Sir Horace Curzon Plunkett

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ We should then [Pg 86] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 125] entertainments of the modern city. ”

“ 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 [Pg 94] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To-day agriculture has to compete in the [Pg 137] 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 Bœotian with the mental superiority of the Athenian. ”

“ 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 [Pg 135] 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. ”

“ 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. ”