Village community

“ The village community, or commune, or township, found in tribes of the most varied race and time, has so modified itself as to get adapted in one place or another to all the different conditions of human existence. This union of men to work for a common object has transformed them from wild animals into tame ones. Century by century the educating process of the social life has been working at human nature ”

“ A real flash of light was struck when German students perceived the connexion between the widely prevalent common or open field system of husbandry, and the village community which for centuries had used it as a shell. ”

“ There are amusements of all kinds, feasts at the temple, and sports outside the village, wherein the young men have an opportunity of exhibiting their strength and prowess. The community, perfect in itself, continues the daily tasks of sowing, planting, and reaping, without paying any attention to the political situations that agitate cities. The villagers do not see a newspaper from one year's end to another. ”

“ These speak their own thoughts, throw startling sidelights on their neighbours; and from the whole, a picture of a village community takes definite shape. The author has snapped his village at one instant on one day, so that there is no 'action.' The village is frozen motionless whilst the reader inspects each inhabitant. There is no sentimentalism, no 'kailyard' gloss; the villagers expressing themselves with immense force from the Earl to the mole-catcher. ”

“ But the village community is also by no means averse to modern agricultural improvements, when it can stand the expense, and when knowledge, hitherto kept for the rich only, finds its way into the peasant's house. ”

“ With the conveniences of a civilized community, a village may have pure and healthful air, opportunity for parents and children to amuse themselves out of doors, cheap fare, moderate rent, milk which knows not the wiles of the city dealer, and a moral atmosphere in which a family may grow up away from the temptations and the evil associations which tend to corrupt the young in the great cities. ”

“ Though, at first sight, the village appeared an isolated, sleepy place, yet a plunge into its activities and a catching of its spirit meant the discovery of a number of enterprising, intellectual, and social efforts, of which any large community would have been proud. ”

“ Wherever there was a great deal of open farm land along a river several of these village farm centers grew up in close proximity. The villages in such a group often combine for convenience, in local government, trading, and support of churches and schools. The majority of the villagers belong to a few large family groups which have grown in that community for generations and give it an enviable permanence and stability. ”

“ However, the village-community institutions so well respond to the needs and conceptions of the tillers of the soil that, in spite of all, Europe is up to this date covered with living survivals of the village communities, and European country life is permeated with customs and habits dating from the community period. ”

“ We have already indicated the processes whereby the economic situation, religious life, public education, the need of local government, and the desire for recreational facilities, are inevitably drawing the people of the countryside together at the natural centers into communities. The locality group is again recognized as essential for the best organization of rural life. But the new rural community is a voluntary group, it is not determined by common control of the land or by common subjection to a feudal lord as was the village community of the old world ”

“ When I speak of holders of villages, I mean the holders of lands that belong to villages. The whole face of India is parcelled out into estates of villages. [3] The village communities are composed of those who hold and cultivate the land, the established village servants, priest, blacksmith, carpenter, accountant, washerman, basket-maker (whose wife is ex officio the midwife of the little village community) , potter, watchman, barber, shoemaker, &c., &c. ”

“ The social problems involved in home life in the rural village and on the farm are of two kinds,—developmental and protective. The social unit in the city is the individual. Urban conditions have rapidly disintegrated the family as a social unit. ”

“ The Village Community is a hope of the future as well as a memory of the past, and therefore those who are interested in the movement for reviving British Agriculture on democratic lines and for improving the social and economic conditions of our villages have reason to welcome Dr. Slater’s attempt to describe existing and recent survivals of the English Village Community, and to ascertain the circumstances, causes, and consequences of its gradual extinction. ”

“ Here, then, is the value of these cases of what we may term arrested development: they warn us against the rashness of assuming that a modern or even a mediæval village has been a village from the first. The village community may be so far from representing the original settlement as to have been, on the contrary, developed from what was at first but a farmstead. The whole argument of such scholars as Professor Earle here and Dr. ”

“ The joke is palpable to the most untechnical reader; but to a student of the village community every line of the story reflects village life. The village servant, the gemeindediener represents the common-tender, field-grieve, or by whatever name the officer was called who had charge of the cultivated meadows. The villagers' lots are scattered all over the village land, so that the servant in scaring the birds would trample down everybody's crops ”

“ To an increasing degree the interests of the open country are centering in the village, or even larger centers. So that in discussing the problems of the agricultural population it is often necessary to make the center of discussion the organization of the village with an agricultural environment. ”

“ It would probably take a generation to convince the farmers of a community of its advantages; it would cost too much, even if not entirely impracticable, to move the house and stables to the central point; and it would involve such a change of habits of labor and of living as must necessarily be the work of time. However, if the principle commends itself to the leading men of the neighborhood, and especially to young men about to marry, the nucleus of a village may be established, and sooner or later the present or the coming generation will find a way to come into the fold. ”

“ These general features and facilities of the village plan are not simply for the advantage or beautification of the village, but they benefit the life of the whole community and should be considered as features of the community's plant. ”

“ With an increasing sense of social needs and responsibilities on the part of rural people, new organizations will be formed and various community activities must be undertaken, but if country people will remain true to their traditions and, with clear view of changing conditions, will seek to organize their community life as an association of farm and village families, they will create the most satisfying and enduring [Pg 19] type of society. ”

“ Because over half of our rural population live in communities of less than 2,500, because the village is the “natural center of rural life,” because conditions in the country must be understood if the drift to the cities is to be adequately controlled, and because “the relation of the small community to the growth and ideals of the urban community makes an understanding of rural life and ideals imperative to the one responsible for leadership in urban life,” Mr Vogt has written this book. ”

“ There is an inevitable companionship in country life which draws rich and poor together. At the cricket-ground and in the hunting-field, in church and in social gatherings, from harvest-home to school-feast, squire and parson, farmer and hind, meet together animated for the hour with the same kindly thoughts. In the great majority of villages, at least, the cottager looks for sympathy in his troubles to the Rectory and the Hall. Even where the clergyman has been torpid and the landowner non-resident, the village has still been a community of neighbours interested in one another. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Throughout much of the old world where farmers still live in village communities the poverty or distress of any family is at once apparent and the more fortunate members of the village in one way or another give such assistance as is possible. ”

“ The difference is that social life is on an upward plane, its activities are not mere repetitions of a process, but they result in definite achievement, which in the process of centuries becomes an accumulated asset for the race. The most lasting achievements are the social institutions.
122. The Village and the Country Store.—Of all the social institutions of the rural community, the most important is the village itself. There scattered homesteads find their common centre of attraction; there houses are located nearer together and the spirit of neighborliness develops ”

“ The village is not a private preserve, as is so often imagined, in which patronized cottagers live a bounty-fed existence, but a free independent {224} and public-spirited community which rules itself in matters of detail through a Tenants' Committee or Council. ”

“ The number of workmen which a village was obliged to furnish was in proportion to the number of its inhabitants; the distribution of the burden of service among the different heads of families was left to the members of the community themselves. ”

“ The school and the church are often located in the open country, but the village forms [116] the nucleus of social intercourse and there are most of the institutions of the community.
The most primitive among these institutions is the country store. It has economic, social, and educational functions. It supplies goods that cannot be produced in the community, it serves as a mercantile exchange for local produce. ”

“ The place to hear them in their purity is in some out-of-the-way village, far from the main roads of civilization. But it is when the villagers are engaged in "communal" work, especially during harvesting-time, that the harmony between the surroundings and the people and the strains that arise, is most complete. ”

“ Women and even young girls perform rude labor in the field and in the stable; and those aspirations which are born of a universal diffusion of periodical literature are almost unknown. At the same time, when the hard and long day's work is over, there comes to all the inexpressible relief and delight of the active social intercourse of the village, where the tillers of the country for a mile around have gathered together their homes and their herds, and where the most intimate social life prevails. ”

“ The town and the country have their mutual economic duties by which their life must be controlled. All that we can hope to do is, on one hand, to ameliorate the hardness and solitude of country living, and, on the other, to bring the citizen into nearer relation with the invigorating fields and woods and boundless air of the country.
Devising no modern Sybaris, where all possible good of life may follow from the unaided operation of a perfect social and industrial organization, I propose to confine myself to the simple question of the best practical development of village life for farmers. ”

“ The motive, conscious or unconsious, of the writers and of the press in all this is to reproduce, as far as possible, in the city the conditions of life in the village. In the village everyone knew everyone else. Everyone called everyone by his first name. The village was democratic. We are a nation of villagers. Our institutions are fundamentally village institutions. In the village, gossip and public opinion were the main sources of social control. ”

“ Those writers who have imagined a reign of peace and happiness on earth, have generally described a rural country, where each small township was directed by the elders and wise men. This was the key of my design. Each village, however small, usually contains a leader, one among themselves whom they venerate, whose advice they seek in difficulty, and whose good opinion they chiefly value. ”

“ But I love a quiet village for its own sake above most things, and would rather spend my leisure amongst its simple cottage folk, take my rest on the bench at the village alehouse door, and walk amid the smock-frocked peasantry to the grey village church, than mingle with the fashionable, over-dressed, prurient, hollow-hearted, and artificial products of civilisation that [2] constitute themselves society—yea a thousand-fold rather. To me the restfulness of a little village, with its cots nestling among the drowsy trees in a warm summer day, is a foreshadowing of the rest of heaven. ”

“ No one can drive through this beautiful old place without realizing the effect of some influence different from that which has usually been [Pg 16] at work in country towns. One feels that it is a village of homes; that the people who live in it love it, and that it has no public or private interest so insignificant as to be neglected. ”