Rural life

“ The fact remains that rural life is undergoing a rapid expansion. Materially, socially, and intellectually, the farmer is broadening. Old prejudices are fading. The plowman is no longer content to keep his eye forever on the furrow. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We have no longer those picturesque villages and cottages, half buried in their garden and orchard trees; no longer those home-crofts, with their old, tall hedges; no longer rows of beehives beneath their little thatched southern sheds; those rich fields and farm-houses, [222] surrounded with wealth of corn-ricks, and herds and flocks. You have no longer that quiet and Arcadian-looking population; hedgers and ditchers, ploughmen and substantial farmers, who seem to keep through life the “peaceful tenor of their way,” in old English fulness and content. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Having shown, in part, what a rural life has to offer to those who are trained to appreciate the beauties of nature and to obey her laws, and having shown that the average farmer always has an assured though modest income, and that the better farmers have an ample income for maintaining improved rural homes, the further discussion of how they may be made to minister to the natural longings for broader and more refined lives may be taken up. ”

“ Even among patients drawn from urban districts, there are few to whom the operations of rural life present no features of interest; while to those drawn from rural districts the horses, the oxen, the sheep, and the crops are unfailing sources of attraction. ”

“ It is a true country scene, to see all these rude sons of the soil collected together from their farm-yards and solitary fields, where, far from towns, they have gone whistling after the plough, sowing, or gathering in harvest; and the girls that have been scrubbing, churning, and milking, and occasionally helping in the hay or corn fields, here dressed out in their rustic finery, and shewing such robust forms and rosy faces as might astonish our over-delicate citizens. ”

“ Anything that makes farm life more worth living, anything that banishes rural isolation, anything that dignifies the business of farming and makes it more prosperous, anything that broadens the farmer's horizon, anything that gives him a greater grasp of the rural movement, anything that makes him a better citizen, a better business man, or a better man, means the passing of the mossback. ”

“ We wish to enumerate, and discuss in brief, some of the important points of vantage to be watched and carefully guarded, if farm life, which means rural life, is to be pleasant and profitable. If rural life is to retain its attractions and its people, it must be both of these. ”

“ Unfortunately, we find it difficult to share this enthusiasm for rural life. You see, we worked on a few farms when we were a wild lad just out of college—we were seeking inspiration in the soil. So we know just how a farm looks and smells in the spring when they are enriching the ground. ”

“ Even now, with all our improvements, the social factors in rural life are comparatively small. Here is one of our greatest problems: How to increase the fullness of social life in rural communities so as to make country life and living everywhere more attractive. ”

“ 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. ”

“ CHAPTER I THE STUDY OF RURAL LIFE
The American farm problem, particularly its sociological aspect, has not as yet had the attention that it deserves from students. Much less have the questions that concern rural social advancement found the popular mind; in truth, the general city public has not been deeply interested in the farmer. ”

“ Nevertheless the part which they played in the routine of rural life was an indispensable one, and the very diversity of the elements which they included made them a link between different ends of the social scale. ”

“ The new rural civilization is bringing a new prosperity into the great business of farming. It is bringing new and permanent satisfactions and comforts into country homes. It has greatly diminished the vexed problem of rural isolation, with its many new ways of communication. It has to a remarkable degree eliminated drudgery, through the use of wonderful machinery. It has popularized education and developed a new social consciousness and new efficiency in rural institutions, amounting often to a total redirection of the community life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Deep in the vale, with a choice Few retir'd,
Drinks the pure pleasures of the Rural Life. ”

“ The residence of people of fortune and refinement in the country, has diffused a degree of taste and elegance in rural economy that descends to the lowest class. The very laborer, with his thatched cottage and narrow slip of ground, attends to their embellishment. ”

“ It was accordant with the rural element in the character of us both, that a portion of the family subsistence should be drawn from our own cultivated soil. This we considered both congenial to health and that consciousness of independence which is one of the pleasantest parts of a life of agriculture. ”

“ This rural hemisphere of American economic and social life is surely worthy the thought [Pg 172] of the captain of industry, of the statesman, of the economist, of the educator, of the preacher. We may also, without danger of being put to confusion, assume that the tiller of the soil is in essential character very much like other people. Farmer nature is usually a fair specimen of human nature. Nevertheless the environment of the farmer is a peculiar one. Individually as well as socially he is comparatively isolated. ”

“ The field chosen covers rural life in the United States, and “particularly those conditions to be found in the great agricultural sections of the Central valley,” because in this area are to be found both the system of diversified agriculture and the intensive culture resulting from the increase of population. Six of the twenty-eight chapters are on the village, two on the rural church, two on rural health, two on farmers’ organizations, and one on the county fair. Questions, references, and topics for research have been added at the close of each chapter. ”

“ All students of social affairs agree that the movement of our people to towns and cities should be checked and the tide turned the other way. So important is the matter considered that a concerted national movement has recently been undertaken to study the conditions of rural life with a view to making it more attractive and so stopping the drain to the city.
Middle-aged farmers move to the town or city for two principal reasons: to educate their children and to escape from the monotony of rural [Pg 14] life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 small farm unit, usually from five to twenty-five acres, brings neighbors close together, abolishing loneliness and most of the social ills of farm life in the East. Beautiful irrigated villages are springing up which rival in comfort and privilege most places on earth, and combine both city and country privileges, where rural and urban meet. The spirit of cooperation is strong in irrigated communities, enforced by the common dependence upon the common enterprise and water supply. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One of the best evidences that the conditions of life and work on the farm need to be improved is the number of people who are leaving the [Pg 13] farm for the city. This movement has been especially rapid during the last thirty years of our history, and has continued until approximately one half our people now live in towns or cities. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The fundamental sources of stimuli are, of course, common to all forms of social grouping, but one difference between rural and urban life expresses itself in the greater difficulty of obtaining under rural conditions certain definite stimulations from the environment. ”

“ But it should be remembered that an increasing population gathers in rural towns thickly strewn throughout the depleted tract, and that the cheer of their growth and thrift is as much a part of the rural situation as the perplexity incident to a diminishing body of people. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So manifold, all pleasing in their kind,
All healthful, are the employs of rural life,
Reiterated as the wheel of time
Runs round; still ending and beginning still. ”

“ In view of this apparent change in the attitude of people toward the farm problem, it may not be idle to suggest some possible errors that should be avoided when we are thinking of rural society. The student will doubtless approach his problem fortified against misconceptions—he probably has thoughtfully established his view-point. But the average person in the city is likely to call up the image of his ancestral home of a generation ago, if he were born in the country, or, if not, to draw upon his observations made on a summer vacation or on casual business trips into the interior. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In our day these warm and fertile slopes give place to cultivated farms, from whence arise the rural sounds of flock and herd so grateful to the spirit, and that primitive blast of horn, winding itself into a thousand echoes, the signal for the ingathering of a household. ”