Rural areas

“ If we go up and down France we shall find the rural population decidedly dense. [77] One little village usually follows another closely and every collection of huts swarms with human bipeds. There are, indeed, vast forests and marshes which might with better management be put under the plow, but the extent of arable land is great. Heaven surely loves the peasants, it has made so many of them. ”

“ The nominally rural population is becoming more and more urban in character, and composed not solely of rustics,—who live in and by the soil and are altogether more natural in their habits,—but largely of town-dwellers who only sleep in country dormitories. ”

“ To-day, with its cultivated fields and with just enough woodland left to vary the monotony that characterises the treeless plains, as we looked across the country, really park like in appearance, we could almost fancy that we were passing through some of the rural districts of Old England. ”

“ Those accustomed to large cities make a pretty broad classification of "country." A town of five thousand people is to them "country." But it is not country. The problem of the village and the small town is not the rural [Pg 10] problem, take it the nation over. The smaller the town, the more nearly it approaches to rural conditions, but its essential problem is not that of the farm. ”

“ The ruder nature of woods and villages, of sturdy ploughmen and the healthy though soiled and ragged children in rural neighbourhoods, affords a by no means unpleasing contrast and introduction to the trim trees and smoothly undulating lawns, and curved walks, and gay parterres, and fine ladies and well dressed and graceful children on some old ancestral estate. We look for rusticity in the village, and for elegance in the park. ”

“ The fields which border this quiet bit of road are among the oldest in our neighborhood, belonging to one of the first farms cleared near the village; they are in fine order, and to look at them, one might readily believe these lands had been under cultivation for ages. But such is already very much the character of the whole valley; a stranger moving along the highway looks in vain for any striking signs of a new country; as he passes from farm to farm in unbroken succession, the aspect of the whole region is smiling and fruitful. ”

“ Physical Types.—To understand the continually changing rural life of the present, it is necessary to examine into the physical characteristics of the country districts, the elements of the population, the functions of the rural community, and its social institutions.
The physical characteristics have a large part in determining occupations and in fashioning social life. A natural harbor, especially if it is at the mouth of a river, seems destined by nature for a centre of commerce, as the falls of a swift-flowing stream indicate the location of a manufacturing plant. ”

“ On some parts of my journey, as we receded from the coast, the drill husbandry, the garden-like culture, and the open country entirely under tillage, resembled portions of England, especially in those districts where the rural population is confined to villages very distant from each other, and concealed from the road. The French peasants are very early risers ”

“ AGRICULTURE IN OPEN FIELD PARISHES A HUNDRED YEARS AGO.
A glance at the accompanying Enclosure Map of England will indicate the importance of common fields in the social life of rural England at certain dates. It was prepared in the following manner: On the Ordnance County diagrams each parish which had an Enclosure Act by which common field arable was enclosed was coloured ”

“ Rural France is a picture. Seen from a car-window it is a succession of fields and villages, at this time of year a continuous combination of greens and white. French farms are small. I suppose twenty or thirty acres is a big place, and many are much less than that. But the land is fertilized, drained, irrigated and worked to the limit. The people live in villages and not much on their own farms. Each village has a common pasture. During the day the farmers go out onto their little places and in the evening they return to town to spend the hours with their neighbors and friends. ”

“ It ought to be evident what a tremendous advantage it is to farmers in a district to have such organizations, what a lever they can pull and control. I have tried to indicate the difference between a rural population and a rural community, between a people loosely knit together by the vague ties of a common latitude and longitude, and people who are closely knit together in an association and who form a true social organism, a true rural community, where the general will can find expression and society is malleable to the general will. ”

“ It is to the heart of one of these models of rural beauty that we now invite the attention of the reader. The immediate location of the village was in a sort of valley, close within the verge of an immense forest, and surrounded by an intervening underwood, which Nature had fashioned as a sort of defensive barrier. ”

“ The time has now come when it is believed that rural population and agricultural tendencies are sufficiently well known to enable those interested in rural life development to determine what are the most suitable centers for community development. ”

“ Rural Scenery in Southern England.
Another marked difference between this country and most parts of ours is the extraordinary finish of the landscape, due to scantiness of forests, absence of undergrowth, thoroughness of tillage, and especially the luxuriance and smoothness of the turf. The quiet beauty of rural England has a perpetual charm. ”

“ The lover of country life who looks upon rural objects in the true spirit, and, for the first time surveys the cultivated portions of the United States, will be struck with the incongruous appearance and style of our farm houses and their contiguous buildings ”

“ The new rural civilization, however, is by no means a mere matter of methods. The farmer himself has been growing more intelligent. County agricultural societies, first organized in 1810, set the farmers to thinking. Many farm journals have contributed widely to the farmers’ education. But in the past twenty years many agencies have united in what has been a great rural uplift. ”

“ Still more peculiar is the rural scenery of England, in the various and beautiful landscape it affords—in the undulating surface—the greenness of the enclosures—the hamlets and country churches—and the farm houses and cottages dispersed over the face of the country, instead of being congregated into villages, as in France and Italy. ”

“ We need above all things to produce such a rural condition as will satisfy the farmer to live permanently in the country rather than to move to town when the farm has given him a competence.
I am not to be understood as saying that farmers ought never to live in town. There will always be shifting both ways between town and country. In some cases, small-area farming develops around a village; or a village grows up because the farms are small and are intensively handled. In irrigation regions, the whole community may be practically a hamlet or village. ”

“ In the rural districts, cattle rearing, both in Westmeath and Roscommon, and the pursuit of general agriculture is principally followed, and the inhabitants of these rural districts are generally comfortable and fairly well-to-do. ”

“ The foliage and the flowers are abundant and beautiful, and in the rural districts the people are picturesque in [388] manners, customs and dress. Their habits and social life have not been affected by what we call the advances of modern civilization. ”

“ In the rural districts and in small villages the neighboring wells and springs may be utilized, but in large communities, especially those having numerous industries, a public supply must be provided. ”

“ This place, which is perhaps eight or nine miles by road, with no facilities of communication, has from time immemorial had a reputation for its fair. There, accordingly, the scattered rural population wends, making no account of distance and very little of weather: it is a country maxim that it always rains on fair day, and mostly thunders. ”

“ In fact, the great rural question for the twentieth century to determine, is whether there were not beneath the inconvenient and uneconomical methods of the common field system, a vital principle essential to true rural prosperity, which has to be re-discovered and re-established in forms suitable to the present environment. ”

“ The rural element, consisting of people who live in villages or solitary farmhouses, will remain comparatively backward, because little affected by the social forces which work swiftly and potently upon close-packed industrial communities, and it may find itself very different in tone, temper, and tendencies from its urban fellow-citizens. ”

“ The rural aspect which has been given to our villages and smaller country towns, and which is often preserved with some pains—the space between the buildings, the trees lining the streets and shading every wall, with the 31little door-yard of flowers—all these are evidences of healthful instincts. ”

“ But the rural population were in a very different case; those who worked on the land were indeed poor, fared coarsely, dressed meanly and wore no shoes, but they were sober and industrious and lived in decent homes, and their wives and children were properly fed and clothed ”

“ In these upper reaches there is little of this, but the immediate slopes of the valley wear, nevertheless, not only an air of physical luxuriance but of rural opulence, so significant not merely of the presence of great landlords but of a popular neighbourhood, where in lodges and granges and other attractive snuggeries prosperous aliens, with fishing proclivities in most cases, spend a part at least of their days. ”

“ There are weather-beaten farm-houses, rolling country, thickets of trees, little hills green and grey in the distance, decorous small fields, orchards, and, I swear, a hedge or two. Most of the towns we went through are a little too vivacious or too pert to be European. But there seemed to be real villages occasionally, and the land had a quiet air of occupation. Men have lived contentedly on this land and died where they were born, and so given it a certain sanctity. ”

“ From the shore a low promontory pushes itself into the water, and on it stands a white village, with a parish church rising in the midst of it, having enclosures, cornfields, and meadows, green as an emerald, which, with trees, and hedges, and cattle, fill up the whole space from the edge of the water, and just opposite to you is a large farmhouse at the bottom of a steep, smooth lawn, embosomed in old woods, which climb half way up the mountain sides, and discover above a broken line of crags that crown the scene. ”

“ Beautiful and thriving villages are found interspersed along the margins of the small lakes, or situated at those points of the streams which are favourable to manufacturing; and neat and comfortable farms, with every indication of wealth about them, are scattered profusely through the vales, and even to the mountain tops. Roads diverge in every direction, from the even and graceful bottoms of the valleys, to the most rugged and intricate passes of the hills. ”

“ It is surrounded by fine woods and pleasure-grounds, laid out in the formal style, which is still the characteristic of French landscape-gardening. Nothing can be more beautiful than the surrounding scenery, the winding river with its vineyards hanging in terraces from the opposite heights, the village reposing beneath sun-lit hills, while corn-fields, pasture-land, and cattle grazing, convey the most pleasing ideas of the comfort of those who dwell upon this luxuriant soil. ”

“ Fields with inclosures, and a cabin or two, are to be met with; a solitary tree, generally an ash, will be seen; some rude instrument of husbandry, or an ass-cart, will show that we are emerging from the region of complete destitution and approaching a land of at least struggling civilisation. At last, and by a transition that is not always easy to mark, the scene glides into those rich pasture-lands and well-tilled farms that form the wealth of the midland counties. Gentlemen’s seats and waving plantations succeed, and we are in a country of comfort and abundance. ”

“ The district north of the Height of Land, long supposed to be a barren wilderness, has proved in part suitable for agriculture, and is steadily increasing in population. Mixed farming and the raising of live stock is becoming more and more the rule, so that the failure of any one crop becomes of less vital importance. ”

“ The coöperation of transportation and agriculture, in the East especially, is not wholly new, but it is highly significant.
"Nothing could be more encouraging than the service which the railroads are beginning to render in the better distribution of population over the land, by putting a premium on good farming and encouraging the young to find careers for themselves in rural industries."
12. Local institutions of all kinds must have a powerful effect in evolving a good community sense. This is true in a superlative degree of the school, the church, the fair, and the rural library. ”

“ The land is so rich that it yields three and four crops a year, and the plains north and west of the city are dotted with villages. To one accustomed to the great plantations and stock-farms of the West, it is strange to see these tiny fields and vineyards; yet wealth in grain and fruit pours from them as from a horn of plenty. The villagers are agriculturists, nothing else. ”

“ We are aware that agriculture does not hold the same relative rank among our industries that it did in former years, and that our city population has increased far more rapidly than has our rural population. We do not ignore the fact that urban industries are developing more rapidly than is agriculture, nor deny the seriousness of the actual depletion of rural population, and even of community decadence, in some portions of the Union. ”