourers, which is the common subject of complaint by
farmers in all parts of the United States, cannot fail to be aggravated
by the change in the conditions of tenancy just noted. The man whose
chief concern is to get the most out of the land, at the least expense,
in two or three years, will not treat his labourers so well--nor the
land so well--as will the man who means to spend his life on the farm;
and therefore the labourers will not stay. This scarcity of labour may
be met to some extent by an increased use of machinery; but it is more
likely to lead to poorer cultivation, which means the depopulation of
agricultural districts. England and Ireland furnish too many examples of
the rural decay immortalised in Goldsmith's "Deserted Village." It would
be strange and sad if the experience were to be repeated on the richest
soil of America.
In the Southern section we find a wastefulness similar to that in the
corn belt, but due to wholly different causes. The communities are
old-settled, but in many instances they are still abnormally depressed
by the terrible effects of the great war, followed by a period of social
and economic stagnation. Here there was little but agriculture for the
people to rely upon, and their methods have, until recent years, been
very backward. The growing of the same crops year after year upon the
same fields, the neglect of precaution against the washing away of the
soil surface, and the failure to use fertilisers, have made the profits
of tillage disappointingly small. Billions of dollars have been lost by
these communities through persistent soil exhaustion and erosion. In the
last few years the Federal Department of Agriculture has maintained a
most efficient staff of agricultural experts under the direction of Dr.
Knapp, one of the ablest organisers of farm improvement I have ever met.
The General Education Board, who administer large sums provided by Mr.
Rockefeller, recognising the educational value of Dr. Knapp's
operations, are contributing about one hundred thousand dollars a year
to his work. Dr. Knapp and his field agents have no difficulty at all in
demonstrating that the yield may be doubled, and the cost of production
greatly reduced, merely by the application of the most elementary
science to agriculture. I heard him tell of a farmer whom he had induced
to allow his boy--still attending school--to cultivate one acre under
his instructions. In the result the boy quadrupled the number of bushels
of corn to the acre that his father, following the traditional methods,
was able to raise. It would be easy to multiply such instances of
thriftlessness and neglected opportunity, of poverty within easy reach
of abundance, which have brought it about that the future of the nation
is actually endangered by the failure of the food supply to keep pace
with the increase of its still relatively sparse population.
The Southern section furnishes two illustrations of long-standing
neglect, both well worthy of consideration for their pregnant
suggestiveness. The Federal Department of Agriculture recently scored a
notable success in dealing with an insect pest which was threatening the
cotton-growing industry with economic ruin. The boll-weevil, like the
legal and medical professions, thrives upon the follies of humanity. It
attacks the cotton plants which have been weakened by bad husbandry. The
scientists did not succeed in finding in the commonwealth of bugs the
natural enemy of the pest they were after, but Dr. Knapp, with the
wisdom which prefers prevention to cure, seized the opportunity of
teaching cotton-growers to diversify their cultivation. The consequence
was that the cotton crop itself is gradually responding to the
treatment. Many other crops are adding their quota to the produce of the
Southern farms, and an all-round improvement, moral as well as material,
is accompanying the educational discipline through which this reformer
is putting the communities with whom and for whom he is working.
There is another pest in the South which does not attack the farm crops,
but goes straight for the farmer. If the Country Life Commission had
done nothing more, they would have justified their appointment by the
attention they called to the ravages of the hookworm, which have, no one
knows how long, scourged the poor white communities in the Southern
States. The effect of the disease set up by the hookworm, which infests
the intestines, is a complete sapping of all energy, mental and
physical. Mr. Rockefeller has provided a million dollars for the
necessary research work and for such subsequent organisation of sanitary
effort as may be required to extirpate this unquestionably preventable
evil. I wonder how long such a state of affairs would have been
permitted to interfere with the health and to paralyse the industry of
urban communities. Had the hookworm, instead of lurking in country
lanes, walked the streets, how would it have fared?
These two pests furnish a fine illustration of the length to which the
neglect of rural life has been allowed to go in the Southern States.
Neither the Eastern nor the Far Western section presents aspects of
special interest to the foreign student of the Rural problem in the
United States, but in both the constructive statesman and the social
worker will find a rich field for their efforts. In the New England
States--more especially in the manufacturing districts--the competition
between town and country for labour is as marked as in Industrial
England. In this section, however, the lure of the city has a rival in
the call of the West, which still makes its appeal to the farmer's boy.
Secretary Wilson has recently given it as his opinion that land-seekers
who pass by the farms now offered for sale in the western portions of
New York State often go further and fare worse. In these relatively
low-priced lands, it ought not to be difficult for agricultural
communities to establish permanently a rural society worthy of American
ideas of progress. But to do this is to solve the problem we are
discussing. We have some other aspects of that problem to consider
before we can agree upon the essentials of a philosophic and
comprehensive scheme for the rehabilitation of rural life--before we can
lay down the lines of a movement to give effect to our plan.
The Far Western section has hardly yet emerged from the frontier-pioneer
stage, and its rural problem is still below the horizon. I may, however,
note in passing a few evidences that the people of this section have
already shown a very real concern for rural progress. The fruit-growers
of the Pacific Coast have, in the coöperative marketing of their
produce, made an excellent beginning in a matter of first importance in
any scheme of rural development. On irrigation farm lands there has
been developed, in connection with the upkeep and control of the water
systems, a community spirit which will surely lead to many forms of
organisation for mutual economic and social advantage. In the city of
Spokane, Washington, the Chamber of Commerce has aroused a public
interest in the work of the Country Life Commission which, so far as my
information goes, has not been equalled elsewhere in the United States.
The Chamber is republishing the Report of the Commission, for which no
Federal appropriation appears to have been made. It would seem to be a
not wild speculation that the statesmen and social workers who will
first solve the rural problem of the English-speaking peoples may be
found in the Far West of the New World as well as of the Old.
I must now conclude the diagnosis of rural decadence by a consideration
of what in my judgment is the chief cause of the malady, and so get to
a point where we can determine the nature of the remedy. It will then
remain only to sketch the outlines of the movement which is to give
practical effect to the agreed principles in the life of rural
communities.
FOOTNOTE:
[3] _North American Review_, September, 1909.
CHAPTER V
THE WEAK SPOT IN AMERICAN RURAL ECONOMY
The evidence of competent American witnesses proves that there is, in
the United States, notwithstanding its immense agricultural wealth, a
Rural Life problem. Here, as elsewhere, on a fuller analysis, the utmost
variety of race, soil, climate and market facilities serve but to
emphasise the importance of the human factor. But this consideration
does not lessen the need for a sternly practical treatment of the rural
social economy under review. In this chapter, I propose to go right down
to the roots of the rural problem, find what is wrong with the industry
by which the country people live, and see how it can be righted. We
should then have clearly in our minds the essentials of prosperity in a
rural community.
Agriculture, the basis of a rural existence, must be regarded as a
science, as a business and as a life. I have already adverted to
President Roosevelt's formula for solving the rural problem--"better
farming, better business, better living." Better farming simply means
the application of modern science to the practice of agriculture. Better
business is the no less necessary application of modern commercial
methods to the business side of the farming industry. Better living is
the building up, in rural communities, of a domestic and social life
which will withstand the growing attractions of the modern city.
This threefold scheme of reform covers the whole ground and will become
the basis of the Country Life movement to be suggested later. But in the
working out of the general scheme, there must be one important change in
the order of procedure--'better business' must come first. The dull
commercial details of agriculture have been sadly neglected, perhaps on
account of the more human interest of the scientific and social aspects
of country life. Yet my own experience in working at the rural problem
in Ireland has convinced me that our first step towards its solution is
to be found in a better organisation of the farmer's business. It is
strange but true that the level of efficiency reached in many European
countries was due to American competition, which in the last half of the
nineteenth century forced Continental farmers to reorganise their
industry alike in production, in distribution and in its finance. Both
Irish experience and Continental study have convinced me that neither
good husbandry nor a worthy social life can be ensured unless
accompanied by intelligent and efficient business methods. We must,
therefore, examine somewhat critically the agricultural system of the
American farmer, and see wherein its weakness lies.
The superiority of the business methods of the town to those of the
country is obvious, but I do not think the precise nature of that
superiority is generally understood. What strikes the eye is the
material apparatus of business,--the street cars, the advertisements,
the exchange, the telephone, the typewriter; all these form an
impressive contrast with the slow, simple life of the farmer, who very
likely scratches his accounts on a shingle or keeps them in his head.
But most of this city apparatus is due merely to the necessity of swift
movement in the concentrated process of exchange and distribution. Such
swiftness is neither necessary nor possible in the process of isolated
production. But there is an economic law, applicable alike to rural and
to urban pursuits, which is being more and more fully recognised and
obeyed by the farmers of most European countries, including Ireland, but
which has been too little heeded by the farmers of the United States and
Great Britain. Under modern economic conditions, things must be done in
a large way if they are to be done profitably; and this necessitates a
resort to combination.
The advantage which combination gives to the town over the country was
recognised long before the recent economic changes forced men to
combine. In the old towns of Europe all trades began as strict and
exclusive corporations. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries new
scientific and economic forces broke up these combinations, which were
far too narrow for the growing volume of industrial activity, and an
epoch of competition began. The great towns of America opened their
business career during this epoch, and have brought the arts of
competition to a higher perfection than exists in Europe. But it has
always been known that competition did not exclude combination against
the consumer; and it is now beginning to be perceived that the fiercer
the competition, the more surely does it lead in the end to such
combination.
A trade combination has three principal objects: it aims, first, at
improving what I may call the internal business methods of the trade
itself by eliminating the waste due to competition, by economising
staff, plant, etc., and by the ready circulation of intelligence, and in
other ways. In the second place, it aims at strengthening the trade
against outside interests. These may be of various kinds; but in the
typical case we are considering, namely, the combination of great
middlemen who control exchange and distribution, the outside interests
are those of the producer on one side and the consumer on the other; and
the trade combination, by its organised unity of action, succeeds in
lowering the prices it pays to the unorganised producer and in raising
the prices it charges to the unorganised consumer. In the third place,
the trade combination seeks to favour its own interests in their
relation to other interests through political control--control not so
much of the machinery of politics as of its products, legislation and
administration. I am not now arguing the question whether or how far
this action on the part of trade combinations is morally justifiable. My
point is simply that the towns have flourished at the expense of the
country by the use of these methods, and that the countryman must adopt
them if he is to get his own again. Moreover, as organisation tends to
increase the volume and lower the cost of agricultural production and to
make possible large transactions between organised communities of
farmers and the trade, it will be seen that the organised combination of
farmers will simplify the whole commerce of those countries where it is
adopted, and thus benefit alike the farmer and the trader.
This truth will be easily realised if we consider for a moment the
system of distribution which the food demand of the modern market has
evolved. Agricultural produce finds its chief market in the great
cities. Their populations must have their food so sent in that it can
be rapidly distributed; and this requires that the consignments must be
delivered regularly, in large quantities, and of such uniform quality
that a sample will give a correct indication of the whole. These three
conditions are essential to rapid distribution, but their fulfilment is
not within the power of isolated farmers, however large their
operations. It is an open question whether farmers should themselves
undertake the distribution of their produce through agencies of their
own, thus saving the wholesale and possibly the retail profits. But
unquestionably they should be so well organised at home that they can
take this course if they are unfairly treated by organised middlemen.
The Danish farmers, whose highly organised system of distribution has
made them the chief competitors of the Irish farmers, have established
(with Government assistance which their organisation enabled them to
secure) very efficient machinery for distributing their butter, bacon
and eggs in the British markets. Other European farming communities are
becoming equally well organised, and similarly control the marketing of
their produce. But where, as in America and the United Kingdom, the town
dominates the country, and the machinery of distribution is owned by the
business men of the towns, it is worked by them in their own interests.
They naturally take from the unorganised producers as well as from the
unorganised consumers the full business value of the service they
render. With the growing cost of living, this has become a matter of
urgent importance to the towns. In the cheaper-food campaign which began
in the late fall of 1909, voices are heard calling the farmers to
account for their uneconomical methods, while here and there
organisations of consumers are endeavouring to solve the problem to
their own satisfaction by acquiring land and raising upon it the produce
which they require.
In the face of such facts it is not easy to account for the
backwardness of American and British farmers in the obviously important
matter of organisation. The farmer, we know, is everywhere the most
conservative and individualistic of human beings. He dislikes change in
his methods, and he venerates those which have come down to him from his
fathers' fathers. Whatever else he may waste, these traditions he
conserves. He does not wish to interfere with anybody else's business,
and he is fixedly determined that others shall not interfere with his.
These estimable qualities make agricultural organisation more difficult
in Anglo-Saxon communities than in those where clan or tribal instincts
seem to survive.[4]
Now it is fair to the farmer to admit that his calling does not lend
itself readily to associative action. He lives apart; most of his time
is spent in the open air, and in the evening of the working day physical
repose is more congenial to him than mental activity. But when all this
is said, we have not a complete explanation of the fact that, by failing
to combine, American and British farmers, persistently disobey an
accepted law, and refuse to follow the almost universal practice of
modern business. I believe the true explanation to be one that has
somehow escaped the notice of the agricultural economist. Those who
accept it will feel that they have found the weak spot in American
farming, and that the remedy is neither obscure nor difficult to apply.
The form of combination which the towns have invented for industrial and
commercial purposes is the Joint Stock Company. Here a number of persons
contribute their capital to a common fund and entrust the direction to
a single head or committee, taking no further part in the business
except to change the management if the undertaking does not yield a
satisfactory dividend. Our urban way of looking at things has made us
assume that this city system must be suitable to rural conditions. The
contrary is the fact. When farmers combine, it is a combination not of
money only, but of personal effort in relation to the entire business.
In a coöperative creamery, for example, the chief contribution of a
shareholder is in milk; in a coöperative elevator, corn; in other cases
it may be fruit or vegetables, or a variety of material things rather
than cash. But it is, most of all, a combination of neighbours within an
area small enough to allow of all the members meeting frequently at the
business centre. As the system develops, the local associations are
federated for larger business transactions, but these are governed by
delegates carefully chosen by the members of the constituent bodies.
The object of such associations is, primarily, not to declare a
dividend, but rather to improve the conditions of the industry for the
members. After an agreed interest has been paid upon the shares, the net
profits are divided between the participants in the undertaking, to each
in proportion as he has contributed to them through the business he has
done with the institution. And the same idea is applied to the control
of the management. It is recognised that the poor man's coöperation is
as important as the rich man's subscription. 'One man, one vote,' is the
almost universal principle in coöperative bodies.[5]
The distinction between the capitalistic basis of joint stock
organisation and the more human character of the coöperative system is
fundamentally important. It is recognised by law in England, where the
coöperative trading societies are organised under _The Industrial and
Provident Societies' Act_, and the coöperative credit associations under
_The Friendly Societies' Act_. In the United States (I am told by
friends in the legal profession), the Articles of Association of an
ordinary limited liability company can be so drafted as to meet all the
requirements I have named. Most countries have enacted laws specially
devised to meet the requirements of coöperative societies. However it is
done, the essential of success in agricultural coöperation is that the
terms and conditions upon which it is based shall be accepted by all
concerned as being equitable in the distribution of profits, risks and
control. It then becomes the interest of every member to give his
whole-hearted support and aid to the common undertaking. To accomplish
this, it is necessary to explain and secure the acceptance of a
constitution and procedure carefully thought out to suit each case. It
will be readily believed that associations of farmers which will meet
these conditions are not likely to be spontaneously generated; hence the
necessity for a plan and for the machinery to carry it through.
In this matter I am here speaking from practical experience in Ireland.
Twenty years ago the pioneers of our rural life movement found it
necessary to concentrate their efforts upon the reorganisation of the
farmer's business. They saw that foreign competition was not, as was
commonly supposed, a visitation of Providence upon the farmers of the
British Islands, but a natural economic revolution of permanent effect.
Our message to Irish farmers was that they must imitate the methods of
their Continental competitors, who were defeating them in their own
markets simply by superior organisation. After five years of individual
propagandism, the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society was formed in
1894 to meet the demand for instruction as to the formation and the
working of coöperative societies, a demand to which it was beyond the
means of the few pioneers to respond.
Two decades of steady development have confirmed the soundness of the
original scheme, and a brief account of agricultural coöperation in
Ireland will be of interest to any reader who has persevered so far. The
conditions were in some respects favourable. The farms are small and
their owners belong to the class to which coöperation brings most
immediate benefit. The Irish peasantry are highly intelligent. They lack
the strong individualism of the English, but they have highly developed
associative instincts. For this reason coöperation, an alternative to
communism,--which they abhor,--comes naturally to them. On the other
hand, the ease with which they can be organised makes them peculiarly
amenable to political influence. In backward rural communities the
trader is almost invariably the political boss. He is a leader of
agrarian agitation, in which he can safely advocate principles he would
not like to see applied to the relations between himself and his
customers. He bitterly opposes coöperation, which throws inconvenient
light upon those relations. We are able to persuade the more enlightened
rural traders that economies effected in agricultural production will
raise the standard of living of his customers and make them larger
consumers of general commodities and more punctual in their payments.
But in the majority of cases the agricultural organiser finds politics
in sharp conflict with business, and has a hard row to hoe. So, while we
have advantages in organising Irish farmers, we have also, largely owing
to well-known historical causes, to overcome difficulties which have no
counterpart in the United States or England.
Nevertheless, we managed to make progress. We began with the dairying
industry, and already half the export of Irish butter comes from the
coöperative societies we established. Organised bodies of farmers are
learning to purchase their agricultural requirements intelligently and
economically. They are also beginning to adopt the methods of the
organised foreign farmer in controlling the sale of their butter, eggs
and poultry in the British markets. And they not only combine in
agricultural production and distribution, but are also making a
promising beginning in grappling with the problem of agricultural
finance. It is in this last portion of the Irish programme that by far
the most interesting study of the coöperative system can be made, on
account of its success in the poorest parts of the Island. Furthermore,
the attempt to enable the most embarrassed section of the Irish
peasantry to procure working capital illustrates some features of
agricultural coöperation which will have suggestive value for American
farmers. I will therefore give a brief description of our agricultural
coöperative credit associations.
The organisation was introduced in the middle of the last century by a
German Burgomaster, the now famous Herr Raiffeisen. He set himself to
provide the means of escape from the degrading indebtedness to
storekeepers and usurers which is the almost invariable lot of poor
peasantries. His scheme performs an apparent miracle. A body of very
poor persons, individually--in the commercial sense of the
term--insolvent, manage to create a new basis of security which has been
somewhat grandiloquently and yet truthfully called the capitalisation of
their honesty and industry. The way in which this is done is remarkably
ingenious. The credit society is organised in the usual democratic way
explained above, but its constitution is peculiar in one respect. The
members have to become jointly and severally responsible for the debts
of the association, which borrows on this unlimited liability from the
ordinary commercial bank, or, in some cases, from Government sources.
After the initial stage, when the institution becomes firmly
established, it attracts local deposits, and thus the savings of the
community, which are too often hoarded, are set free to fructify in the
community. The procedure by which the money borrowed is lent to the
members of the association is the essential feature of the scheme. The
member requiring the loan must state what he is going to do with the
money. He must satisfy the committee of the association, who know the
man and his business, that the proposed investment is one which will
enable him to repay both principal and interest. He must enter into a
bond with two sureties for the repayment of the loan, and needless to
say the characters of both the borrower and his sureties are very
carefully considered. The period for which the loan is granted is
arranged to meet the needs of the case, as determined by the committee
after a full discussion with the borrower. Once the loan has been made,
it becomes the concern of every member of the association to see that
it is applied to the 'approved purpose'--as it is technically called.
What is more important is that all the borrower's fellow-members become
interested in his business and anxious for its success.
The fact that nearly three hundred of these societies are at work in
Ireland, and that, although their transactions are on a very modest
scale, the system is steadily growing both in the numbers of its
adherents and in the business transacted is, I think, a remarkable
testimony to the value of the coöperative system. The details I have
given illustrate the important distinction between coöperation, which
enables the farmer to do his business in a way that suits him, and the
urban form of combination, which is unsuited to his needs. The ordinary
banks lend money to agriculturists for a term (generally ninety days)
which has been fixed to suit the needs of town business. Thus, a farmer
borrowing money to sow a crop, or to purchase young cattle, is obliged
to repay his loan, in the first instance, before the crop is harvested,
and in the second, before the cattle mature and are marketable. Far more
important, however, than these not inconsiderable economic advantages
are the social benefits which are derived by bringing people together to
achieve in a very definite and practical way the aim of all coöperative
effort--self-help by mutual help.
Our coöperative movement, taken as a whole, is to-day represented by
nearly one thousand farmers' organisations, with an aggregate membership
of some one hundred thousand persons, mostly heads of families. Its
business turnover last year was twelve and a half million dollars. In
estimating the significance of these figures, American readers must not
'think in continents,' and must give more weight to the moral than to
the material achievement. As I have explained, the coöperative system
requires for its success the exercise of higher moral qualities than
does the joint stock company. Once a coöperative society becomes a
soulless corporation, its days are numbered. It requires also the
diffusion of a good deal of economic thought among its members, and
this, also, is no small matter in the conditions. The most striking fact
about this work in Ireland is that while in its earlier years
organisation consisted mainly in expounding and commending to farmers
the coöperative principle, we now find that the principle is taken for
granted and the only question upon which advice is needed is how to
apply it. The progress of agricultural coöperation depends largely on
the character of the community; its commercial value may be measured by
the extent to which it develops in the community the mental and moral
qualities essential to success.[6]
In agricultural coöperation, Ireland can claim to have shown the way to
the United Kingdom. Ten years ago, after the Irish movement had been
launched, the English rural reformers started a movement on exactly the
same lines, even founding on the Irish model an English Agricultural
Organisation Society. An Irishman, who had studied coöperation at home,
was selected as its chief executive officer. Five years later, a
Scottish Agricultural Organisation Society took the field. Both in
England and in Scotland the chief difficulty to be overcome is the
intense individualism of the farmers, and perhaps some lack of altruism.
The large farmers did not feel the need of coöperation, and where the
natural leader of the rural community will not lead, the small
cultivator cannot follow. Whether the same difficulties have prevented
any considerable adoption of agricultural coöperation in the United
States, it is not necessary to inquire. It is certain that the
underlying principles approved by every progressive rural, community in
Europe have not so far exercised more than an occasional and fitful
influence upon the rural economy of the American Republic.
If I have given in these pages a true explanation of the deplorable
backwardness of American farmers in the matter of business combination
when compared with all other American workers, those who take part in
the movement which is to provide the remedy will have set themselves a
task as hopeful as it is interesting. Americans as a people are addicted
to associated action. I have seen the principle of coöperation developed
to the highest point in the ranching industry in the days of the
unfenced range. Our cattle used to roam at large, the only means of
identifying them being certain registered marks made by the
branding-iron and the knife. The individual owner would have had no more
property in his herd than he would have had in so many fishes in the
sea but for a very effective coöperative organisation. The Stock
Association, with its 'round-ups' and its occasional resort to the
Supreme Court of Judge Lynch, were an adequate substitute for the title
deeds to the lands, and for fences horse-high, bull-strong and
hog-tight. But then we were in the Arid Belt and the frontier-pioneer
stage; we had no politics and no politicians. I must return, however, to
the less exciting, but I suppose more important, life of the regular
farmer, and consider his efforts at organisation.
Instances can be multiplied where the coöperative system has been
adopted with immensely beneficial results; but in too many cases it has
been abandoned. On the other hand, Granges, Institutes, Clubs, Leagues,
Alliances and a multitude of miscellaneous farmers' associations have
been organised for social, religious, political and economic objects.
From my study of the work done by these bodies, the impression left is
that almost everything that can be done better by working together than
by working separately has been at some time the subject of organised
effort. But these manifestations of activity have been fitful and
sporadic. They were commonly marked by some or all of the same
defects--mutual distrust, divided counsels, ignorance of what others
were doing, want of continuity and impatience of results. Many
organisations, after winning some advantages,--over the railroads for
instance,--fell into abeyance or even out of existence; others lapsed
under the enervating influence of a little temporary prosperity, such as
a few years of better prices. The truth is, American farmers have had
the will to organise, but they have missed the way.[7]
The political influence of the farming community has for this reason
never been commensurate either with the numerical strength of its
members or the magnitude of their share in the nation's work. It is
true that the Federal Department of Agriculture, appropriations for
Agricultural Colleges, some railway legislation and other boons to
farmers, are to be attributed to the efforts of their organisations.
Yet, as compared with the influence exercised upon National affairs by
the farmers of, say, France and Denmark, the American farmer has but a
small influence upon legislation and administration affecting his
interests. What better proof of this could be given than the absence of
a Parcels Post in the United States? The whole farming community are
agreed as to the need for this boon to the dwellers of the open country,
and yet they have not succeeded in winning it against the opposition of
the Express Companies, because it is merely a farmers' and not a
townsmen's grievance. And not only political impotence, but political
inertia, result from the lack of organisation. The state of the country
roads--one of the greatest disabilities under which country life in the
United States still suffers--is as good an instance as I know. Congress
has shown itself well disposed towards the farmer, but not always so the
State governments, and the good intentions of Congress on the roads
question are largely nullified owing to the failure of one-third of the
States to establish highway commissions, or make other provision for
expending such amounts as might be voted to them by Congress. Here, as
in the cases of the transit and marketing problems, we see the need for
a strong, central, permanent organisation, fitted alike to direct local
or promote National action; an association capable of securing the
legislative protection of the farmer's interests, and an organisation
fitted to further the business side of his industry. In fact, this need
is urgent, and a coöperative movement of National dimensions should be
established to meet it. Had such a movement been started after the War,
or even twenty years later, the American farmer would be in a far
stronger position to-day, and much misdirected effort would have been
saved.
I have now tried to explain the weak spot in American rural economy. It
may be regarded from a more general point of view. If we were
considering the life of some commercial or industrial community and
trying to forecast its future development, one of the first things we
should note would be its general business methods. No manufacturing
concern with a defective office administration and incompetent
travellers could survive, even if it had an Archimedes or an Edison in
supreme control. I cannot see any reason why an agricultural community
should expect to prosper while the industry by which its members live
retains its present business organisation. I have urged that as things
are, the farming interest is at a fatal disadvantage in the purchase of
agricultural requirements, in the sale of agricultural produce, and in
obtaining proper credit facilities. Whatever the cause--and I have set
down those which I regard as the chief among them--American farmers have
still to learn that they are subject to a law of modern business which
governs all their country's industrial activities--the law that each
body of workers engaged in supplying the modern market must combine, or
be worsted at every turn in competition with those who do.
I do not much fear that this general principle, overlooked, perhaps,
because it was too obvious to be worth enforcing, will be disputed. I
hope I may gain acceptance for my further contention that the inability
of American farmers to sustain an effective business organisation has
been due simply to the fact that the not obvious distinction between the
capitalistic and the coöperative basis of combination suitable to town
and country respectively was missed. For it will then be clear why, in
the working out of Mr. Roosevelt's formula, better business must precede
and form the basis of better farming and better living. The conviction
that in this general procedure lies the one hope of solving the problem
under review accounts for the otherwise disproportionate space given to
that aspect of rural life which is of the least interest to the general
reader.
I shall now attempt to determine the principles which must be applied to
the solution of our problem. Those who have followed the arguments up to
this point will have a pretty clear idea of the general drift of my
conclusions. The substitution in rural economy of the coöperative for
the competitive principle, which I have so far advocated as a matter of
business prudence, will be seen to have a wider import. This course will
be shown to have an important bearing upon the application of the new
knowledge to the oldest industry and also upon the building of a new
rural civilisation we must provide for the dwellers of the open country
a larger share of the intellectual and social pleasures for the want of
which those most needed in the country are too often drawn to the
town.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] I should expect the negroes in the Southern States to be very good
subjects for agricultural organisation. I have discussed this question
with the staff of the Hampton Institute in Virginia--a fine body of men,
doing noble work. The Principal, the Rev. H. B. Frissell, D.D., whose
judgment in this matter is probably the weightiest in the United States,
and his leading assistants, both white and coloured, are of the same
opinion.
[5] Where capital is, in rare instances, subscribed by persons other
than farmers, it is usually invested less as a commercial speculation
than as an act of friendship on the part of the investor, who in no case
exercises more control than his one vote affords.
[6] Readers who are sufficiently interested in the rural life movement
in Ireland will find a full description of it in my book, "Ireland in
the New Century," John Murray, London, and E. P. Dutton, New York.
[7] Mr. John Lee Coulter contributed to the _Yale Review_ for November,
1909, an article on Organization among the farmers of the United States
which is a most valuable summary of the important facts.
CHAPTER VI
THE WAY TO BETTER FARMING AND BETTER LIVING
In no way is the contrast between rural and urban civilisation more
marked than in the application of the teachings of modern science to
their respective industries. Even the most important mechanical
inventions were rather forced upon the farmer by the efficient selling
organisation of the city manufacturers than demanded by him as a result
of good instruction in farming. On the mammoth wheat farms, where, as
the fable ran, the plough that started out one morning returned on the
adjoining furrow the following day, mechanical science was indeed called
in, but only to perpetrate the greatest soil robbery in agricultural
history. Application of science to legitimate agriculture is
comparatively new. In my ranching and farming days I well remember how
general was the disbelief in its practical value throughout the Middle
and Far West. In cowboy terminology, all scientists were classified as
"bug-hunters," and farmers generally had no use for the theorist. The
non-agricultural community had naturally no higher appreciation of the
farmer's calling than he himself displayed. When some Universities first
developed agricultural courses, the students who entered for them were
nicknamed "aggies," and were not regarded as adding much to the dignity
of a seat of higher learning. The Department of Agriculture was looked
upon as a source of jobs, graft being the nearest approach to any known
agricultural operation.
All this is changing fast. The Federal Department of Agriculture is now
perhaps the most popular and respected of the world's great
administrative institutions. In the Middle West, a newly awakened
public opinion has set up an honourable rivalry between such States as
Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska and Minnesota, in developing the
agricultural sides of their Universities and Colleges. None the less,
Mr. James J. Hill has recently given it as his opinion that not more
than one per cent of the farmers of these regions are working in direct
touch with any educational institution. It is probable that this
estimate leaves out of account the indirect influence of the vast amount
of extension work and itinerant instruction which is embraced in the
activities of the Universities and Colleges. I fear it cannot be denied
that in the application of the natural sciences to the practical, and of
economic science to the business of farming, the country folk are
decades behind their urban fellow-citizens. And again I say the
disparity is to be attributed to the difference in their respective
degrees of organisation for business purposes.
The relation between business organisation and economic progress ought,
I submit, to be very seriously considered by the social workers who
perceive that progress is mainly a question of education. Speaking from
administrative experience at home, and from a good deal of interested
observation in America, I am firmly convinced that the new rural
education is badly handicapped by the lack of organised bodies of
farmers to act as channels for the new knowledge now made available. In
some instances, I am aware, great good has been done by the formation of
farmers' institutes which have been established in order to interest
rural communities in educational work and to make the local arrangements
for instruction by lectures, demonstrations and otherwise. But all
European experience proves the superiority for this purpose of the
business association to the organisation _ad hoc_, and has a much better
chance of permanence.
Again, the influence upon rural life of the agricultural teaching of the
Colleges and Universities, as exercised by their pupils, may be too
easily accepted as being of greater potential utility than any work
which these institutions can do amongst adults. This is a mistake. The
thousands of young men who are now being trained for advanced farming
too often have to restrict the practical application of their theoretic
knowledge to the home circle, which is not always responsive, for a man
is not usually a prophet in his own family. It is here that the
educational value of coöperative societies comes in; they act as
agencies through which scientific teaching may become actual practice,
not in the uncertain future, but in the living present. A coöperative
association has a quality which should commend it to the social
reformer--the power of evoking character; it brings to the front a new
type of local leader, not the best talker, but the man whose knowledge
enables him to make some solid contribution to the welfare of the
community.
I come now to the last part of the threefold scheme--that which aims at
a better life upon the farm. The coöperative association, in virtue of
its non-capitalistic basis of constitution and procedure (which, as I
have explained, distinguishes it from the Joint Stock Company), demands
as a condition of its business success the exercise of certain social
qualities of inestimable value to the community life. It is for this
reason, no doubt, that where men and women have learned to work together
under this system in the business of their lives, they are easily
induced to use their organisation for social and intellectual purposes
also.
The new organisation of the rural community for social as well as
economic purposes, which should follow from the acceptance of the
opinion I have advanced, would bring with it the first effective
counter-attraction to the towns. Their material advantages the country
cannot hope to rival; nor can any conceivable evolution of rural life
furnish a real counterpart to the cheap and garish entertainments of
the modern city. Take, for example, the extravagant use of electric
light for purposes of advertisement, which affords a nightly display of
fireworks in any active business street of an American city far superior
to the occasional exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London, which was
the rare treat of my childhood days. These delights--if such they
be--cannot be extended into remote villages in Kansas or Nebraska; but
their enchantment must be reckoned with by those who would remould the
life of the open country and make it morally and mentally satisfying to
those who are born to it, or who, but for its social stagnation, would
prefer a rural to an urban existence.
In one of his many public references to country life, President
Roosevelt attributed the rural exodus to the desire of "the more active
and restless young men and women" to escape from "loneliness and lack of
mental companionship."[8] He is hopeful that the rural free delivery,
the telephone, the bicycle and the trolley will do much towards
"lessening the isolation of farm life and making it brighter and more
attractive." Many to whom I have spoken on this subject fear that the
linking of the country with the town by these applications of modern
science may, to some extent, operate in a direction the opposite of that
which Mr. Roosevelt anticipates and desires. According to this view, the
more intimate knowledge of the modern city may increase the desire to be
in personal touch with it; the telephone may fail to give through the
ear the satisfaction which is demanded by the eye; among the "more
active and restless young men and women" the rural free delivery may
circulate the dime novel and the trolley make accessible the dime
museum. In the total result the occasional visit may become more and
more frequent, until the duties of country life are first neglected and
then abandoned.
I do not feel competent to decide between these two views, but I offer
one consideration with which I think many rural reformers will agree.
The attempt to bring the advantages of the city within the reach of the
dwellers in the country cannot, of itself, counteract the townward
tendency in so far as it is due to the causes summarised above. However
rapidly, in this respect, the country may be improved, the city is sure
to advance more rapidly and the gap between them to be widened. The new
rural civilisation should aim at trying to develop in the country the
things of the country, the very existence of which seems to have been
forgotten. But, after all, it is the world within us rather than the
world without us that matters in the making of society, and I must give
to the social influence of the coöperative idea what I believe to be its
real importance.
In Ireland, from which so much of my experience is drawn, we have found
a tendency growing among farmers whose combinations are successful, to
gather into one strong local association all those varied objects and
activities which I have described as advocated by the Irish Agricultural
Organisation Society. These local associations are ceasing to have one
special purpose or one object only. They absorb more and more of the
business of the district. One large, well-organised institution is being
substituted for the numerous petty transactions of farmers with
middlemen and small country traders. Gradually the Society becomes the
most important institution in the district, the most important in a
social as well as in an economic sense. The members feel a pride in its
material expansion. They accumulate large profits, which in time become
a kind of communal fund. In some cases this is used for the erection of
village halls where social entertainments, concerts and dances are held,
lectures delivered and libraries stored. Finally, the association
assumes the character of a rural commune, where, instead of the old
basis of the commune, the joint ownership of land, a new basis for union
is found in the voluntary communism of effort.
A true social organism is thus being created with common human and
economic interests, and the clan feeling, which was so powerful an
influence in early and mediæval civilisations, with all its power of
generating passionate loyalties, is born anew in the modern world. Our
ancient Irish records show little clans with a common ownership of land
hardly larger than a parish, but with all the patriotic feeling of large
nations held with an intensity rare in our modern states. The history of
these clans and of very small nations like the ancient Greek states
shows that the social feeling assumes its most binding and powerful
character where the community is large enough to allow free play to the
various interests of human life, but is not so large that it becomes an
abstraction to the imagination. Most of us feel no greater thrill in
being one of a State with fifty million inhabitants than we do in
recognising we are citizens of the solar system. The rural commune and
the very small States exhibit the feeling of human solidarity in its
most intense manifestations, working on itself, regenerating itself and
seeking its own perfection. Combinations of agriculturists, when the
rural organisation is complete, re-create in a new way the conditions
where these social instincts germinate best, and it is only by this
complete organisation of rural life that we can hope to build up a rural
civilisation, and create those counter-attractions to urban life which
will stay the exodus from the land.
I do not wish to exaggerate the interest which the rural life of my own
little island may have for those who are concerned for the vast and
wealthy expanses of the American farm lands. But, even here there is a
genuine desire for the really simple life, which in its commonest
manifestation is a thing that rather simple people talk about. In a
properly organised rural neighbourhood could be developed that higher
kind of attraction which is suggested by the very word _neighbourhood_.
Once get the farmers and their families all working together at
something that concerns them all, and we have the beginning of a more
stable and a more social community than is likely to exist amid the
constant change and bustle of the large towns, where indeed some
thinkers tell us that not only the family, but also the social life, is
badly breaking down. When people are really interested in each
other--and this interest comes of habitually working together--the
smallest personal traits or events affecting one are of interest to all.
The simplest piece of amateur acting or singing, done in the village
hall by one of the villagers, will arouse more criticism and more
enthusiasm among his friends and neighbours than can be excited by the
most consummate performance of a professional in a great city theatre,
where no one in the audience knows or cares for the performer.
But if this attraction--the attraction of common work and social
intercourse with a circle of friends--is to prevail in the long run over
the lure which the city offers to eye and ear and pocket, there must be
a change in rural education. At present country children are educated as
if for the purpose of driving them into the towns. To the pleasure which
the cultured city man feels in the country--because he has been taught
to feel it--the country child is insensible. The country offers
continual interest to the mind which has been trained to be thoughtful
and observant; the town offers continual distraction to the vacant eye
and brain. Yet, the education given to country children has been
invented for them in the town, and it not only bears no relation to the
life they are to lead, but actually attracts them towards a town career.
I am aware that I am here on ground where angels--even if specialised in
pedagogy--may well fear to tread. Upon the principles of a sound
agricultural education pedagogues are in a normally violent state of
disagreement with each other. But whatever compromise between general
education and technical instruction be adopted, the resulting reform
that is needed has two sides. We want two changes in the rural
mind--beginning with the rural teacher's mind. First, the interest which
the physical environment of the farmer provides to followers of almost
every branch of science must be communicated to the agricultural classes
according to their capacities. Second, that intimacy with and affection
for nature, to which Wordsworth has given the highest expression, must
in some way be engendered in the rural mind. In this way alone will the
countryman come to realize the beauty of the life around him, as through
the teaching of science he will learn to realise its truth.
Upon this reformed education, as a basis, the rural economy must be
built. It must, if my view be accepted, ensure, first and foremost, the
combination of farmers for business purposes in such a manner as will
enable them to control their own marketing and make use of the many
advantages which a command of capital gives. In all European
countries--with the exception of the British Isles--statesmen have
recognised the national necessity for the good business organisation of
the farmer. In some cases, for example France, even Government officials
expound the coöperative principle. In Denmark, the most predominantly
rural country in Europe, the education both in the common and in the
high school has long been so admirably related to the working lives of
the agricultural classes that the people adopt spontaneously the methods
of organisation which the commercial instinct they have acquired through
education tells them to be suitable to the conditions. The rural
reformer knows that this is the better way; but our problem is not
merely the education of a rising, but the development of a grown-up
generation. We cannot wait for the slow process of education to produce
its effect upon the mind of the rural youth, even if there were any way
of ensuring their proper training for a progressive rural life without
first giving to their parents such education as they can assimilate.
Direct action is called for; we have to work with adult farmers and
induce them to reorganise their business upon the lines which I have
attempted to define. Moreover, this is essential to the future success
of the work done in the schools, in order that the trained mind of youth
may not afterwards find itself baulked by the ignorant apathy or lazy
conservatism of its elders.
I hold, then, that the new economy will mean a more scientific mastery
of the technical side of farming, for farmers will make a much larger
use of the advice, instruction and help which the Nation and the States
offer them through the Department of Agriculture and the Colleges. It is
equally certain that there will arise a more human social life in the
rural districts, based upon the greater share of the products of the
farmer's industry, which the new business organisation will enable him
to retain; stimulated by the closer business relations with his fellows
which that organisation will bring about, and fostered by the closer
neighbourhood which is implied in a more intensive cultivation.
The development of a more intensive cultivation must carry with it a
much more careful consideration of the labour problem. The difficulty of
getting and keeping labour on the farm is a commonplace. I think farmers
have not faced the fact that this difficulty is due in the main to their
own way of doing their business. Competent men will not stay at farm
labour unless it offers them continuous employment as part of a
well-ordered business concern; and this is not possible unless with a
greatly improved husbandry.
To-day agriculture has to compete in the labour market against other,
and to many men more attractive, industries, and a marked elevation in
the whole standard of life in the rural world is the best insurance of a
better supply of good farm labour. Only an intensive system of farming
can afford any large amount of permanent employment at decent wages to
the rural labourer, and only a good supply of competent labour can
render intensive farming on any large scale practicable. But the
intensive system of farming not only gives regular employment and good
wages; it also fits the labourer of to-day--in a country where a man can
strike out for himself--to be the successful farmer of to-morrow. Nor,
in these days of impersonal industrial relations, should the fact be
overlooked that under an intensive system of agriculture, we find still
preserved the kindly personal relation between employer and employed
which contributes both to the pleasantness of life and to economic
progress and security.
Moreover, in a country where advanced farming is the rule, there is a
remarkable, and, from the standpoint of national stability, most
valuable, steadiness in employment. Good farming, by fixing the labourer
on the soil, improves the general condition of rural life, by ridding
the countryside of the worst of its present pests. Those wandering
dervishes of the industrial world, the hobo, the tramp--the entire
family of Weary Willies and Tired Timothys--will no longer have even an
imaginary excuse for their troubled and troublesome existence. But the
farmer who was the prey of these pests must, if he would be permanently
rid of them, learn to respect his hired farm hand. He must provide him
with a comfortable cottage and a modest garden plot upon which his young
family may employ themselves; otherwise, whatever the farmer may do to
attract labour, he will never retain it. In short, the labourer, too,
must get his full and fair share of the prosperity of the coming good
time in the country.
There is one particular aspect of this improved social life which is so
important that it ought properly to form the subject of a separate
essay; I mean the position of women in rural life. In no country in the
world is the general position of woman better, or her influence greater,
than in the United States. But while woman has played a great part there
in the social life and economic development of the town, I hold that the
part she is destined to play in the future making of the country will be
even greater.
In the more intelligent scheme of the new country life, the economic
position of woman is likely to be one of high importance. She enters
largely into all three parts of our programme,--better farming, better
business, better living. In the development of higher farming, for
instance, she is better fitted than the more muscular but less patient
animal, man, to carry on with care that work of milk records, egg
records, etc., which underlies the selection on scientific lines of the
more productive strains of cattle and poultry. And this kind of work is
wanted in the study not only of animal, but also of plant life.
Again, in the sphere of better business, the housekeeping faculty of
woman is an important asset, since a good system of farm accounts is one
of the most valuable aids to successful farming. But it is, of course,
in the third part of the programme,--better living,--that woman's
greatest opportunity lies. The woman makes the home life of the Nation.
But she desires also social life, and where she has the chance she
develops it. Here it is that the establishment of the coöperative
society, or union, gives an opening and a range of conditions in which
the social usefulness of woman makes itself quickly felt. I do not think
that I am laying too much stress on this matter, because the pleasures,
the interests and the duties of society, properly so called,--that is,
the state of living on friendly terms with our neighbours,--are always
more central and important in the life of a woman than of a man. The
man needs them, too, for without them he becomes a mere machine for
making money; but the woman, deprived of them, tends to become a mere
drudge. The new rural social economy (which implies a denser population
occupying smaller holdings) must therefore include a generous provision
for all those forms of social intercourse which specially appeal to
women. The Women's Sections of the Granges have done a great deal of
useful work in this direction; we need a more general and complete
application of the principles on which they act.
I have now stated the broad principles which must govern any effective
scheme for correcting the present harmful subordination of rural life to
a civilisation too exclusively urban. Before I bring forward my definite
proposal for a remedy calculated to meet the needs of the situation, I
must anticipate a line of criticism which may occur to the mind of any
social worker who does not happen to be very familiar with the
conditions of country life.
I can well imagine readers who have patiently followed my arguments
wishing to interrogate me in some such terms as these: "Assuming," they
may say, "that we accept all you tell us about the neglect of the rural
population, and agree as to the grave consequences which must follow if
it be continued, what on earth can we do? Of course the welfare of the
rural population is a matter of paramount importance to the city and to
the nation at large; but may we remind you that you said the evil and
the consequences can be removed and averted only by those immediately
concerned--the actual farmers--and that the remedy for the rural
backwardness was to be sought for in the rural mind? 'Canst thou
minister to a mind diseased?' Must not the patient 'minister' to
himself?"
Fair questions these, and altogether to the point. I answer at once that
the patient ought to minister to himself, but he won't. He has acquired
the habit of sending for the physician of the town, whose physic but
aggravates the disease. Dropping metaphor, the farmer does not think for
himself. In rural communities, there is as great a lack of collective
thought as of coöperative action. All progress is conditional on public
opinion, and this, even in the country, is a very much town-made thing.
So I am, then, in this difficulty. My subject is rural, my audience
urban. I have to commend to the statesmen and the philanthropists of the
town the somewhat incongruous proposal that they should take the
initiative in rural reform. Neither the thought nor the influence which
can set in motion what in agricultural communities is no less than an
economic revolution are to be found in the open country. To the townsmen
I now address my appeal and submit a plan.
FOOTNOTE:
[8] Message to the Fifty-eighth Congress (1903).
CHAPTER VII
THE TWO THINGS NEEDFUL
In my earlier chapters I traced to the Industrial Revolution in England
the origin of that subordination, in the English-speaking countries, of
rural to urban interests which finds its expression to-day in the
problem of rural life. I have shown that the continuance of the tendency
in America was natural if not inevitable, and have urged that, for
economic, social and political reasons, its further progress should now
be stayed. If my view as to the origin, present effects and probable
consequences of the evil be accepted, any serious proposals for a remedy
will be welcomed by all who realise that national well-being cannot
endure if urban prosperity is accompanied by rural decay. In this belief
I offer the scheme for a Country Life movement which has slowly matured
in my own mind as the result of the experience described in the
preceding pages.
The first aim of the movement should be to coördinate, and guide towards
a common end, the efforts of a large number of agencies--educational,
religious, social and philanthropic--which, in their several ways, are
already engaged upon some part of the work to be done. For such a
movement the United States offers advantages not to be found elsewhere
in the area for which we are concerned. For here public-spirited
individuals and associations of the kind required exist in larger
numbers than can be known to any one who has not watched what is going
on in this field of social service. If I had not already devoted too
much space to personal experiences, I could of my own knowledge testify
to the remarkable growth of organised effort in American rural
communities. Sometimes this is the outcome of a growing spirit of
neighbourliness, sometimes it emanates from young Universities and
Colleges emulating the extension work with which nearly every big city
is familiar. I have been much struck with the way in which, at
gatherings of school teachers, pedagogic detail and questions affecting
their status and emoluments have become less popular subjects for
discussion than schemes of social progress.[9] Similarly, the
agricultural Press is becoming less exclusively technical and
commercial, and more human. Even the syndicated stuff is getting less
townified. My correspondence, newspaper clippings sent to me, and many
other indications, point in the same direction. They leave the
impression upon my mind that there is a vast, efficient and enthusiastic
army of social workers upon the farm lands of the United States badly in
need of a Headquarters Staff.
If I am right in believing that, of the English-speaking countries, the
United States affords the best opportunity for such a consummation, most
assuredly the present time is peculiarly auspicious. If Mr. Roosevelt's
Country Life policy has not been received with any marked enthusiasm,
American public opinion has been thoroughly aroused upon his
Conservation policy. The latter cannot possibly come to fruition--nor
even go much further--until the Country Life problem is boldly faced. In
the Conference of Governors it was pointed out over and over again that
the farmer, now the chief waster, must become the chief conserver. As
such he will himself become a supporter of the policy, and will bring to
the aid of those advocates of Conservation whose chief concern is for
future generations, an interested public opinion which will go far to
outweigh the influence of those who profit by the exhaustion of natural
resources. To the country life reformer I would say that, as the one
idea has caught on while the other lags, he will, if he is wise, hitch
his Country Life waggon to the Conservation star.
With every advantage of time and place, the promotion of the movement
which is to counteract the townward tendency will have to reckon with
the psychological difficulty inherent in the conditions. They must
recognise the paradox of the situation already pointed out, the
necessity of interesting the town in the problems of the country. The
urban attitude of mind which caused the evil, and now makes it difficult
to interest public opinion in the remedy, is not new; it pervades the
literature of the Augustan age. I recall from my school days Virgil's
great handbook on Italian agriculture, written with a mastery of
technical detail unsurpassed by Kipling. But the farmers he had in mind
when he indulged in his memorable rhapsody upon the happiness of their
lot were out for pleasure rather than profit. While the suburban poet
sang to the merchant princes, Rome was paying a bonus upon imported
corn, and entering generally upon that fatal disregard for the interest
of the rural population which is one of the accepted causes of the
decline and fall.
How that Old World tragi-comedy comes back to me when I talk to New York
friends on the subject of these pages! I am not, so they tell me, up to
date in my information; there is a marked revulsion of feeling upon the
town _versus_ country question; the tide of the rural exodus has really
turned, as I might have discerned without going far afield. At many a
Long Island home I might see on Sundays, weather permitting, the
horny-handed son of week-day toil in Wall Street, rustically attired,
inspecting his Jersey cows and aristocratic fowls. These supply a select
circle in New York with butter and eggs, at a price which leaves nothing
to be desired--unless it be some information as to the cost of
production. Full justice is done to the new country life when the
Farmers' Club of New York fulfils its chief function, the annual dinner
at Delmonico's. Then agriculture is extolled in fine Virgilian style,
the Hudson villa and the Newport 'cottage' being permitted to divide the
honours of the rural revival with the Long Island home. But to my
bucolic intelligence, it would seem that against the 'back to the land'
movement of Saturday afternoon the captious critic might set the rural
exodus of Monday morning.
These reflections are introduced in no unfriendly spirit, and with
serious intent. To me this new rural life is associated with memories of
characteristically American hospitality; but my interest in it is more
than personal. It is giving to those who cultivate it, among whom are
the helpers most needed at the moment, a point of view which will enable
them to grasp the real problem of the open country, as it exists, for
example, in the great food-producing and cotton-growing tracts of the
West and South. Both in the countries where the townward tendency of
the industrial age was foreseen and prevented, and in those in which the
evil is being cured, the impulse and inspiration which will be required
to initiate and sustain our Country Life movement came mainly from
leaders who were not themselves agriculturists.[10] Proficiency in the
practice or even in the business of farming is not necessary. What is
needed is a comprehensive knowledge of public affairs, political
imagination, an understanding sympathy with and a philosophic insight
into the entire life of communities. Men who combine with the necessary
experience those gifts of heart and mind which go to make the higher
citizenship in the many, and the statesmanship in the few, will more
likely be found in the city than in the country. Yet they are, in the
conditions, the natural leaders of the Country Life movement, which must
now be defined.
The situation demands two things; on the one hand an association,
popular, propagandist, organising; on the other, an Institute,
scientific, philosophic, research-making. These two things are distinct
in character, but they are complementary to each other. One will require
popular enthusiasm and business organisation. To the service of the
other must be brought the patient spirit of scientific and philosophic
analysis and inquiry. These two bodies--the popular propagandist
association and the scientific research-making Institute--must,
therefore, be created; and, for a reason to be explained when we
consider the work of the Institute, they should be independent of each
other. This rough indication of the character of the work, which I will
describe more in detail presently, will suffice for the moment. I feel
that the work will be so intensely human in its interest that it will be
well to say at once how the two central agencies can be established, and
the movement made, not a writer's fancy, but a living and doing agency
of human progress.
A body, in many respects ideally fitted to give the necessary impulse
and direction to the work of organisation, is already in the field. The
leaders of the Conservation idea, recognising that their policy, in
common with other policies, will need an organised public opinion at its
back, have founded a National Conservation Association. Mr. Gifford
Pinchot has now been selected as its President. Before he was available,
the task of organising and setting to work the new institution was
unanimously entrusted to and accepted by President Eliot, of whose
qualifications all I will say is that we foreign students of social
problems vie with his own countrymen in our appreciation of his public
work and aims. These two appointments are sufficient proof of the
serious importance of the work, and bespeak public influence and support
for the Association. I have no doubt that this body would be fully
qualified to formulate and initiate the Country Life movement, and act
as the central agency for the active promotion of its objects. Its
members, who, I am sure, agree with Mr. Roosevelt in regarding the
movement as a necessary complement to the Conservation policy, might
even feel that for this very reason it was incumbent upon them to set
their organisation to this work.
There is, however, one consideration which will make Mr. Pinchot and his
associates hesitate to adopt this course. The doubt relates to the
distinction I have drawn between the Conservation policy and the Country
Life movement, the one seeking to promote legislative and administrative
action, and the other, while it may give birth to a policy, being
chiefly concerned with voluntary effort.[11] Although the National
Conservation Association is founded for the purpose of educating public
opinion upon the Conservation idea, it may decide to support the
Conservation policy of one party rather than that of another. It would
thus become too much involved in party controversy to act as a central
agency of a movement which must embrace men of all parties. Should this
view prevail, the difficulty can be easily surmounted by following the
Irish precedent, where we had a very similar and indeed far more
delicate situation to save from political trouble. An American
Agricultural Organisation Society could be founded for the purpose in
view, and as it is probable that leading advocates of the Conservation
policy would take a prominent part in the Country Life movement, the
interdependence of the two ideas would have practical recognition.
Apart from the possibility of political complications, there is one
strong reason to recommend this course. The movement will accomplish its
best and most permanent results as an advocate of self-reliance; it will
seek to make self-help effective through organisation; it will concern
itself much more for those things which the farmers can do for
themselves by coöperation than with those things which the Government
can do for them.[12] The selection, however, between the two alternative
courses is a question which the foreign critic cannot decide. The work
to which I now return will be the same, whatever agency is charged with
its execution.
The central body (which for brevity I will call the Association) will
have as its general aim the economic and social development of rural
communities. The work will be mainly that of active organisation. For
reasons explained in the earlier chapters, the organisation must be
coöperative in character, and will be concentrated upon the business
methods of the farmers. This will, it is believed, cure a radical defect
in their system--a defect which, as I have argued, is responsible for a
restricted production, and for a course of distribution injurious alike
to producer and consumer, besides exercising a depressing influence upon
the economic efficiency and social life of rural communities. It follows
that the first step towards a general reconstruction of country life,
which has the promise of giving to the country a social attraction
strong enough to stem the tide of the townward migration, is
agricultural coöperation.
Such being the general aim and the definite procedure, the first
practical question that arises will be, how to apply this
solvent--agricultural coöperation. It will not suffice to throw these
two long words at the hardy rustic; shorter and more emphatic words
might come back. Two equally necessary things must be done; the
principle must be made clear, and the practical details of this rural
equivalent of urban business combination must be explained in language
understanded of the people. It is not difficult to draft a paper scheme
for this purpose, but the fitting of the plan to local conditions is a
very expert business. Hence the central agency should have at its
disposal a corps of experts in coöperative organisation for agricultural
purposes. After a short visit to a likely district by a competent
exponent of the theory and practice, local volunteers would be found to
carry on the work. Experience shows that once a well-organised
coöperative association of farmers is permanently established, similar
associations spring up spontaneously under the magic influence of
proved success in known conditions. I should strongly recommend
concentration at first on a few selected districts, with the aim of
making standard models to which other communities could work. I need
hardly say that all this work would be done in coöperation with whatever
other agencies would lend their aid. The Country Life movement would be
extremely useful to the great educational foundations centred in New
York. I happen to know that the Trustees of the Rockefeller, Carnegie
and Russell Sage endowments are keenly desirous to promote such a
redirection of rural education as will bring it into a more helpful
relation with the working lives of the rural population. Then there are
such bodies as the Y. M. C. A., whose leaders, I am told, are alive to
the value of the open air life, and are anxious to extend their country
work in the rural districts. The great army of rural teachers, the
Farmers' Union, and other farmers' organisations I have already named
would gladly coöperate with schemes making for rural progress.
More important, I believe, than is generally realised, from an economic
and social point of view, are the rural churches. In many European
countries, where agricultural coöperation has played a great part in the
people's lives, the clergy have ardently supported the system on account
of its moral value. In Ireland, some of our very best volunteer
organisers are clergymen. Some leaders of the rural church in the United
States have told me that a feeling is growing that an increased economic
usefulness in the clergy would strengthen their position in the society
which they serve in a higher capacity. I know that the suggestion of
clerical intervention in secular affairs is open to misunderstanding.
But here is a body of educated citizens who would gladly take part in
any real social service; and here is a situation where there is work of
high moral and social value calling for volunteers. Nothing but good,
it seems to me, could result if such men, who have more opportunity and
inclination for general reading than the working farmer, would help in
explaining the intricacies of coöperative organisation and procedure
which must be understood and practised in order that the system may be
fruitful.
In addition to its active propagandist work, the central Association
could exercise a powerful and helpful influence in other ways. It
should, of course, keep both the agricultural and the general press
informed of its plans and progress. It should also keep in touch with
the agricultural work of all important educational bodies, and more
especially urge upon them the necessity of spreading the coöperative
idea. The Department of Agriculture would welcome and support the
movement; for I know many leading men in that service who thoroughly
understand and recognise the immense importance, especially to backward
rural communities, of the coöperative principle.
It is not necessary, at this stage, to go further into details. I feel
confident that the work of assisting all suitable agencies, such as
those I have named, and others which may be available, through
organisers of agricultural coöperation and by the spreading of
information, would soon enable the central body to render inestimable
service to the cause of rural progress. Such, at any rate, is the
outline of my first proposal for giving to my American fellow-workers
upon the rural problem the assistance which I feel they most need at the
present moment. I pass now to my second proposal.
I suggest that an institution--which, as I have said, will be
scientific, philosophic, research-making--should be founded. It would
be, in effect, a Bureau of research in rural social economy. Personally
I know that, in my own experience as an administrator and organiser, I
have been constantly brought face to face with problems where we could
turn to no guide--no patient band of investigators who had been
measuring, analysing, determining the data. Yet in some directions much
excellent work is being done. Every social worker knows how the
knowledge of what others are doing will help him. It is strange how
little the problems of the rural population have entered into the
studies of economists and sociologists. At leading Universities I have
sought in vain for light. At a recent anniversary in New York, which
brought together the foremost economists of the Old and New World, there
was an almost complete omission of the country side of things from a
programme which I am sure was generally held to be almost exhaustive.
The fact is, the subject must be treated as a new one, and it is
urgently necessary, if the work of the Country Life movement is to be
based on a solid foundation of fact, to make good the deficiency of
information which has resulted from the general lack of interest in the
subject under review. An Institute is wanted to survey the field, to
collect, classify and coördinate information and to supplement and carry
forward the work of research and inquiry. The rural social worker
requires as far as possible to carry exact statistical method into his
work so that he may no longer have to depend on general statements, but
may have at his command evidence, the validity of which can be trusted,
while its significance can be measured. I may mention a few typical
questions on which useful light would be shed by the Institute's
researches:--
1. The influence of coöperative methods (_a_) on the productive and
distributive efficiency of rural communities, and (_b_) on the
development of a social country life.
2. The systems of rural education, both general and technical, in
different countries, and the administrative and financial basis of each
system.
3. The relation between agricultural economy and the cost of food.
4. The changes (_a_) in the standard and cost of living, and (_b_) in
the economy, solvency and stability of rural communities.
5. The economic interdependence of the agricultural producer and the
urban consumer, and the extent and incidence of middle profits in the
distribution of agricultural produce.
6. The action taken by different Governments to assist the development
and secure the stability of the agricultural classes, and the
possibilities and the dangers of such action, with special reference to
the delimitation of the respective spheres of State aid and voluntary
effort.
7. How far agricultural and rural employment can relieve the problems of
city unemployment, and assist the work of social reclamation.
Some may think that I am assigning to two bodies work which could be as
well done by one. While all proposals for multiplying organisations in
the field of social service should be critically examined, there are
strong reasons in this case for the course I suggest. The two bodies,
while working to a common end, will differ essentially in their scope
and method. The propagandist agency will be executive and
administrative, and while its operations would have suggestive value to
the country social worker everywhere, it would be concerned directly
only with the United States. Furthermore, it need not necessarily have
any lengthened existence as a national propagandist agency. It would be
founded mainly to introduce that method into American agricultural
economy which I have tried to show lies at the root of rural progress.
As soon as the soundness of the general scheme had been demonstrated in
any State, the central body would promote an organisation to take over
the work within that State. The State organisation would, in its turn,
soon be able to devolve its propagandist work upon a federation of the
business associations which it had been the means of establishing. That
is the contemplated evolution of my first proposal--the early delegation
of the functions of the national to the State propagandist agency, which
would further devolve the work upon bodies of farmers organised
primarily for economic purposes, but with the ulterior aim of social
advancement.
The Country Life Institute would be on a wholly different footing. Its
researches, if only to subserve the Country Life movement in the United
States, would have to range over the civilised world, and to be
historical as well as contemporary. It should be regarded as a
contribution to the welfare of the English-speaking peoples, one aspect
of whose civilisation--if there be truth in what I have written--needs
to be reconsidered in the light which the Institute is designed to
afford. Its task will be of no ephemeral character. Its success will
not, as in the case of the active propagandist body, lessen the need for
its services, but will rather stimulate the demand for them.
These differences will have to be taken into account in considering the
important question of ways and means. Both bodies will, I hope, appeal
successfully to public-spirited philanthropists. The temporary body will
need only temporary support; perhaps provision for a five-years'
campaign would suffice. In the near future, local organisations would
naturally defray the cost of the services rendered to them by the
central body; but the Country Life Institute would need a permanent
endowment. The man fitted for its chief control will not be found idle,
but will have to be taken from other work. The scheme, as I have worked
it out, will involve prolonged economic and social inquiry over a wide
field. This would be conducted mostly by postgraduate students. From
those who did this outside work with credit would be recruited the
small staff which would be needed at the central office to get into the
most accessible form the facts and opinions which are needed for the
guidance of those who are doing practical work in the field of rural
regeneration. My estimate of the amount required to do the work well is
from forty to fifty thousand dollars a year, or say a capital sum of
from a million to a million and a quarter dollars. Whether the project
is worthy of such an expenditure, depends upon the question whether I
have made good my case.
Let me summarise this case. I have tried to show that modern
civilisation is one-sided to a dangerous degree--that it has
concentrated itself in the towns and left the country derelict. This
tendency is peculiar to the English-speaking communities, where the
great industrial movement has had as its consequence the rural problem I
have examined. If the townward tendency cannot be checked, it will
ultimately bring about the decay of the towns themselves, and of our
whole civilisation, for the towns draw their supply of population from
the country. Moreover, the waste of natural resources, and possibly the
alarming increase in the price of food, which have lately attracted so
much attention in America, are largely due to the fact that those who
cultivate the land do not intend to spend their lives upon it; and
without a rehabilitation of country life there can be no success for the
Conservation policy. Therefore, the Country Life movement deals with
what is probably the most important problem before the English-speaking
peoples at this time. Now the predominance of the towns which is
depressing the country is based partly on a fuller application of modern
physical science, partly on superior business organisation, partly on
facilities for occupation and amusement; and if the balance is to be
redressed, the country must be improved in all three ways. There must be
better farming, better business, and better living. These three are
equally necessary, but better business must come first. For farmers, the
way to better living is coöperation, and what coöperation means is the
chief thing the American farmer has to learn.
FOOTNOTES:
[9] In the capital of Virginia, to take one notable example, I have
witnessed a perfect ferment of social activity at one of the gatherings.
It brought together such an ideal combination of the best spirits in
both rural and urban life that I anticipate some striking developments
in rural civilization which will surely extend beyond the borders of the
State.
[10] I may mention Raiffeisen, Luzzati, Rocquigny, Bishop Grundtwig,
Henry W. Wolff, the Rev. T. A. Finlay, S.J., and most of the leaders in
agricultural organization in Great Britain and Ireland.
[11] See above, page 31.
[12] It may seem a small matter even for a footnote, but an unambiguous
terminology is so important to propagandist work that I must mention a
somewhat unfortunate use of the word 'coöperation' which prevails in
official and pedagogic circles. We hear of coöperative demonstration
work, coöperative education, coöperative lectures, and so forth.
Whenever a Government or State department, or an educational body works
with any other agency, and sometimes when they are only doing their own
work, they use the term, which is of course grammatically applicable
whenever two people work together--from matrimony down. If the word in
connection with agriculture could be retained for its technical sense,
so long established and well understood in Europe, the proposed movement
might be saved a good deal of confused thinking. Might not Government
and educational authorities substitute the word 'coördinated' so as to
preserve the distinction?
* * * * *
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