Warren H. Wilson

“ EVOLUTION OF THE COMMUNITY
I THE PIONEER
The earliest settlers of the American wilderness had a struggle very different from our own, who live in the twentieth century. Their economic experience determined their character. They appear to us at this distance to have common characteristics, habits and reactions upon life; in which they differ from all who in easier times follow them. They have more in common with one another than they have in common with us. They differ less from one another than they differ from the modern countryman. The pioneer life produced the pioneer type. ”

“ Many churches in the country teach only the standards of right and wrong to which the farmers already conform. For a short time a new minister is popular with them because his new voice and his fresh elocution contain a subtle flattery. He denounces the sins to which they are not inclined and praises the virtues which they have learned to practise from their fathers. But after about six months of such preaching the farmer wearies of a preacher with no new message. Indeed the countryman is puzzled and perplexed by modern situations about which the minister has no knowledge. ”

“ The duty of the church in the process of exploitation is to build the community and to make itself the center of the growing scientific industry on which the country community in the future will be founded.
The religion of the exploiter moves in the giving of money. Consecration of his wealth is consecration of his world and of himself. The church that would save him must teach him to give. His sins are those of greed, his virtues are those of benevolence. His own type, not the least worthy among men, should be honored in his religion. ”

“ The farmer's moral standards are opposed to combination. He believes in personal righteousness and family morals. He does not believe in the moral control of the individual or the household by the economic group. It has been impossible, therefore, to combine the farmers in the East in any general way so as to control their markets by maintaining a high standard of product. The only control that is dreamed of by the leaders of the farmers is the control of the quantity of their products. ”

“ For this reason the ministers, teachers, and social workers in the country should be not discouraged, but hopeful, when confronted with rural landlords and capitalists. The business of the community leader is to enlist in the common task those persons whose privileges are superior and inspire them with a progressive spirit. Without their leadership the community cannot progress. Without their privileges, wealth and superior education, no progress is possible in the country. ”

“ The great movements which have influenced the farmer in the past twenty years have most of them been pushed to success by men unknown to any but farmers. What orator has come into national prominence out of the enterprises of agricultural life in the past two decades? The farmer does not need great eloquence, but he does need a thorough understanding of the moral and spiritual situations arising out of the exploiter process in which he is immersed. He needs moral teachers for the era of husbandry which is dawning in the country. ”

“ Sermons and funerals and weddings become to country people the windows by which religion flies out of the community. Especially among farmers, religion is a matter of every-day life. What religion the farmer has grows out of his yearly struggle with the soil and with the elements. His belief in God is a belief in Providence. His God is the creator of the sun and the seasons, the wind and the rain. The man who does not with him share these experiences cannot long interpret them for him in terms of scripture or of church. ”

“ Industry is based on it. Civilization is propelled by it. It is the desire to get a living and the quest of a living.
I believe that this economic motive is religious. It is the quest of what a man has not, but feels to be his. It engages his utmost efforts. It is labor for his wife and children and for all his group fellows, and therefore is involved in his holiest, most self-forgetting feelings. It takes him back to his parents and reminds him constantly of his ancestors. He forms his ideas of justice in his economic experiences. ”

“ It is this high ethical value of recreation which causes the working man to defend his amateur baseball team, and makes it so hard to repress Sunday games. The working man admits the high value of the Sabbath, but he sets a value also upon recreation, and without analysis of the philosophy either of the Sabbath or of the play-ground, stoutly maintains the goodness of recreation and its necessity for those who have labored all the week. "I work six days in the week, and I must have some time for recreation," is the working man's answer to all Sunday reformers. ”

“ The true consciousness of kind must be economic and social. There is no escape from this for religious people. They must go deep down to the unities with men who co-operate with them in getting a living. The Pittsburgh mill owner has no other unity by which he can find himself at one with his foreign born mill-hand, than the fact that he and the mill-hand are fellow workers in the mill.
What other bond of union is there between the farm landlord and the farm tenant? They have no common idealism. ”

“ I am convinced that in most farming territories the loyalty of the countryman to his group is the second reason for his refusal to co-operate. Again, this refusal of his is not subject to persuasion. He is obeying an economic condition which shapes his life and controls his action. Striking instances are furnished in many regions of the amazing disloyalty of farmers to one another, and to their own pledged word. These are to be explained by the type to which the farmer in these sections conforms. We must not expect the land farmer to obey the ethical standards of the husbandman. ”

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

“ Contrasting the farmer in his knowledge of financial obligation with the broker in the Stock Exchange, the latter type stands out in strong contrast as an admirable example of financial honesty to contracts, even if they be verbal only. The farmer on the other hand has no conception of the relations on which the financial system must be built. He is not an exploiter to begin with, but a farmer.
The transition from the older economy to the new is illustrated in the dairy industry which surrounds every great city. The dairy farmer has ideas of right and wrong which are purely individualistic. ”

“ This economic competition compacted the family group and formed the basis for the social economy of the country community. The land farmer had no ideal of community prosperity. His thought for generations has been to make his own farm prosperous, to raise some crop that others shall not raise, to have a harvest that other men have not and to find a market which other men have not discovered, by which he and his farm and his group may prosper. ”

“ The weakness of the common schools in American rural communities shows itself in their failure to educate the marginal people of the community, in their failure to train average men and women for life in that community, in their robbing the community of leadership by training those on whom their influence is strongest, so that they go out from the community never to return; and in their general disloyalty to the local community with its needs and its problems. ”

“ The craving of the young and of working-people for common places of recreation is a normal craving due to the development of conscience as well as to weariness of body. The exactions of modern labor create a craving for free and voluntary movement. Those who are hired to work, and those who if they are employers are bound to the routine of the desk or of the bench, seek to breathe deeply the air of happy and self-expressive action. The result is that play, especially team work, is highly moral. ”

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

“ The writer believes that the path of co-operation is the efficient and slow one of economic and social organization rather than the delusive short-cut of religious union. People cannot be united in religion until they are united in their social economy. The business of the church is to organize co-operative enterprises, economic, social and educational, and to school the people in the joy, to educate them in the advantages, of life together. Co-operation must become a gospel. Union requires to be a religious doctrine. ”

“ Economic matters are not those of mere money. The word has a greater meaning than has the word finance. It connotes poverty as truly as wealth, and is greater than both. The economic motive animates men in the quest of those vital satisfactions which the individual craves, and the social group requires. Professor John Bates Clark has somewhere described this motive as the desire to preserve the present status, with slight improvement, for oneself and one's children after him; the desire to live on the same economic standard in one's own generation ”

“ There may be other centers of the community where other functions are assembled, but the church should lift up her eyes to the horizon in which she lives and comprehend all the people in her service and affection. This does not mean that they shall all be members of that church. The community spirit is itself growing. ”

“ Moreover, nobody outside a country community knows how far a family can go in the path to poverty and still live. No one knows how eccentric and peculiar, how reserved and whimsical the life of a household may be, in the country community, unless he has lived as neighbor and friend to such a household. The preacher cannot know this. Not all the experience of the world is written even in the Bible. The spirit shall "teach us things to come." It is the pastor who learns these things by his daily observation of the lives of men. ”

“ I believe that the quest of education and the love of music are religious, just as much as the desire for daily bread. One might enumerate the whole series of economic wants, to satisfy which is to live, but religion is the total of the reflections, and the complex of customs which result from the lifelong quest for a living among common folk. ”

“ At the time of the Protestant Reformation the value of books in the hands of the common people was infinite. For several generations along with the extension of universal education this infinite value of books continued for the people on the margin of the educated world. But nowadays everybody in American progressive communities can read and write: and in a universally educated population we arrive at the final utility of books in human use. Great masses of poor people and also many people of means use books within narrow limits only. ”