Rural society

“ NATURE OF THE RURLAL PROBLEM.—Contrary to popular belief, the rural problem arises not so much from the actual degeneration of rural society, as from the fact that many rural districts have failed to progress as rapidly as have urban communities. ”

“ By the end of the fifteenth century the different elements in rural society are spread, as it were, along a more extended scale, and there is a much wider gap between those who are most, and those who are least, successful. ”

“ Characteristics of Population.—Rural life feels in each region the reactions of nature. The narrow life of the hills, the open life of the plains, the peaceful life of the comfortable plantation with its lazy river and its delightful climate, each has its peculiar characteristics that are due in part at least to nature. But these features are complicated by social elements of population. The American rural community of to-day is composed of individuals who differ in age and fortune and kinship, and who vary in qualities and resemblances. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In these relatively low-priced lands, it ought not to be difficult for agricultural communities to establish permanently a rural society worthy of American ideas of progress. But to do this is to solve the problem we are discussing. We have some other aspects of that problem to consider before we can agree upon the essentials of a philosophic and comprehensive scheme for the rehabilitation of rural life—before we can lay down the lines of a movement to give effect to our plan. ”

“ Rural Occupations.—An important part of the study of the rural community is its social functions. These do not differ greatly in name from the functions of the family, but they have wider scope. The domestic functions are confined almost entirely to the homes. The village usually includes a boarding-house or a country inn for the homeless few, and here and there an almshouse shelters the few derelicts whom the public must support. ”

“ There was a wholesome respect for church and school, and as villages grew the settlers did not neglect the organization and housing of such institutions; store, mill, and smithy found their place as farther east, and later the lawyer and physician came, but the pioneer could do without them for a time. Inventiveness and individual initiative were characteristics of the rural people, made necessary by their remoteness and isolation. ”

“ And it is questionable if the petty society of such a village can compensate for the freedom and purity of rural family life now existing. It may even be asserted with some degree of positiveness that the small village, on the moral and intellectual sides, is distinctly inferior to the isolated farm home. ”

“ The various orders of society are therefore diffused over the whole surface of the kingdom, and the more retired neighborhoods afford specimens of the different ranks.
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. ”

“ Following these topics come the problems of rural socialization through such agencies as the school, the grange, and the church, and the application of the principles already learned in a study of social relations. ”

“ Its machinery is not working smoothly. Its environment is undergoing transformation. A hundred years ago the family was strictly rural; not more than three per cent of the people lived in large communities. Now nearly one-half are classified as urban by the United States census of 1910, and those who remain rural feel the influences of the town. There is far less economic independence on the farm than formerly, and in the towns and cities the home is little more than a place in which to sleep and eat for an increasing number of workers, both men and women. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It has been my privilege for one-third of a century to have known rather closely many of the men and women who have been instrumental in bringing the rural problem to its present stage of advancement. They have been public-minded, able, far-seeing men and women, and they have rendered an unmeasurable service. The rural movement has been brought to its present state without any demand for special privilege, without bolstering by factitious legislation, and to a remarkable degree without self-seeking. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ THE COUNTRYSIDE OUTSIDE this exuberant life of the cities, standing aloof from it, and with but little share in its prosperity, stands the countryside. Rural England, beyond the radius of certain favoured neighbourhoods, and apart from the specialised population which serves the necessities of the country house, is everywhere hastening to decay. No one stays there who can possibly find employment elsewhere. All the boys and girls with energy and enterprise forsake at the commencement of maturity the life of the fields for the life of the town. ”

“ They show an appreciation of a function of these agencies that has been neglected. The first item in rural social progress is that the country preacher, the rural teacher, the country doctor, the country editor, the agricultural editor, the agricultural college professor, and especially the farmer himself, shall see the social need of the farm community. But to assert, for instance, that the church shall be the social center of that community may lead to a partial and even to a fanatical view of things. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There are in every community concrete evidences of these forces. There is the rural church. There is the rural school. In many localities are to be found, also, buildings, for social and fraternal purposes, as grange halls, structures for holding fairs and picnics. These are tangible evidences that there are rural agencies at work in the community whose chief purpose is to increase the educational advantages, the social opportunities and the moral aspirations of the people. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The rural community has suffered in nearly every imaginable way from the rapid and rather crude development of our industrial civilization. The emigration of strong, ambitious men to the towns, the substitution of alien labor for the young and sturdy members of the large American families of other days, the declining birth rate and the disintegration of a hearty and cheerful neighborhood life, all have worked together to create a problem of the rural neighborhood, the country school and the country church unique in its difficulties, sometimes in its discouragements. ”

“ Out of the peculiar environment of the farmer grow his peculiar social needs, namely, better organization, fuller and richer education, quicker communication. To meet these supreme needs we find a growing and already powerful coterie of farmers' organizations, somewhat heterogeneous but rapidly developing plans of agricultural education, and a marvelous evolution of the means of transportation for body, voice, and missive. These needs and these agencies are selected as the conspicuous and vital element in the sociological problem that confronts the rural pastor. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”