CHAPTER II

“Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,When wealth accumulates, and men decay.”

“Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,

When wealth accumulates, and men decay.”

Goldsmith.

Regular men and women long for children as they long for good luck, long life, and sweet happiness. But they do not want just children, any kind whatever so that they be children. No indeed! It is always a whole, healthy child, a bright, intelligent child, a loving, obedient child, a beautiful, virtuous child, that lives warm in their dreams. And a child with such characteristics costs morethan many men and women can pay; for a well-bred child, like a well-bred colt, is the product of many favoring tides of good fortune.

Farms, The Place of Children

So it is that the Johns and Marys who leave the farm and its open spaces for city life give up having children of their own,—often without knowing it when they leave the country, to be sure,—and find themselves later doomed to work out human contentment in some other way; for the high cost of city space, of just sufficient elbow-room for a child to grow in and acquire the human characteristics desired, is almost as prohibitive as if a law were on the statute-books forbidding the rearing of children in city blocks. While my critic is biting histhumb at this “exaggeration,” gravely asserting that he knows there are many families of children in our American cities, I have caught his eye and will hold it long enough to tell him a thing disclosed by the last United States Census report, viz., among the thirty millions of farm people, there are 4,000,000 more children under twenty-one years of age than there are among any thirty millions of city people. And this bald fact virtually declares the truth I am uttering—that the country contains the children of the nation, that the farm is the natural rearing-ground of well-bred children, and that the city core—the stamping-ground of business and adults—abhors children as “nature abhors a vacuum.”

My story will not reach home, however, unless one pauses a moment to letthis census fact soak in. Here is an excess of children living on our farms that would make a small nation,—bigger than Switzerland, bigger than Chili, than Norway, than famous little agricultural Denmark.

Cities Get Youth from Farms

And what will become of this excess of children? What else than this? The farms will manage to feed them, clothe them, educate them until they come of age, when, possessed of the strong right arm, they will turn their backs on the farm and farming, and go to recruit the nerve-fagged industry of cities.

The farms feed industry, professional service, and city life with muscle, intellect, and imagination. This is the romance, and there is not a word init of wheat, corn, cotton, or cattle. This every-day function of the farm, often spoken of lightly, almost as if it were a poetic fiction, is the solid stratum of fact upon which the plot of my story rests. The annual editorial blast, “Keep the boy on the farm,” never concerns this slowly moving stream of young adults cityward, for these are a surplus, an excess. And they must go, as sure as fate. A legion of editorials could not dam back this flow.

We are not without some definite information, moreover, as to how this surplus of farm population works its way to the cities of the nation; for a unique study has been made by the United States Department of Agriculture—of the movement of 3000 young people from a thousand farmsin one community—over a period of one hundred years—a community where (and this fits into my story) the God of the Puritans has been known by the children from the days of the first log cabins. We know just which farms sent their surplus crop of young folk away. We know exactly where they went in the United States. And, furthermore, we know what vocations they recruited, and what achievements in these vocations they made. In a nutshell, we know in some measure what the contribution of human force and influence was from these thousand farms, farm by farm, to the upbuilding of the cities of the nation. The unfolding picture of this farm community’s impact upon the nation’s life during the century just passed is precisely the thing many persons have looked forto put national meaning into the daily disappearance from the farms of the surplus of young adults which every few years amounts to a strong small nation poured into city industry.

I cannot pass this remarkable study by without naming some of the men who as “exportable surplus” left the old farmstead to work out careers in cities. I will name only those whom you know, and know to honor. You remember Governor George Peck of Wisconsin. You knew him as thePeckof “Peck’s Bad Boy.” Farm number 555 among these thousand farms gave Governor Peck to Wisconsin. Governor Reuben Wood of Ohio came from farm number 119. Governor Cushman Davis, of Minnesota, afterward United States Senator, was the product of farm number 556, just as much as the wheatfrom that farm was a product and went into national trade. Farm number 618 gave Charles Finney to American Christendom and to Oberlin College as its honored president. Farm number 701 raised Charles N. Crittenton, gave him to the wholesale drug business in New York City, in which he accumulated wealth with which he put into operation his ideal for friendless girls. The Florence Crittenton Rescue Homes for girls in seventy-two cities of the United States tells his story. One of the little hamlets in the community produced Daniel Burnham, America’s leading architect, at home equally in Chicago, New York, or Rome, Italy.

But these brighter lights of the exodus do not by any means convey what is perhaps after all the greater influenceand might of the majority of the human surplus who went forth and found their places and played their rôles as less widely known personalities in enterprises of banking, manufacture, teaching, or merchandizing, where they helped weave the fabric of America and its institutions as we know them in every-day life.

The force of this plain story of the human product of good farms, in a community where God was known, lies not in what might be considered the exceptional character of the community, but rather in the fact that the story of this particular community of farms is the story, in one respect or another, of all American farm communities. This study convinces both men of the farms and men of the cities,—as it sets their memories to work about the migrantsfrom the land whom they have known—that as the farming communities wax or wane, so wax or wane the cities and the nation.

Many Children Virtual Pagans

And here an unsuspected villain enters my story. Do not laugh in your sleeve when you discover that the villain is a fact, merely a fact; but, by the by, a very stubborn and blistering fact. Of the fifteen millions of farm children—children under twenty-one years of age,—more than four millions are virtual pagans, children without knowledge of God. If, perchance, they know the words to curse with, they do not know the Word to live by. This saddening fact is the solemn disclosure of the recent study, already mentioned, made by the Social and ReligiousInstitute of New York City.

A survey of 179 counties in the United States, representatively selected, enables the Institute with confidence to assert that “1,600,000 farm children live in communities where there is no church or Sunday-school of any denomination,” and “probably 2,750,000 more who do not go to any Sunday-school, either because the church to which their parents belong does not have any, or because they do not care to connect themselves with such an organization.”

One does not get the real inwardness of this fact until one appreciates that these 1,600,000 of pagan children are not scattered evenly, or more or less evenly, among the other millions of children who are in contact with the Bible, but are in a great measure homedin bibleless, godless communities. The nation might possibly assimilate a million bibleless children if they were brought up among several millions of children who know the concepts of religion; but absorbing godless children in great numbers from whole godless groups is a bird of a different feather. What is still more disconcerting, the trend, we are led to suppose, is not from bad to better, but from bad to worse.

“There is no national passion for seeking out the godless community and setting the Bible there,” we hear on every hand.

“The promoters of Bible study are too apologetic to business, to education, to pleasure, even, and go not about their tasks as those who have a commission from the nation,” many say.

But these bare statements fail, perhaps, to get hold of us. We must have particulars and the pulse of the thing. And so I wish to take a page out of my own experience and let you read it.

Trapped in a Godless Community

My duties, a while back, took me into the clover-bearing hills of a promising county in a dairy State. I stayed the night with a farmer’s family, enjoying the hospitality and confidences of the home. Never shall I forget two episodes of the evening.

The milking was finally over—twelve mighty good cows. I had been allowed to milk three, taking the mother’s place on her favorite milking-stool. Certain cows were “tender” and responded kindly to her gentler touch.

The house was on a side hill sloping steeply to the road, and across the road was a thinly timbered twenty-acre lot. The warm milk had been poured into ten-gallon cans and carried up to the house, where stood, in a neat little milk-house, a cream separator. When all was ready, the separator began to sing, the cream came trickling out, the skim-milk poured into a ten-gallon can, as the gaunt six-foot-three, narrow-shouldered farmer turned the crank. At the first whirring tune-up of the separator, I hear a scurrying of feet in the timber lot below, and soon a regiment of hogs and pigs were at the fence, standing with hind feet in the long trough, front feet over the top rail of the fence, black heads in a row, beady little eyes peering up the hill, open mouths giving vent to a long-drawnsqueal of jubilant petition. As the whir of the separator grew into a liquid hum, the squealing chorus rose to heaven, filling the valley, investing the farm, like a piece of symbolism, with the imperious demands of animals and crops upon the total energies of the family. Finally the last drop of milk went through the separator. Then the father put his hands to two handles of two ten-gallon cans of skim-milk; one son grasped the other handle of one can; another son caught hold of the handle of the second can; while each son in his remaining hand held a pail of the milk. Then they three, with two cans and two brimming pails, took up their stately march abreast down the hill to the squealing chorus at the trough. It looked for all theworld like some priestly ritual. The milk was poured into the trough. The pigs ceased to chant and began to suck, guzzle, push, and grunt. So the day’s work was over, and we sought the house. Darkness fell over the hill and valley and the filled pigs lay down to sleep; while the farmer gathered his family about him, took up his Bible and read the Scriptures, even as did the cotter, whom Burns, the farmer Scot, made us know:

The priest-like father reads the sacred page,How Abram was the friend of God on high;Or Moses bade eternal warfare wageWith Amalek’s ungracious progeny;Or how the royal bard did groaning lieBeneath the stroke of Heaven’s avenging ire;Or Job’s pathetic plaint and wailing cry;Or rapt Isaiah’s wild, seraphic fire;Or other holy seers that tune the sacred lyre.

The priest-like father reads the sacred page,

How Abram was the friend of God on high;

Or Moses bade eternal warfare wage

With Amalek’s ungracious progeny;

Or how the royal bard did groaning lie

Beneath the stroke of Heaven’s avenging ire;

Or Job’s pathetic plaint and wailing cry;

Or rapt Isaiah’s wild, seraphic fire;

Or other holy seers that tune the sacred lyre.

Conversation in the morning brought out the fact that this hillside home was virtually the only one, in this clover community, struggling to bring up its children in the knowledge of God. No church, no Sunday-school, no parochial school, no Bible class. The gaunt father, gathering emotion as he overheard his own story, said:

“I have only one problem now. In twelve years my cows and hogs have paid for themselves, paid for my farm, built my barn and house. The one problem is not money any longer, but it is my boys and girls. They are justnow at the point where the home can no longer hold them, and they will, I fear, sink into the mire of this godless community.”

“What do you mean, ‘mire’?” I inquired.

“Well, it is hard to put into words,” he continued. “Perhaps this will give you some idea: since I have been here, now twelve years, not a wedding has taken place anywhere hereabouts that has not been forced. And this is not the worst of it.”

“Why don’t you start a Sunday-school?” I urged.

“Too late!” he sighed. “My children are almost beyond me. I was, I fear, too busy with my cows and pigs, and the children just grew up before I knew it.”

“What will you do?” I could notrefrain from asking, more to myself than to him, in my own perplexity, as I tried to share in the problem.

“The only thing I can do,” said he, as if the conversation had strengthened a previous resolution half-heartedly entertained, “is to yield to my wife’s judgment; sell the farm, go to some safe community where there is a church, Sunday-school, and a high school. We people here in this community made our great mistake in starting out wrong. We made a religion of our pure-bred hogs and cattle, and let our boys and girls go to the dogs.”

This tale of children, who turned out to have been unwittingly sidetracked by cows and hogs, recalled my own experience in breaking some new land in the Skims at a period in mylife when the doctor had said: “What you need is to get close to the land. Crawl around on the soil a year or two and you will learn over again how to sleep.”

Well, with my old horse The Cid and a mail-order one-horse plow, I went through the motions of plowing that pine cut-over from which the pines had been skimmed off like cream from a milk-pan. Surveying the scratched and torn field, somewhat bruised and bleeding, I will declare it was, I said to myself:

“It doesn’t look really plowed; but it will be all right when I get it dragged.”

Then The Cid did his very best at dragging. Dutifully—with an inner chuckle, I am sure, at my green expectations, for he was a seasonedold Skims horse himself—he plodded along and over the field. At last I stood sweating and weary, looking it over, and was obliged to own up:

“It doesn’t look dragged; but it will be all right when I get it cultivated.”

I went through the form of marking and planting, and though I couldn’t see the rows very well, I quieted my discontent by saying to myself, “It will be all right when I get it hoed.”

But when the corn came up, it was accompanied by such a community of weeds, briers, grass, and small bushes, that I couldn’t cultivate because I couldn’t see the corn.

After I had in much perplexity stared at the cultivator and then at the field, I looked that piece of work square in the face and averred:

“If I ever plow again, I am notgoing to kid myself into thinking that the cultivator will straighten out the sins of the plow.”

This raw-boned farmer and his wife, possessed of the fairest intentions in the world for their children, had become trapped in a godless community before they were aware of it; all because the seed-bed of human life had not been plowed deep with social religion at the very outset. Is this community a fair example of bibleless country groups? I believe it is. I am sorry to admit it, but I believe it is a fair type.

When the Bible Has No Interpreter

If a nation can not build civilization securely without a knowledge of history, neither can children build character without a knowledge of those menand women of history who have essayed to know God. The Bible is the story of such persons. It is biography. It is lives of those in whom the soul of man in his search for God has risen to its highest levels. There is no substitute for this Bible biography,—except, if you please, another Bible.

And perhaps, in point of Bible illiteracy, next to the community which has no Bible in it, lies the community in which, though there is a Bible, the leaders in teaching the Bible, or rather in explaining the Bible to the children, are themselves grossly ignorant, if not demoralized. The Bible is a book of many stories, of a host of incidents, of innumerable ideas. Selection is vital. To select from the Bible and hand on its meaning in grave ignorance is to run the risk that all ignorance runs.Here is where many a rural community suffers, when it is commonly thought to be provided with a knowledge of God.

It fell to my lot recently to visit a small rural community of twenty-five families of this type. Only three of the families were totally without church connections, or at least church traditions. One church building has fallen in. One lies torn down. The third, still standing, is rotting. It is supposed to be “haunted.” Splits disorganized and discouraged the people. A fourth rude church structure has come, but splitting up from within has begun. Ignorance of a crass sort rules. The Bible has had no well-balanced soul to interpret its wonderful truths.

The family histories of this settlementrun—to speak very grimly indeed—like an anthology of despair and depravity. Listen:

“She drowned her babies regularly in the creek.”

“He was said to be the father of his own daughter’s first child.”

“This woman was subnormal and has three illegitimate children.”

“This other woman is a menace to every man in the community.”

“He committed suicide.”

“She poured kerosene on the cat and set fire to it.”

“Boil nails in water to find out if person for which water is named committed a crime. If nails crackle and knock against the pan, then person named is guilty.”

“A person dies hard on feathers. We took mother’s bed out from underher three times when we thought she was dying.”

“Our children don’t need to go to school to learn to read. The Spirit teaches them to read.”

The people of these families looked, in the face, like people you meet in any fair group of folks; but their minds, their deeds, their hopes, their fears! There’s the rub. Is this group of twenty-five families typical of country communities where the Bible is fought over by blind leaders of the blind? I am afraid it is. I admit it with shame, but I admit it. The Bible,—as if it were a plow found by persons who knew not its use, but who scrapped hard for its possession as an ornament of their dooryards,—the life-giving Bible in these hands is still a closed book and a locked-up treasure.

Pedigreed Austerity Better Than Ignorance

Human life at its best is no mere accident which may happen anywhere under any conditions. The best has its pedigree. It is the result of infinite pains with children as with crops and animals. Even the austere, narrow-gaged leadership having a pedigree is far better than this ignorant, illiterate type.

I remember well as a lad how my father, a country minister, collegebred and trained in the theological school of his particular denominational stripe, stood rock-like in his parish for temperance. It was a grape country, with several wine distilleries. My father taught abstention from wine-drinking and preached against thedistilleries. One church pillar was in the wine business and furnished the sacramental wine. My father finally carried his logic to the point where he made announcement:

“Next Sunday at the Communion we shall not use fermented wine.”

Sunday came. A larger congregation than usual assembled. There was a tenseness of silent emotion in the stiff Sunday-dressed village and farmer folk, which I can feel yet, after forty years.

The communion-table was set. I see my father now, as he picked up the flagon of wine and poured into the chalice. He paused—on his face a sudden look of bewilderment. Then slowly he poured the chalice of wine back into the flagon, strode to the door, and emptied the contents on theground. Quietly resuming the ceremony he said:

“We will commune without wine to-day.”

The distiller had done his dirty work and put one over on the country parson. But the parson, although he caused a sense of consternation to creep over the church folk,—akin to the horror in the multitude whenCount Antonio, in Anthony Hope’s tonic story, laid hands on the Sacred Bones in midstream,—by this daring act helped plug the bung-holes and spike the spigots in the cellars of that county. And the whole countryside, be it said, responded to the resolute will of my father to make God known to a community steeped in wine.

My father probably shared the narrow-mindedness of his particularpedigree, but he certainly hewed to the line like a prophet of old. His crop of young converts came usually in winter; but the snow and ice had no deterring chill for him. He never thought of postponing the baptismal rite till summer. He had a large hole cut through in the little river near by, for water helped mightily in his system of doctrine. He didn’t spare me either. At eleven years of age, he led me, as he did my country playmates, out of the sleigh, down the snowbank, into this ice-water. There was no softening of the ideals of life in that parish, I can tell you. And the God of Daniel was known and acknowledged there in fear and trembling.

When, in after years it fell to my fortune to live on the Skims and to woo sleep with logging, stumping, and“scratching” the land, I saw what a real Sunday-school would do even in a submarginal community for the children of the pine cut-over. There was the farmer widow woman with the man’s hands. What would have been her chances of rearing her seven children to usefulness and self-respect without that weekly community-school under good leadership?

I hear again her breezy, cheery call to her brood as she drives up to the little church.

“Pile out.”

“Pile in,” when Sunday-school is over.

A slap of the lines, and a piece of rural America goes back to its cabin, minds sprayed with race lore. A mighty wholesome sight in a community of tools with broken handles, ofharnesses toggled with hay-wire, of fortunes “busted”, of the blind, and of those who could not sleep.

There was the old retired farmer, Scotch McDugle, too, eighty years old. He would come over from next door of an evening and swap Skims stories for a cheery welcome and a listening ear. It would be midwinter. The sheet-iron stove showed red.

“Come in, Mr. McDugle,” my wife would say. “Take off your hat and mittens.”

“Oh, no, no,” he would reply, “just stepped in to say ‘howdy.’ Can’t stay a minute.”

Then McDugle would settle down for the evening close to the red-hot stove, mittens drawn tight, Scotch cap pulled close down over his ears. As he got limbered in memory, he wouldgo through a set of queer antics with his lips and tongue—little dry, staccato sputters. He reminded me in this of a courtly neurasthene I once met who said, as he went through similar tongue motions, “I beg your pardon, but I have a hair on the tip of my tongue which I seem never able to get off.”

Farmer McDugle’s favorite theme was the making of great American men out of “hard knocks” and “a good pinch of God.” He reveled in Lincoln, whom he had known; and he never got tired of weaving the people he knew in with the race-heroes of all time.

As I think of McDugle and his ilk in these later days, I can not help suspecting that bleak little Scotland and God in the life, despite the stainof the “wee drap o’rye,” account for many of America’s man-making rural communities.

When Catholic and Protestant Agree

The chairman of the Board of Directors of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, in a call published (in the April 1924 number of “St. Isadore’s Plow”) for the second annual Catholic Rural Life Conference, says:

“We have two distinct entities of population, and, we might say, of civilization in the United States—the urban and the rural. The church is decidedly urban. So far as the Church is concerned, the country towns and villages are still ‘pagani.’”

Thus you see Protestant andCatholic agree in seeing the menace of rural paganism within the borders of Christian America.

This is not the moment to settle the blame for this condition on any persons or sects. It is rather the time for a statesmanlike move to meet the menace. Bible instruction of worth, dignity, intelligence, in every community, made accessible to the last child, is an aim which alone can meet the case. But this is an herculean stunt, and requires some of the same sweep of coöperative, universal momentum as drove out yellow fever, malaria, and is fighting pellagra, hook-worm, and tuberculosis. Bible illiteracy ranks as a problem with book illiteracy; and as great a unanimity is required to root it out as to eradicate book illiteracy. A hundred different religious bodies inthe United States have striven more or less fitfully in the past with this problem. But far more is needed than the hundred-headed effort. When, in the late war, the Allies came to their senses and found that their struggle was not a rope-pull nor a barbecue, but a life-or-death struggle, they elected Foch to give universality of will to the cause of defense.

The children of rural America deserve by good rights a Foch to lead the forces of Bible literacy against a creeping, godless paganism. I have refrained from presenting the religious case for this crusade. The menace is so great that the social appeal should be sufficient—and should reach every intelligent lover of America, be he fundamentalist, modernist, ethicist, or just plain man.

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