Our social ideas, the expression of what the psychologists define as the social mind, are influenced too much by the thinking of urban people, too little by that of people who live in the country and small villages. There are many reasons for this undesirable social situation. One is the outstanding fact that the city has the prestige that belongs to political and commercial leadership. The urban leaders have for the most part obtained their position by their possession of the means of control of industries and of the channels of communication, or because of their skill in winning public attention. They have become successful by exercising capabilities that naturally give them social influence. They are victors in conteststhat are decided largely upon the basis of superior ability in manipulating men. Their advance has meant an increasing opportunity to influence the thought of their fellows. In many cases they have deliberately studied the methods of influencing public opinion and have worked to obtain control of the modern equipment necessary to direct it. One of the great engines for moving the public mind is the newspaper and this is always in the hands of urban leadership and a share of its power can usually be had by those who have the necessary "pull" or cash.
Socially the successful farmer belongs to the opposite class. His success has been obtained for the most part by his skill in handling natural law. His struggle has been largely with the obstacles that arise when one attempts to furnish a share of the food supply required by a hungry world. The farmer's experience with the means of social influence is limited and in his business there is no need of his impressing himself upon his fellows. Onthe other hand it is natural that he should overvalue the thinking of those who, unlike himself, have developed the art of making social and political impression. This tendency to discount his own social contribution in practice—even though in theory he may often insist upon his paramount social function—makes the farmer a good follower and a poor leader.
And yet in the nature of things there is nothing to demonstrate that socially those who have the machinery that is required for the influencing of public opinion or who have learned the art of impressing themselves upon their fellows are the most fit to direct the social mind. The struggle with Nature teaches as much that is of lasting value for a philosophy of personal or national conduct as comes from competition between people. Even if the population stimulus of urban centers brings forth men of great ability who do large things, it by no means follows that these men are wise merely because they are powerful. And even if they werejustified in claiming superiority at every point over the successful men of the country, it would not be for the social good that they be given a monopoly of social prestige.
Contact with men who occupy high places in city commerce will often convince any one of a neutral and discriminating mind that these men of social power have suffered loss at some points in their developing personality as a result of the struggle that has made possible their success. The present serious discord between capital and labor is fundamentally born of the belief of some that wealth is as socially right in all important matters as it is socially powerful and the faith of others that the social problems that vex men and women would pass with the destruction of wealth's artificial social advantages. Each group confines itself to the territory of experience where everything has to do with matters of human relationship, and each group insists that only one point in that territory can havevalue as a position for the observing and estimating of what happens there.
The extreme representatives of each group disclose that they have been forced to a narrow view of human motives and interests by their environmental experiences. They agree in their elevation of the power of money to the supreme place socially—one defending the power as belonging of right to wealth, the other regarding the social situation as due to the unjust privileges of the few who prey upon the many.
The typical farmer is both a capitalist and a laborer and has a saner attitude toward the difficulty than one can have who belongs exclusively to either group. He is likely to accumulate his capital by slow savings, which represent in some degree real sacrifice, and he cannot have sympathy with those who refuse to credit capital with legitimate social function. He also earns his bread by the sweat of his brow and has therefore a first-hand knowledge of the burden of human toil.This gives him an understanding of the discontent of exploited labor, but also a deep contempt for those who have no interest in the work they do. His thinking in regard to the differences between capital and labor is born of experiences that are elemental in the human struggle for life and comfort and therefore cannot be safely turned aside. His sympathies swing toward one or the other of the conflicting groups according to his most recent economic experiences. If he has been robbed by some commission merchant, he joins the protest against the unjust power of capital; if he has had a hired man who has worked indifferently and with no respect for his vocation, he understands what is meant by the unreasonable and impossible demands of labor.
The unchanging element in his thinking, however, comes from his personal concern with reference to both capital and labor. In other words, he lives closer to an earlier economic experience of man, when the present great gulf between thosewho furnish capital and those who furnish labor for industry had not been fixed. Neither the representatives of the capital nor of the labor group, when they undertake what seem to him extreme measures, can count upon his support.
The abiding fact that denies to urban thinking the right to enjoy a monopoly of social influence is this: men cannot safely build up their social thinking from experiences gathered merely from the field of human association. Nature also has lessons to teach and lessons that do not always agree with the inferences that are naturally made when one thinks only of the experiences of men in their associations. It is socially foolish and socially unsafe to disregard, or at least to forget, the value of thinking that functions, as the farmer's does, in the effort to control Nature for a livelihood that directly contributes to human welfare. If such thinking is often prosaic and rigid, it is also close to reality and insistent upon practicality. Narrow it may be at times,as a result of lack of opportunity to have wide contact, but it is substantial and born of knowledge of the necessary limitations that Nature places upon the wishes of men and women. The farmer by his vocation is taught to be suspicious of easy solutions. He stands aloof from men who claim to have found the panacea and regards men of such abounding enthusiasm as belonging to the same group of the pathetically deluded as the believers in the machine of perpetual motion. The farmer keeps the greatest distance from day dreaming and can never have charged against him as a characteristic fault that menace of self-supporting fancy which is so insidious in its attack upon the mental wholesomeness of a multitude of people.
It becomes, therefore, as a result of a constant and clear-minded attention to the actual working of forces of Nature that seem at times friendly and at times hostile to man's purposes, difficult for the farmer to regard money, even with all its recognized power, as able to do everything,or the one thing to be desired. This does not mean, of course, that the farmer is indifferent to money. No one who knows him at all would claim that he is unconcerned in regard to finances. He is always interested in money, and, like other men, works to make it. For want of money he is often troubled. He knows how much money will do in the sphere of human association. His everyday philosophy reveals this in ways that one cannot mistake. He also knows, however, that even money has its limits and that these are seen in man's relations with Nature.
How different it is in the experience of the city-dweller! He finds that money will do nearly anything. With money he can have the fruits gathered from the ends of the earth. Without money he is helpless. His protection from disease, from vice, from countless forms of discomfort, disrespect, and exploitation depends upon his ability to pay the necessary rent for safe and pleasant surroundings. How much of suffering, both physical andmental, the want of a "safe" income brings to the urban-dweller one may discover by merely walking along the crowded streets of any city. Without the necessary money he even fears loss of a respectable funeral and burial place in case of death.
The urban wealthy keep close to more and more wonderful forms of luxury by money. The urban poor keep out of the breadline by money. The middle-class know that with a little more money they may expect to join the first class and with a little less they may be forced into the second. Money seems the one thing of power. Newspapers, street discussions, and public opinion, for the most part, encourage the belief in the omnipotence of money. Only in rare instances, as for example when there is a death in the family, does the city person from his own experience discover that money, which has so much of power among men, cannot fully usurp Nature's control over the desires of men. Having so often seen greatnatural obstacles overcome by bridges, tunnels, and immense buildings, the urban person's final mental assumption is that, given enough money, anything can be done. It is hardly strange that the political philosophy which is distinctively urban should be built upon the supreme value of money and the problem of its distribution.
With the present movement of the population toward urban centers, and with the increasing ability of urban people through organization and modern forms of communication to impress their ideas upon men and women far and near, it is hardly strange that we should in our better moments recoil from a materialism which seems to be creeping everywhere into men's souls and producing interpretations of the purposes of life that are false, dangerous, and sordid.
The antidote is a larger contribution to national thought and policy from rural people. Talkers and men skilful in manipulating other men have been taken tooseriously. The doer, especially he who has first-hand grapple with Nature in the contest she forever forces upon men, has a word that should be spoken, a word of sanity. City people are often too far distant from the realities of the primary struggle with natural law to be entrusted with all the thinking. A visit a few months ago to any city seed-store would have forced upon any critical observer how ignorant city people are of the effort required to produce even their most familiar foods.
Healthy national ideals require a contribution from both urban and rural experience. The first we have in quantity. It is the second we lack. It is the business of those who conserve social welfare to respect the conclusions of rural thinkers and to discover how rural experience may make its largest contribution to national policy and social opinion.
We had just finished eating lunch at one of the more quiet hotels of our greatest city. We lingered after the meal for a chat, this being one of the privileges of the place, untroubled by the type of waiter, hungry for tips, who so often at the metropolitan hotels conveys unmistakably the idea that one's departure is expected to follow directly the presentation of his bill. The host was a man of business, famed for his success and his interest in public affairs, and especially generous in giving of his money and time to further movements that attempt the betterment of rural life. He had spent his youth in the open country and had never lost any of the vividness of his first joys. It was this mutual interest in rural problems that had brought host and guest together for a quiet talk.
"Will you give me your deepest impression of the city as you came into it from the country?" asked the man of business of the student.
"I hardly can claim one impression, there are so many."
"But one must be deeper or at least more consciously so than the others. It is that I want. I'll tell you in return my strongest impression when recently I visited, for the first time in several years, the farm where I was born."
"I suppose the line of thought that captured my mind when I first came into the city tonight is what you want."
"Yes."
"I began to think not of your noise or your hurry, your poverty or your crowds, but of your atmosphere of what I call popular materialism. Do you understand what I mean?"
"Perhaps not."
"I mean I sensed everywhere the emphasis upon the power of money. I suppose it is an experience forced uponthe consciousness of everyone who comes into the life of this great city from a small community. It seems as if the city was a monument to the idea that money can do everything, that the getting of money is the only satisfactory purpose of life."
"You must not forget the miser of the small village or the considerable number of city people who do not make business and money-making the chief object of their lives."
"Of course in justice I must remember what you say, for it is true. But you wanted my vivid impression and I give it to you as the feeling that in the city money seems all-powerful. With it you are able to get everything, to do everything. You can command other men and they obey you. You can reach over the ocean and draw luxuries of every kind to you for your pleasure and your comfort. Wherever you go you are invited to spend money. At least it is suggested to you how much you could have tosatisfy your wildest dreams, had you only the necessary bank account.
"On the other hand, without money you are like a lost soul in the midst of Paradise. With a little money your life must be spent in miserable tenements, in a dirty, noisy, unsanitary quarter of the city. Your children, perchance, must become familiar with the neighboring prostitute. Disease dogs your steps. Pleasures are few. More income means not merely renting a better tenement, but also changing to a safer and more pleasant neighborhood. And always facing you at every turn, from every show window, even from the posters on the bill boards, are suggestions of what money could do for you if only you had it."
"I see your point, but not for many years have I felt the truth of what you say. I imagine I felt strongly the power of money when I first came to the city. Of late I have taken the matter for granted and thought little of it. Yet you must admit that money is power."
"Of course, but not to the degree the city deludes one into thinking. Even in the city there is much money cannot do. In the smaller places, especially in the country, one is impressed with the limitations of money. In normal ways it is not possible to spend great sums of money in the country. You do not find methods of getting rid of your money attracting your attention at every turn. If great wealth is spent, a plan must be worked out and some new enterprise undertaken—for example, a magnificent residence or a fancy farm. In the city no forethought is required to spend great wealth. The opportunity is ever at one's elbow. The difficulty is not to accept the importunate invitations."
"I assume you blame the cities for the widespread materialism which is charged up against modern life?"
"Not altogether. In the country, as you have suggested, we have lovers of money and we have sordid poverty. But I do think that urban life tends toemphasize money-getting and to keep it before the mind in a way that is not natural in the small community. Because of this I regard the cities as the natural strongholds of materialism and I see a danger in the urbanizing movement of modern civilization. I think, therefore, that men like yourself should do everything possible to keep in the public consciousness the splendid idealism that is in the city. I mean such kindly sacrifice as the settlement house. However, I have talked enough. What is your vivid impression as a result of your visit to the place of your boyhood?"
"Well, before I give you that, let me remind you that men like myself get our power to help what you call idealism largely because of our money. I suppose you hold, therefore, that even in our disinterested service we advertise the power of money?"
"Yes, I must confess that your influence is never divorced from your standing as one who has made good in the ways oftrade. But what of your country impression?"
"There is no place that still seems so beautiful to me as the place of my childhood. I was born beside a splendid river; and not far from the house, separated from it by stretches of meadowland, was a thick and extensive forest. It seemed as if I had everything ideal for the play of childhood.
"Upon my recent visit I felt as never before the value of what I like to call the freedom of the spirit. It seems as if country environment generously provides what the healthy-minded child most needs—an opportunity for the free play of the fancy. I call it a spiritual preparation for life, but I assume that the scientist would describe it as an experience of the imagination. Do I make myself clear?"
"Yes, as far as you have gone. I covet, however, a clearer understanding of what you mean."
"I mean what I used to find in Wordsworth's poetry and in the work ofour own Whittier. I never read them now, but years ago I did a little. You were country-born yourself, as I remember. Don't you recall how your imagination made rich with meaning the simple pleasures and sports of your early life? I can well remember hours of fishing at a dark curve in the river where the water was black even at noon-day because of the overhanging trees. I think I never caught a fish there, but there was always something about the place that made me think that some day a wonderful catch would be made there. It was a place that enlivened the fancy and it illustrates what I mean. There were many other such breeding-spots for fancy scattered along the miles of river and woodland which I grew to know so well."
"Don't you consider your play of fancy mentally dangerous?"
"No, not when it comes into the mind with the incoming tide of experience. There was plenty of reality. We had our discomforts and our disappointments. Wewere forced to take into account the causal order of things. But the mind had a chance to add its part to the fact of existence. And so it always needs to be. I have been successful as a man of business in part because of my early use of the gift of imagination. It is bad to have life all imagination, to carry into adult experiences the make-believe of childhood, but it is a miserable and destitute existence for any adult to bring to his work no imagination."
"And you regard your earlier use of imagination as a preparation for your later use?"
"Indeed I do. I also regard it as the best basis for a reasonable spiritual interpretation of life. In addition it furnished pleasures, the memories of which are sweet and wholesome to this day."
"Do city children have no similar opportunity for creating fancy?"
"Perhaps they do, but their imagination is too quickly forced into the hard forms of adult experience. They feel all toosoon the meaning of wealth, the punishments of poverty. They dream of more of this or less of that. They covet possession of the things they see from the store windows or in the yards of more fortunate children. The shadow of the money-magic of which you spoke falls too soon for their later good across their path. With the country boy and girl this is not likely to happen. Their experiences are more buoyant, more interpretive, more exploring. Fancy creates and reveals; it does not largely furnish the false pleasures of fictitious possession. This is to me the difference. The city may be the richest environment for the adult. That is a matter of opinion. But I cannot see how anyone can think of it as the best place for the child. I cannot believe that I would have gotten nearly so much of good from my early experiences if I had lived in the city. If I am right, this is another element to add to the great urban problem. If the experience of the city child suffers spiritualprivations from the limitations of his environment, must this not show itself in social tendencies? In any case I had a motive in what I have said. You are interested in movements that attempt to enrich the experiences of country boys and girls. That is good, but you must not occupy all of the child's time or interest. Give him freedom to discover his own inner resources, the spiritual union between his cravings and the richness of nature. Don't exile him from nature's paradise by too much adult supervision, organization, or influence. In my day we had too little adult assistance in our games and recreation. I can imagine a condition where the country childhood would suffer from too much."
It was this suggestion that I carried away with me from our conversation.
In discussing the mind of the farmer, the difficulty is to find the typical farmer's mind that north, south, east, and west will be accepted as standard. In our science there is perhaps at present no place where generalization needs to move with greater caution than in the statement of the farmer's psychic characteristics. It is human to crave simplicity, and we are never free from the danger of forcing concrete facts into general statements that do violence to the opposing obstacles.
The mind of the farmer is as varied as the members of the agricultural class are significantly different. And how great are these differences! The wheat farmer of Washington state who receives for his year's crop $106,000 has little understanding of the life outlook of the NewEnglander who cultivates his small, rocky, hillside farm. The difference is not merely that one does on a small scale what the other does in an immense way. He who knows both men will hardly question that the difference in quantity leads also to differences in quality, and in no respect are the two men more certainly distinguishable than in their mental characteristics.
It appears useless, therefore, to attempt to procure for dissection a typical farmer's mind. In this country at present there is no mind that can be fairly said to represent a group so lacking in substantial unity as the farming class, and any attempt to construct such a mind is bound to fail. This is less true when the class is separated into sections, for the differences between farmers are in no small measure geographical. Indeed, is it not a happy fact that the American farmer is not merely a farmer? Although it complicates a rural problem such as ours, it is fortunate that the individual farmershares the larger social mind to such a degree as to diminish the intellectual influences born of his occupation.
The method of procedure that gives largest promise of substantial fact is to attempt to uncover some of the fundamental influences that operate upon the psychic life of the farmers of America and to notice, in so far as opportunity permits, what social elements modify the complete working of these influences.
One influence that shows itself in the thinking of farmers as of fundamental character is, of course, the occupation of farming itself. In primitive life we not only see the importance of agricultural work for social life but we discover also some of the mental elements involved that make this form of industry socially significant. From the first it called for an investment of self-control, a patience, that Nature might be coaxed to yield from her resources a reasonable harvest. We find therefore in primitive agriculture a hazardous undertaking which,nevertheless, lacked any large amount of dramatic appeal.
It is by no means otherwise today. The farmer has to be efficient in a peculiar kind of self-control. He needs to invest labor and foresight in an enterprise that affords to the usual person little of the opportunity for quick returns, the sense of personal achievement, or the satisfaction of the desire for competitive face-to-face association with other men which is offered in the city. Men who cultivate on a very large scale and men who enjoy unusual social insight as to the significance of their occupation are exceptions to the general run of farmers. In these days of accessible transportation we have a rapid and highly successful selection which largely eliminates from the farming class the type that does not naturally possess the power to be satisfied with the slowly acquired property, impersonal success, and non-dramatic activities of farming. This process which eliminates the more restless and commercially ambitious from thecountry has, of course, been at work for generations. It has tended, therefore, to a uniformity of mental characteristics, but it has by no means succeeded in procuring a homogeneous rural mind. The movement has been somewhat modified by the return of people to the country from the city and by the influence on the country mind of the more restless and adventurous rural people who, for one reason or another, have not migrated. In the far West especially, attention has been given to the rural hostility to, or at least the misunderstanding of, city movements which attempt ambitious social advances. It is safe to assume that this attitude of rural people is widespread and is noticeable far west merely because of a greater frankness. The easterner hides his attitude because he has become conscious that it opens him to criticism. This attitude of rural hostility is rooted in the fundamental differences between the thinking of country and of city people, due largely to the process of social selection. This mentaldifference gives constant opportunity for social friction. If the individuals who live most happily in the city and in the country are contrasted, there is reason to suppose that the mental opposition expresses nervous differences. In one we have the more rapid, more changeable, and more consuming thinker, while the thought of the other is slower, more persistent, and less wasteful of nervous energy.
The work of the average farmer brings him into limited association with his fellows as compared with the city worker. This fact also operates upon him mentally. He has less sense of social variations and less realization of the need of group solidarity. This results in his having less social passion than his city brother, except when he is caught in a periodic outburst of economic discontent expressed in radical agitation, and also in his having a more feeble class-consciousness and a weaker basis for cooperation. This last limitation is one from which the farmer seriously suffers.
The farmer's lack of contact with antagonistic groups, because his work keeps him away from the centers where social discontent boils with passion and because it prevents his appreciating class differences, makes him a conservative element in our national life, but one always big with the danger of a blind servitude to traditions and archaic social judgments. The thinking of the farmer may be either substantial from his sense of personal sufficiency or backward from his lack of contact. The decision regarding his attitude is made by the influences that enter his life, in addition to those born of his occupation.
At this point, however, it would be serious to forget that some of the larger farming enterprises are carried on so differently that the manager and owner are more like the factory operator than the usual farmer. To them the problem is labor-saving machinery, efficient management, labor cost, marketing facilities, and competition. They are not especiallyinfluenced by the fact that they happen to handle land products rather than manufactured articles.
Much has been made of the farmer's hand-to-hand grapple with a capricious and at times frustrating Nature. This emphasis is deserved, for the farmer is out upon the frontier of human control of natural forces. Even modern science, great as is its service, cannot protect him from the unexpected and the disappointing. Insects and weather sport with his purposes and give his efforts the atmosphere of chance. It is not at all strange, therefore, that the farmer feels drawn to fatalistic interpretations of experience which he carries over to lines of thought other than those connected with his business.
A second important influence that has helped to make the mind of the farmer has been isolation. In times past, without doubt, this has been powerful in its effect upon the mind of the farmer. It is less so now because, as everyone knows, thefarmer is protected from isolation by modern inventions. It is necessary to recall, however, that isolation is in relation to one's needs and that we too often neglect the fact that the very relief that has removed from country people the more apparent isolation of physical distance has often intensified the craving for closer and more frequent contact with persons than the country usually permits. Whether isolation as a psychic experience has decreased for many in the country is a matter of doubt. Certainly most minds need the stimulus of human association for both happiness and healthiness, and even yet the minds of farmers disclose the narrowness, suspiciousness, and discontent of place that isolation brings. It makes a difference in social attitude whether the telephone, automobile, and parcel post draw the people nearer together in a common community life or whether they bring the people under the magic of the city's quantitative life and in this way cause rural discontent.
The isolation from the great business centers which has kept farmers from having personally a wide experience with modern business explains in part the suspicious attitude rural people often take into their commercial relations. This has been expressed in a way one can hardly forget by Tolstoi in his "Resurrection," when his hero, from moral sympathy with land reform, undertakes to give his tenants land under conditions more to their advantage and, much to his surprise, finds them hostile to the plan. They had been too often tricked in the past and felt too little acquainted with business methods to have any confidence in the new plan which claimed benevolent motives. It is only fair to admit that the farmer differs from others of his social rank only in degree, and that his experiences in the past appear to him to justify his skeptical attitude. He has at times suffered exploitation; what he does not realize is that this has been made possible by his lack of knowledge of the ways of modernbusiness and by his failure to organize. The farmer is beginning to appreciate the significance of marketing. Unfortunately, he too often carries his suspiciousness, which has resulted from business experiences, into many other lines of action and thinking, and thus robs himself of enthusiasm and social confidence.
A third important element in the making of the farmer's mind may be broadly designated as suggestion. The farmer is like other men in that his mental outlook is largely colored by the suggestions that enter his life.
It is this fact, perhaps, that explains why the farmer's mind does not express more clearly vocational character, for no other source of persistent suggestions has upon most men the influence of the newspaper, and each day, almost everywhere, the daily paper comes to the farmer with its appealing suggestions. Of course the paper represents the urban point of view rather than the rural, but in the deepest sense it may be said to look atlife from the human outlook, the way the average man sees things. The newspaper, therefore, feeds the farmer's mind with suggestions and ideas that counteract the influences that specially emphasize the rural environment. It keeps him in contact with thinking and events that are world-wide, and unconsciously permeates his motives, at times giving him urban cravings that keep him from utilizing to the full his social resources in the country. Any attempt to understand rural life that minimizes the common human fellowship which the newspaper offers the farmer is certain to lead to unfortunate misinterpretation. Mentally the farmer is far from being isolated in his experiences, for he no longer is confined to the world of local ideas as he once was. This constant daily stimulation from the world of business, sports, and public affairs at times awakens his appetite for urban life and makes him restless, or encourages his removal to the city, or makes him demand as much as possible of the quantitativepleasures and recreations of city life. In a greater degree, however, the paper contents his mental need for contact with life in a more universal way than his particular community allows. The automobile and other modern inventions also serve the farmer, as does the newspaper, by providing mental suggestions from an extended environment.
A very important source of suggestion, as abnormal psychology so clearly demonstrates, at present, is the impressions of childhood. Rural life tends on the whole to intensify the significant events of early life, because of the limited amount of exciting experiences received as compared with city life. Parental influence is more important because it suffers less competition. This fact of the meaning of early suggestions appears, without doubt, in various ways and forbids the scientist's assuming that rural thinking is made uniform by universal and unvaried suggestions.
The discontent of rural parents withreference to their environment or occupation, due to their natural urban tendencies, or to their failure to succeed, or to the hard conditions of their farm life, has some influence in sending rural youth to the city. Accidental or incidental suggestion often repeated is especially penetrating in childhood, and no one who knows rural people can fail to notice parents who are prone to such suggestions expressing rural discontent. In the same way, suspiciousness or jealousy with reference to particular neighbors or associates leads, when it is often expressed before children, to general suspiciousness or trivial sensitiveness. The emotional obstacles to the get-together spirit—obstacles which vex the rural worker—in no small degree have their origin in suggestion given in childhood.
The country is concerned with another source of suggestion which has more to do with the efficiency of the rural mind than its content, and that is the matter of sex. Students of rural life apparentlygive this element less attention than it deserves. As Professor Ross has pointed out in "South of Panama," for example, the precocious development of sex tends to enfeeble the intellect and to prevent the largest kind of mental capacity. It is unsafe at present to generalize regarding the differences between country and city life in matters of sex, but it is certainly true, when rural life is empty of commanding interests and when it is coarsened by low traditions and the presence of defective persons, that there is a precocious emphasis of sex. This is expressed both by early marrying and by loose sex relations. It is doubtful whether the commercializing of sex attraction in the city has equal mental significance, for certainly science clearly shows that it is the precocious expression of sex that has largest psychic dangers. In so far as the environment of a rural community tends to bring the sexual life to early expression, we have every reason to suppose that at this point at least the influence of thecommunity is such as to tend toward a comparative mental arrest or a limiting of mental ability, for which the country later suffers socially. Each student of rural life must, from experience and observation, evaluate for himself the significance of this sex precociousness. When sex interests become epidemic and the general tendency is toward precocious sex maturity, the country community is producing for itself men and women of inferior resources as compared with their natural possibilities. Even the supposed social wholesomeness of earlier marrying in the country must be scrutinized with the value of sex sublimation during the formative years clearly in mind.
In modern civilization the increasing attractiveness of the city is one of the apparent social facts.[6]Social psychology may reasonably be expected to throw light upon the causes of this movement of population from rural to urban conditions of life. Striking illustrations of individual preference for city life, even in opposition to the person's economic interests, suggest that this problem of social behavior so characteristic of our time contains important mental factors.
Since sensations give the mind its raw material,[7]the mind may be said to crave stimulation. "In the most general way of viewing the matter, beings that seem to us to possess minds show in theirphysical life what we may call a great and discriminating sensitiveness to what goes on at any present time in their environment."[8]This interest of the mind in the receiving of stimulation for its own activity is an essential element in any social problem. The individual reacts socially "with a great and discriminating sensitiveness" to his environment, just as he reacts physically to his stimuli to conserve pleasure and avoid pain.
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. This fact is assumed both by those who hold the popular belief that most great men are country-born and by those who accept the thesis of Ward that "fecundity in eminent persons seems then to beintimately connected with cities."[9]The city may be called an environment of greater quantitative stimulations than the country. The city furnishes forceful, varied, and artificial stimuli; the country affords an environment of stimuli in comparison less strong and more uniform. Minds that crave external, quantitative stimuli for pleasing experiences are naturally attracted by the city and repelled by the monotony of the country. On the other hand, those who find their supreme mental satisfactions in their interpretation or appreciation of the significant expression of the beauty and lawfulness of nature discover what may be called an environment of qualitative stimulations. The city appeals, therefore, to those who with passive attitude need quantitative, external experiences; the country is a splendid opportunity for those who are fitted to create their mental satisfactions from the active working over of stimulithat appear commonplace to the uninterpreting mind. If Coney Island, with its noise and manufactured stimulations, is representative of the city, White's "Natural History of Selborne" is a characteristic product of the wealth of the country to the mind gifted with penetrating skill.
Doubtless this difference between rural and urban is nothing new, and from the beginning of civilization there have been the country-minded and the city-minded. In our modern life, however, there is much that increases the difference and much that stimulates the movement of the city-minded from the country. Present-day life with its complexity and its rapidity of change makes it difficult for one to get time to develop the active mind that makes appreciation possible. Our children precociously obtain adult experiences of quantitative character in an age of the automobile and moving pictures, and an unnatural craving is created for an environment of excitement, a life reveling innoise and change. Business, eager for gain, exploits this demand for stimulation, and social contagion spreads the restlessness of our population. The urban possibilities for stimulation are advertised as never before in the country by the press with its city point of view, by summer visitors, and by the reports of the successes of the most fortunate of those who have removed to the cities. In an age restless and mobile, with family traditions less strong, and transportation exceedingly cheap and inviting, it is hardly strange that so many of the young people are eager to leave the country, which they pronounce dead—as it literally is to them—for the lively town or city. It is by no means true that this removal always means financial betterment or that such is its motive. It is very significant to find so many farmers who have made their wealth in the country, or who are living on their rents, moving to town to enjoy life. May it not be that a new condition has come about in our day bythe possibility that there are more who exhaust their environment in the country before habit with its conservative tendency is able to hold them on the farm? One who knows the discontent of urban-minded people who have continued to live in the country can hardly doubt that habit has tended to conserve the rural population in a way that it does not now. And one must not forget the pressure of the discontent of these urban-minded country parents upon their children. The faculty of any agricultural college is familiar with the farmer's son who has been taught never to return to the farm after graduation from college. That the city-minded preacher and teacher add their contribution to rural restlessness is common thought.
In the city the sharp contrast between labor and recreation increases without doubt the appeal of the city to many. The factory system not only satisfies the gregarious instinct, it also gives an absolute break between the working timeand the period of freedom. In so far as labor represents monotony, it emphasizes the value of the hours free from toil. This contrast is often in the city the difference between very great monotony and excessive excitement after working hours. It has been pointed out often that city recreation shows the demand for great contrast between it and the fatigue of monotonous labor. So great a contrast between work and play—monotony and freedom—is not possible in the country environment. In the midst of country recreations there are likely to be suggestions of the preceding work or the work that is to follow. It is as if the city recreations were held in factories. Country places of play are usually in close contact with fields of labor. Often indeed the country town provides the worker with very little opportunity for recreation in any form. In rural places recreation cannot be had at stated periods. Weather or market conditions must have precedence over the holiday. Recreation, therefore,cannot be shared as a common experience to such an extent by country workers as is possible in the city. Since the rural population is very largely interested in the same farming problems, even conversation after the work of the day is less free from business concerns than is usually that of city people.
The difficulty of obtaining sharp contrast between work and play in the country no doubt is one reason for the ever-present danger of recourse to the sex instinct for stimulation. One source of excitement is always present ready to give temporary relief to the barren life of young people. Not only of the girl entering prostitution may it be said that with her the sex instinct is less likely "to be reduced in comparative urgency by the volume and abundance of other satisfactions."[10]The barrenness of country life to the girl growing into womanhood, hungry for amusement, is one large reasonwhy the country furnishes so large a proportion of prostitutes to the city. "This civilizational factor of prostitution, the influence of luxury and excitement and refinement in attracting the girl of the people, as the flame attracts the moth, is indicated by the fact that it is the country dwellers who chiefly succumb to the fascination. The girls whose adolescent explosive and orgiastic impulses, sometimes increased by a slight congenital lack of nervous balance, have been latent in the dull monotony of country life and heightened by the spectacle of luxury acting on the unrelieved drudgery of town life, find at last their complete gratification in the career of a prostitute."[11]
Consideration of the part played in the rural exodus by the nature of the stimuli demanded by the individual for satisfaction or the hope of satisfaction in life suggests that the school is the most efficient instrument for rural betterment.The country environment contains sources of inexhaustible satisfaction for those who have the power to appreciate them. Farming cannot be monotonous to the trained agriculturist. It is full of dramatic and stimulating interests. Toil is colored by investigation and experiment. The by-products of labor are constant and prized beyond measure by the student and lover of nature. Even the struggle with opposing forces lends zest to the educated farmer's work. This does not mean that such a farmer runs a poet's farm, as did Burns, with its inevitable financial failure, but rather that the farmer is a skilled workman with an understanding and interpreting mind. If the farming industry, under proper conditions, could offer no satisfaction to great human instincts, it would be strange indeed when one remembers the long period that man has spent in the agricultural stage of culture. City dwellers in their hunt for stimulation are likely to face either the breakdown of physical vitality or the blunting of theirsensibilities. Country joys, on the other hand, cost less in the nervous capital expended to obtain them. The urban worker, in thinking of his hours of freedom in sharp contrast with the time spent at his machine, forgets his constant temptation to use most of his surplus income in the satisfying of an unnatural craving for stimulation created by the conditions of his environment. This need not be true of the rural laborer and usually is not.
It is useless to deny the important and wholesome part that the urban life and the city-minded man play in the great social complex which we call modern civilization, but he who would advance country welfare may wisely agitate for country schools fitted to adjust the majority of country children to their environment, that they may as adults live in the country successful and contented lives. We need never fear having too few of the urban-minded or the able exploiters of talent who require the city as their field of activity. The present tendency makesnecessary the development of country schools able to change the apparent emptiness of rural environment and the excessive appeal of urban excitement into a clear recognition on the part of a greater number of country people of the satisfying joys of rural stimulations.