Rural labor

“ One civilization after another has begun with a predominantly rural economy that has become increasingly urban as it matured. Food gathering, pastoral life and small scale agriculture were rural. Trade, commerce, manufacturing and finance, concentrated populations, increased division of labor, specialization, inter-communication and interdependence produced the trade center, the commercial metropolis and the general purpose city.
Herdsmen and land workers, dependent on grass and rainfall, lived close to the subsistence margin and were at the mercy of forces they could not control. ”

“ A class of laborers was arising who depended entirely on the wages of industry for their subsistence. The cloth workers in rural areas were isolated and weak and often at the mercy of middle-men for employment and the amount of their wages. When rural laborers went to towns to seek employment in the new industries, they would work at first for any rate. ”

“ Economic activities in the main are associated with the farm home. The common occupation in the country is agriculture. Individuals are born into country homes, learn the common occupation, and of necessity in most cases make it their means of livelihood. Rural people are accustomed to hard labor for long hours. There are seasons when comparative inactivity renders life dull; there are individuals who enjoy pensions or the income of inherited or accumulated funds, and so are not compelled to resort to manual labor, and there are directors of agricultural industry ”

“ The Rural Development program included land reforms, land resettlement, the establishment of the Court of Agrarian Relations and the Land Tenure Administration, the organization of cooperatives, the extension of credit, the setting up of expanded rural health units, the construction of roads, irrigation systems and artesian wells, the extension of educational facilities, and the encouragement of enlightened labor unionism. ”

“ This is undoubtedly in part due to the impossibility of cramping by extreme division of labor. At the same time a partial application of its principles is needed to bring leisure for some general culture and larger acquaintance with the progress of the world. As the evils of factory life can be cured by attention, so the weaknesses of rural life can be removed by a careful study of its needs. True education in both quarters is essential as a means of mutual understanding and adjustment of interests. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is good reason to believe that the state of the agricultural labourers does not differ much, at least in kind, from that of the working people in towns. The remedies for the evils in both are of the same nature; and whatever results are arrived at with respect to the health of towns may generally be adapted, without much difficulty, to the wants of the rural population. ”

“ Such themes might not only be expounded with profit to those who work their fellowmen, but should also be impressed betimes upon those who work the soil for the good of their fellowmen.
The Paramount Problem. The paramount problem, therefore, is to make the conditions of rural life desirable—to convert farming into an enjoyable vocation; to make farm life and its labors a business to be envied and not despised. The fact is, planning for beauty and comfort in the city has progressed far and away beyond the country. ”

“ It need not surprise us that, under such circumstances, a race of men habituated to the incessant labour of a rude and unskilled agriculture, and habitually fond of social enjoyments, congregated together in rural communities, occupying portions of the wholly unappropriated soil, sufficient to provide each family with material comforts, far beyond their ancient means, or almost their conceptions ”

“ 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. ”

“ For example, if it were found that the average farmer in a rural township lived in a house valued at about $100, without barn, garden, cow, or pasture, with an insufficient supply of poultry, and unable to read and heavily involved in debt, it would be the height of unwisdom to commence the rural uplift by establishing a public library or even a school. ”

“ It was the rural way of life that shaped the county and his demands which needed to be met.
At first glance this farmer's life seems tempered by nature and largely self-contained. The daily routine was established by seasons and sunlight; fortunes were made or lost at the mercy of the wind and rain. A farm was not only the farmer's livelihood and workshop but his home. Thus, unlike the city worker whose occupation was entirely separate from home concerns, country life had a total integration. ”

“ Our first settler’s land, being the center of population, the store, the blacksmith’s forge, the wheelwright’s shop, are set up on it, or on its margin, where soon arises a village, which rapidly grows into a town, the center of exchanges for the people of the whole district. With no greater agricultural productiveness than it had at first, this land now begins to develop a productiveness of a higher kind. To labor expended in raising corn, or wheat, or potatoes, it will yield no more of those things than at first ”

“ We now have the labourer's minimum wage, which, I think, will want increasing; but we want good rural housing on an economically sound basis, an enlivened village life, and all that can be done to give the worker on the land a feeling that he can rise, the sense that he is not a mere herd, at the beck and call of what has been dubbed the "tyranny of the countryside." The land gives work which is varied, alive, and interesting beyond all town industries, save those, perhaps, of art and the highly-skilled crafts and professions. ”

“ But every year there are more town-bred children and fewer cousins in the country. To rear healthy children you want first a home; secondly, milk; thirdly, fresh air; and fourthly, exercise under the green trees and blue sky. All these things every country labourer's child possesses, or used to possess. For the shadow of the City life lies now upon the fields, and even in the remotest rural district the labourer who tends the cows is often denied the milk which his children need. The regular demand of the great towns forestalls the claims of the labouring hind. ”

“ As the land tax forms the mainstay of the imperial revenue, so the ryot or cultivator constitutes the unit of the social system. The organized village community contains many other members besides the cultivators; but they all exist for his benefit, and all alike are directly maintained from the produce of the village fields. Even in considerable towns, the traders and handicraftsmen almost always possess plots of land of their own, on which they raise sufficient grain to supply their families with food. The operations of rural life are familiar to every class. ”

“ The laborers employed on the farm are received into the farmer's family under conditions of social equality. The man who is this year a laborer may in a decade be a farmer. The dignifying of personality with land ownership has been such a general social experience in the country that every individual is thought of in the farmer period as a potential landowner.
The institutions of the rural community of the land-farmer type are the country store, the rural school, and the church. ”

“ 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 the solution of the farm problem we must deliberately invoke the influence of quickened means of communication, of co-operation among farmers, of various means of education, and possibly even of religious institutions, to stimulate and direct industrial activity. What needs present emphasis is the fact that there is a definite, real, social end to be held in view as the goal of rural endeavor. The highest possible social status for the farming class is that end. ”

“ For we cannot properly judge the significance and the relation of the different industrial activities of our farmers, and especially the value of the various social agencies for rural betterment, except by the standard of class status. It is here that we seem to find the only satisfactory philosophy of rural progress. ”

“ Speculation in land has been creating a class of non-resident agricultural capitalists and tenant cultivators, and has been transforming the type of agricultural population over large sections of country. Soil exhaustion is leading to abandonment of the poorest land and is compelling methods of scientific agriculture on the remainder. These conditions are producing their own social problems for the rural community. ”

“ Compared with his predecessor of a century ago, the farmer of to-day is better fed, better clothed and housed, and better able to secure adequate education and recreation. At the same time the relatively greater advances which urban communities have made in economic and social activities render the improvement of rural life highly desirable. ”

“ Then the true desirability of rural life will become manifest.
By co-operative working of the land, and the village plan of living, the work can be reduced to the minimum for both the men and the women, and the greatest enjoyment be attainable. ”

“ It follows, then, that if the farming business is to contribute to the redirection of country life, the woman has responsibilities as well as the man. As the strength of a chain is determined by its weakest link, so will the progress of [Pg 86] rural civilization be determined by the weakness of the farm as an economic unit, or by the weakness of the home as a domestic and social unit. ”

“ I have diligently perused all the different reports that have been published for the last five years upon the present state of the rural economy of the country, and they all concur in stating that there is a slight improvement in the value of land; that idle people are seldom found; and that there is sufficient work in which to employ the labouring population.— (p. 291.) ”

“ The most representative farming communities today are those of Scotch or Scotch-Irish people, whose instinctive tenacity, their "clannishness," has perpetuated longer than in other instances the rural economy and the country community.
In using the term land-farmer I am aware of its close resemblance to the term exploiter. The word itself points to exploitation of land. The land farmer has used the raw materials of the country. ”

“ The farmers are being welded into a more compact society. They are being nurtured to greater alertness of mind, to [Pg 22] greater keenness of observation, and the foundations are being laid for vastly enlarged social activities. The problem now is to extend these advantages to every rural community—in itself a task of huge proportions. ”

“ Differentiation of Occupation.—If community life is to continue there must be the producers who farm or mine or manufacture; in rural districts they are farmers, hired laborers, woodcutters, threshers, and herdsmen. ”

“ In the northern agricultural zone, where the soil is poor and primitive farming with free labour can hardly be made to pay, the proprietors had to let their land at a small rent, and those of them who could not find places in the rural administration migrated to the towns and sought employment in the public service or in the numerous commercial and industrial enterprises which were springing up at that time. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We have been considering the economic relations of the farm and the village as affecting community life, for they are at present the chief factor in creating community interest, as well as the leading cause of group friction. The rural community of to-day is primarily an economic unit, but in the future it seems probable that business will occupy a relatively less important place than the social activities of the community center. ”

“ We may rather be entitled to infer that there has been a considerable change in rural economy. For the cultivation of his demesne land the lord begins to rely less and less on the labour of serfs whom he feeds, more and more upon the labour of tenants who have plots of their own and who feed themselves. ”