Country life

“ The real, vital possibilities of country life are without number. The surface attractions of the city are most alluring. A focusing of the public mind upon the problem, its pros and cons, will, it is to be hoped, turn the scales without delay in favor of country life and its substantial benefits. ”

“ Fortunately there are many such, and each year their number is increasing.
Rural life has as many sides as there are human interests. This book looks out upon country-life conditions from a viewpoint comparatively neglected. ”

“ The local history of the country community is a fruitful source of recreation. Farmers look to the past, and even the new people in the country are keen to hear the story of the old settlers and of the early pioneers. Nothing is of greater value in developing and refreshing country life than to enrich it by celebrating its early history. ”

“ The country-life movement does not imply that all young persons who hereafter shall remain in the country are to be actual farmers. The practice of customary professions and occupations will take on more importance in country districts. ”

“ In many agricultural colleges and state universities, we find an increasing proportion of students coming from the cities for training in the science of agriculture [Pg 35] and the arts of rural life. This is a very significant and encouraging fact. It shows us that the tide has begun to turn. Rural life is coming to its own, for country life is beginning to be appreciated again after several decades of disfavor and neglect. ”

“ But I have not set out to present an all-round picture of the conditions of country life in any of the fictional districts I have chosen as the scene of my novels. The great majority of the inhabitants of any countryside are the people who work on the land and live by it, and these I have left out almost entirely ”

“ The English, in fact, are strongly gifted with the rural feeling. They possess a quick sensibility to the beauties of nature, and a keen relish for the pleasures and employments of the country. This passion seems inherent in them. Even the inhabitants of cities, born and brought up among brick walls and bustling streets, enter with facility into rural habits, and evince a tact for rural occupation. ”

“ The farmer is reminded that he has a distinct natural responsibility toward the farm laborer, in providing him with good living facilities and in helping him to be a man among men; and all the rural people are reminded of the obligation to protect and develop the natural scenery and attractiveness of the open country. ”

“ I would only allow you to prefer them; but there is a net of kind, expansive benevolence which it would seem as if Nature loved to throw more widely in scenes of rural life than in any other. "Man made cities, God formed the country." ”

“ The situation of the countryman is in this sense favorable; he is surrounded by great natural teachers, by noble monitors, in the works of the Deity; many are the salutary lessons to be learned on the mountain-tops, within the old groves beside the flowing stream. The everlasting hills—the ancient woods—these are his monuments—these tell him of the past, and not a seed drops from his hand but prophesies of the future. The influences which surround the countryman are essentially ennobling, elevating, civilizing, in fact. ”

“ A broad-minded leader of the religious life of college men has recently expressed his opinion that the [Pg 19] rural problem is more pressing just now than any other North American problem. He is a city man and is giving his attention impartially to the needs of all sections. ”

“ This is so radically different from the life of the past, we may justly call it a new rural civilization. It is distinctly a rural civilization, not merely because of its characteristics, but because it is a triumph of rural leadership and the product of rural evolution, by fortunate selection and survival in the country of efficient [Pg 64] manhood and womanhood best adapted to cope with their environment. ”

“ To be sure there is much the country may well learn from the city, the finer phases of real culture, the cultivation of social graces in place of rustic bashfulness and boorish manners, and the saving element of industrial cooperation ”

“ The manner of the country makes the usage of life there, and the land will not be lived in except in its own fashion. ”

“ In some way more variety should be brought into the lives of country people. Farm life should become one of the most attractive and interesting spheres of activity. Its freedom, its independence, its close [Pg 108] contact with nature, should give to it for multitudes a compelling charm. ”

“ There are also subjects that have a political bearing, such as local government in the country, and primary reform in rural communities, which perhaps ought not to be omitted. So, too, various phases of home life and of art might be touched upon. ”

“ In that interval man passed from an animallike obedience to the climate and the weather and his own instincts, from living in small family parties of a score or so over restricted areas of indulgent country, to permanent settlements, to the life of tribal and national communities and the beginnings of cities. ”

“ Making a Countryman into a Citizen.—It is important to enter into the spirit of the young people who prefer the streets and blocks of the town to the winding country roads, and are willing to sacrifice what there is of beauty and leisure in rural life for the ugliness, sordidness, and continuous drive of the city ”

“ Nor does he paint that chimerical state of society, termed the golden age, in which the characteristic traits of rural life are erased, but attempts to please by a genuine imitation of Nature, and by descriptions of the manners, the rustic occupations, or rural enjoyments of the inhabitants of the country where the scene of the pastoral is laid. ”

“ By bringing within the reach of the country people educational advantages suited to their needs, rural life becomes more attractive, country homes are multiplied, and the valuable qualities which these homes develop become the possession of a correspondingly larger number of the citizenship of the state. ”

“ In the country one sees only Nature's fair works, and one's soul is not saddened by the cruel struggle for mere existence that goes on in the crowded city. ”

“ So, ask the traveled inhabitant of any nation, In what country on earth would you rather live?—Certainly, in my own, where are all my friends, my relations, and the earliest and sweetest affections and recollections of my life. Which would be your second choice? ”

“ In discussing and enacting its provisions, let it be borne in mind, that the surface of the earth, like the atmosphere in which we breathe, and the light in which we see, is the natural and common patrimony of man. Let it be considered, that by nature we are tillers of the soil, and that all the artifices of society, and the employments of towns, are good and desirable in the degree only in which they promote the comforts of the country. ”

“ I have seen my people, the habitants, toiling from morning to night, summer and winter, from year to year, like their fathers for many generations, and for what reward? Food and clothes and shelter, the bare necessaries of life, and all of the poorest kind. It is a living, perhaps, but it is not to live; and I say--it is my message, if you like--that for all their toil there should be more reward. The young men, my old playmates, say the same, and go away, to the States, to the North-West, and leave this land, this good land, to the old people and those without ambition, without enterprise. ”

“ Two thousand miles westward from the rock where their fathers landed, may now be found the sons of the Pilgrims, cultivating smiling fields, rearing towns and villages, and cherishing, we trust, the patrimonial blessings of wise institutions, of liberty, and religion. The world has seen nothing like this. Regions large enough to be empires, and which, half a century ago, were known only as remote and unexplored wildernesses, are now teeming with population, and prosperous in all the great concerns of life; in good governments, the means of subsistence, and social happiness. ”

“ But every mile was rich in the signs and suggestion of an old and most human civilisation—farms, villages, towns, the carefully tended woods, the fine roads running their straight unimpeded course over hill and dale, bearing witness to a State sense, of which we possess too little in this country. ”

“ I have considered the great rural establishments of the nobility, and the lesser establishments of the gentry, as so many reservoirs of wealth and intelligence distributed about the kingdom, apart from the towns, to irrigate, freshen, and fertilize the surrounding country. ”

“ Beautiful green slopes, rich woods, gay looking towns, a picturesque country-house here and there, and a group of cottages crowning a bold cliff or nested at its foot, were seen all along the line of coast, and the very first sight of that country filled the mind with ideas of home comfort, and sweet domestic peace, and the rich prosperity of an industrious, law-fearing people, and an equable, but firm government, more strongly than the aspect of any other land I had ever seen. ”

“ Just as our beautiful land is so well ordered: the fields so well laid out, the trees so well disciplined, the little, red-topped villages so clean and so prosperous, so in harmony. Just so in our family life: it is so well ordered. ”

“ Whoever travels hastily through this part of the country must have been agreeably surprised with the luxuriant vegetation of the fields, with the orchards and vineyards which cover the hillside's, with the size of the villages, with the breadth of their streets, with the beauty of their official buildings, with the cleanliness and stateliness of their houses, with the good clothing in which the people appear at their festivities, and with the universal proofs of a prosperity which has been caused by industry and skill, and which has survived all the political changes of the times. ”

“ With that we both laughed, but when I reached the top of the hill, and looked back, I saw him still standing there bare-footed in the road looking after me. I waved my hand and he waved his: and I saw him no more.
No country, after all, produces any better crop than its inhabitants. And as I travelled onward I liked to think of these brave, temperate, industrious, God-friendly American people. I have no fear of the country while so many of them are still to be found upon the farms and in the towns of this land. ”

“ Our road took us through a broad and beautiful valley, filled with little towns—nobody thinks of living alone in this country, but all the people crowd into towns for self-protection—and covered with ripe corn and green wheat-fields. ”

“ Possessed of an easy competence, and a manageable field of labour, surrounded by the simplicities of rural manners, and the picturesque features of rural scenery,—lord of his sphere of duty, and master of his time,—his life can be, and often is, one of the most useful and happy, honourable in its toils, and graceful in its relaxations, to be found on earth. ”

“ The traveller, who may have occasion to cross their thresholds, will seldom witness the semblance of poverty, or the shadow of discontent. Since my arrival in the country, I have not beheld a single trace of anxiety or care in the countenances of the people. In the city, the town, the village, and the open country, every eye sparkles with contentment, and every tongue speaks the language of independence. ”

“ Where do the people live who care for all this splendid farming country? We see them working in the fields, these superb wheat-fields, or harvesting the oats, but you can drive your car for mile after mile and never see a human habitation. ”

“ Indeed, the whole country reminds me perpetually of one that has been carefully cultivated by a civilized people, who had been suddenly removed from the earth, with all the works of their hands, and the land given again into nature's keeping. ”

“ Did you ever see such a ghastly travesty of nature, the whole country-side swept clean of every green and living thing, beautiful woods and charming villages blown to the four winds of heaven, and this might have been our own beautiful sunny downs, our own charming villages. The British public should go down on its knees every day of the week and thank God for their deliverance. ”

“ Mountains, plains, squatters’ shanties, replicas of foreign palaces, cowboys, Indians, ranchers, New Yorkers, Londoners. The free open-air life and altitude of the plains, the sheltered luxurious manners and customs of the idle rich! Across the warp of Western characteristics is woven the woof of a cosmopolitan society. ”

“ But as the sum of the miles and hours grew, they were glad to see the road less worn with travel, and the traces of men passing from sight. The ploughed and planted country, that quilt of many-colored harvests which they had watched yesterday, lay in another world from this where they rode now. ”

“ A farmer up-country, who says he has been into the "bush" after cattle, means that he has been into the forest, in contradistinction to his own cleared land, the settlement, or the open country.
Our road lies at first through the fern lands beyond Riverhead, and we soon lose sight of the settlement. We appear to be travelling at random across the moor, for not a trace of what our English eyes have been taught to regard as a road can we discern. The country is all a rugged wilderness of range and gully: "gently undulating," you say, if you want to convey a favourable impression ”

“ I always return from my neighbourly excursions extremely happy, because there I see good living almost under every roof, and prosperous endeavours almost in every field. But you may say, why don't you describe some of the more ancient, opulent settlements of our country, where even the eye of an European has something to admire? It is true, our American fields are in general pleasing to behold, adorned and intermixed as they are with so many substantial houses, flourishing orchards, and copses of woodlands; the pride of our farms, the source of every good we possess. ”