Much is said about the necessity of redirecting rural institutions. The fairs are mentioned among the rest. I shall now indicate an experiment that might be tried with existing county and local fairs, not only as a suggestion for the fairs themselves, but as an illustration of how completely it is possible to reconstruct an institution that is long established in conventional methods.
I do not think a fair that carries only one or two weeks' interest during the year is justifiable; but of this aspect of the question I am not now speaking.
The county fair has not changed its general basis of operation in recent years, and yet the basis of country life is changing rapidly. Many fairs are doing excellent work and are worth to the people all that they cost in effort and money;but the whole plan of the county fair is insufficient for the epoch that we are now entering. I should not discontinue the local fairs: I should make them over.
The fairs have been invaded by gambling, and numberless catch-penny and amusement and entertainment features, many of which are very questionable, until they often become great country medleys of acrobats and trained bears and high-divers and gew-gaws and balloon ascensions and side-shows and professional traveling exhibitors and advertising devices for all kinds of goods. The receipts are often measured by the number of cheap vaudeville and other "attractions" that the fair is able to secure. And as these things have increased, the local agricultural interest has tended to drop out. In some cases the state makes appropriations to local fairs; it is a question whether the state should be in the showman business.
I should like to see one experiment tried somewhere by some one, designed to project a bold enterprise on a new foundation. It would first be necessary to eliminate some of thepresent features, and then to add a constructive program.
I should eliminate all gate receipts; all horse trots; all concessions and all shows; all display of ordinary store merchandise; all sales of articles and commodities; and all money premiums.
Having taken out the obstructions, unnecessaries, and excrescences, I should enter on a constructive program. I should then begin to make a fair. I assume that the fact of a person living in a community, places on him responsibilities for the welfare of that community. We should make the county fair one of the organized means of developing this welfare. Therefore, I should assume that every citizen in the county, by virtue of his citizenship, is a member of the county fair and owes to it an allegiance.
It would then devolve on the persons who areorganizing and operating the work, representing the fair association, to develop in him his sense of allegiance and coöperation. I should not discourage any citizen of the county from coöperating in the enterprise, or allow him to escape his natural responsibilities, because he felt himself unable or unwilling to pay an admission fee, any more than I should eliminate any person because of religion, politics, color, or sex.
Of course, it requires money to run a fair. I should like to see the money raised by voluntary contribution in a new way. I should have it said to every resident in the county that he and his family may come uninterruptedly to the fair without money and without price; but I should also say to him that money is needed, and that all those persons who wish to give a certain sum would be provided with a badge or receipt. I suspect that more money could be more easily raised in this way than by means of gate receipts.
Ishould have this money collected in advance by means of an organized effort through all the schools and societies in the county, setting every one of them at work on a definite plan.
Of course, the state or other agency could contribute its quota of funds as theretofore.
In other words, I should like to see, in this single experiment, a complete transfer from the commercial and "amusement" phase to the educational and recreation phase. I should like to see the county fair made the real meeting place for the country folk. I should make a special effort to get the children. The best part of the fair would be the folks, and not the machines or the cattle, although these also would be very important. I should make the fair one great picnic and gathering-place and field-day, and bring together the very best elements that are concerned in the development of country life.
I should work through every organized enterprisein the county, as commercial clubs, creameries, coöperative associations, religious bodies, fraternal organizations, insurance societies, schools, and whatever other organized units already may exist.
It is often said that our fairs have developed from the market-places of previous times, and are historically commercial. We know, of course, that fairs have been market-places, and that some of them are so to this day in other countries. I doubt very much, however, whether the history is correct that develops the American agricultural fair from the market-place fairs of other countries. From the time when Elkanah Watson exhibited his merino sheep in the public square of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1807, in order that he might induce other persons to grow sheep as good as his, and when the state of New York started its educational program in 1819, the essence of the American idea has been that a fair is an educational and not a trading enterprise. But whatever the history, the agricultural fair maintained by public money owes its obligation to the people and not to commercial interests.
I should have every person bring and exhibit what he considers to be his best contribution to the development of a good country life.
One man would exhibit his bushel of potatoes; another his Holstein bull; another his pumpkin or his plate of apples; another a picture and plans of his modern barn; another his driving team; another his flock of sheep or his herd of swine; another his pen of poultry; another his plan for a new house or a sanitary kitchen, or for the installation of water-supplies, or for the building of a farm bridge, or the improved hanging of a barn door, or for a better kind of fence, or for a new kink in a farm harness, or the exhibition of tools best fitted for clay land or sandy land, and so on and on.
The woman would also show what she is contributing to better conditions,—her best handiwork in fabrics, her best skill in cooking, her best plans in housekeeping, her best ideas for church work or for club work.
Thechildren would show their pets, what they had grown in the garden, what they had made in the house or the barn, what they had done in the school, what they had found in the woods.
I should assume that every person living on the land in the country has some one thing that he is sure is a contribution to better farming, or to better welfare; and he should be encouraged to exhibit it and to explain it, whether it is a new way to hang a hoe, or a herd of pure-bred cattle, or a plan for farmers' institutes. I should challenge every man to show in what respect he has any right to claim recognition over his fellows, or to be a part of his community.
I should ask the newspapers and the agricultural press to show up their work; also the manufacturers of agricultural implements and of country-life articles of all kinds.
I should also ask the organizations to prove up. What is the creamery contributing to a better country life? What the school? The church? The grange? The coöperative exchange? Thefarmers' club? The reading club? The woman's society? The literary circle? The library? The commercial clubs? The hunting or sportsman's clubs?
I should give much attention to the organization of good games and sports, and I should have these coöperative between schools, or other organizations, such organizations having prepared for them consecutively during the preceding year. I should introduce good contests of all kinds. I should fill the fair with good fun and frolic.
I should want to see some good pageants and dramatic efforts founded on the industries, history, or traditions of the region or at least of the United States. It would not be impossible to find simple literature for such exercises even now, for a good deal has been written. By song, music, speaking, acting, and various other ways, it would not be difficult to get all the children in the schools of the county at work. In the old days of the school "exhibition," somethingof this spirit prevailed. It was manifest in the old "spelling bees" and also in the "lyceum." We have lost our rural cohesion because we have been attracted by the town and the city, and we have allowed the town and the city to do our work. I think it would not be difficult to organize a pageant, or something of the kind, at a county fair, that would make the ordinary vaudeville or sideshow or gim-crack look cheap and ridiculous and not worth one's while.
If we organize our fair on a recreation and educational basis, then we can take out all commercial phases, as the paying of money premiums. An award of merit, if it is nothing more than a certificate or a memento, would then be worth more than a hundred dollars in money. So far as possible, I should substitute coöperation and emulation for competition, particularly for competition for money.
It is probable that the fair would have to assume the expense of certain of the exhibits.
This kind of fair is not only perfectly possible, but it is feasible in many places, if only some one or two or three persons possessed of good common sense and of leadership would take hold of the thing energetically. One must cut himself loose from preconceived notions and probably from the regular fair associations. He must have imagination, and be prepared to meet discouragements. He need not take the attitude that present methods are necessarily all bad; he is merely concerned in developing a new thing.
Because I should not have horse races in my fair, I do not wish at all to be understood as saying that horse races are to be prohibited. Let the present race courses in the fair grounds be used for horse races, if the people want them. We have June races now, and they could be held at other times of the year when persons who are interested desire to have them. My point is that they are not an essential part of a county agricultural fair. Theyrest on a money basis, and do not represent the people. Neither do I say that all traveling shows and concessions are bad; but most of them are out of place in a county fair and contrary to its spirit.
If the horse races were organized for the purpose of developing the horses of the county, then I should admit them; but I should give them only their proportionate place along with other means of developing horse-stock,—as of work horses, farm horses, draft horses, driving horses.
An enterprise of the kind that I project need not necessarily be held on a fair-ground of the present type, although that might be the best place for it. If there is a good institution in the county that has grounds, and especially that has an agricultural equipment worthy of observation, I should think that the best results would be secured by holding the fair at that place. This kind of a fair would not need to be inclosed within a Chinese wall. Of course, therewould have to be buildings and booths and stables in which exhibitions could be made.
In every fair there should nowadays be an assembly hall in which lectures, exhibitions, simple dramas, worth-while applicable moving pictures, and other entertainment features can be given.
My plea, therefore, is that some one somewhere make one experiment with a county fair designed to bring all the people together on a wholly new idea. The present basis is wrong for this twentieth century. The old needs are passing; new needs are coming in. I should have the fair represent the real substantial progress of rural civilization, and I should also have it help to make that progress. It should be a power in its community, not a phenomenon that passes as a matter of course, like the phases of the moon.
I do not expect all this to materialize in a day; but I want to set a new picture into my readers' minds.
The conservation movement is the expression of the idea that the materials and agencies that are part of the furniture of the planet are to be utilized by each generation carefully, and with real regard to the welfare of those who are to follow us. The country-life movement is the expression of the idea that the policies, efforts, and material well-being of the open country must be highly sustained, as a fundamental essential of a good civilization; and it recognizes the fact that rural society has made relatively less progress in the past century than has urban society. Both movements are immediately economic, but in ultimate results they are social and moral. They rest on the assumption that the welfare of the individual man and woman is to be conserved and developed, and is the ultimate concern of governments; both, therefore,are phases in a process of social evolution.
These are the twin policies of the Roosevelt administration, an economic and social movement for which that administration will be first remembered after the incidents and personalities of the time have lost their significance.
Not only the welfare but the existence of the race depends on utilizing the products and forces of the planet wisely, and also on securing greater quantity and variety of new products. These are finally the most fundamental movements that government has yet attempted to attack; for when the products of the earth shall begin to disappear or the arm of the husbandman to lose its skill, there is an end to the office of government. At the bottom, therefore, the conservation and country-life movements rest on the same premise; but in their operation and in the problems that are before them they are so distinct that they should not be confounded or united. These complementary phases may best work themselves out by separate organization and machinery, althougharticulating at every point; and this would be true if for no other reason than that a different class of persons, and a different method of procedure, attach to each movement. The conservation movement finds it necessary, as a starting-point, to attack intrenched property interests, and it therefore discovers itself in politics, inasmuch as these interests have become intrenched through legislation. The country-life movement lacks these personal and political aspects, and proceeds rather on a broad policy of definite education and of redirection of imagination.
Neither conservation nor country life is new except in name and as the subject of an organized movement. The end of the original resources has been foreseen from time out of mind, and prophetic books have been written on the subject. The need of a quickened country life has been recognized from the time that cities began to dominate civilization; and the outlook of the high-minded countryman has beendepicted from the days of the classical writings until now. On the side of mineral and similar resources, the geologists amongst us have made definite efforts for conservation; and on the side of soil fertility the agricultural chemists and the teachers of agriculture have for a hundred years maintained a perpetual campaign of conservation. So long and persistently have those persons in the agricultural and some other institutions heard these questions emphasized, that the startling assertions of the present day as to the failure of our resources and the coördinate importance of rural affairs with city affairs have not struck me with any force of novelty.
But there comes a time when the warnings begin to collect themselves, and to crystallize about definite points; and my purpose in suggesting this history is to emphasize the importance of the two formative movements now before us by showing that the roots run deep back into human experience. It is no ephemeral or transitory subject that we are now to discuss.
I have said that these are economic and social problems and policies. I wish to enlarge this view. They are concerned with saving, utilizing, and augmenting, and only secondarily with administration. We must first ascertain the facts as to our resources, and from this groundwork impress the subject on the people. The subject must be approached by scientific methods. The "political" phase, although probably necessary, is only temporary, till we remove impedimenta and clear the way.
It would be unfortunate if such movement became the exclusive program of a political party, for then the question would become partisan and probably be removed from calm or judicial consideration, and the opposition would equally become the program of a party. Every last citizen should be naturally interested in the careful utilization of our native materials and wealth, and it is due him that the details of the question be left open for unbiased discussion rather than to be made the arbitrary program,either one way or another, of a political organization. Conservation is in the end a plain problem involving economic, educational, and social situations, rather than a political issue.
The country-life movement is equally a scientific problem, in the sense that it must be approached in the scientific spirit. It will be inexcusable in this day if we do not go at the subject with only the desire to discover the facts and to arrive at a rational solution, by non-political methods.
The resources that sustain the race are of two kinds,—those that lie beyond the power of man to reproduce or increase, and those that may be augmented by propagation and by care. The former are the mines of minerals, metals, and coal, the water, the air, the sunshine; the latter are the living resources, in crop and live-stock.
Intermediate between the two classes stands the soil, on which all living resources depend. While the soil is part of the mineral and earthy resourcesof the planet, it nevertheless can be increased in its producing power. Even after all minerals and metals and coal are depleted, the race may sustain itself in comfort and progress so long as the soil is productive, provided, of course, that water and air and sunshine are still left to us. The greatest of all resources that man can make or mar is the soil. Beyond all the mines of coal and all the precious ores, this is the heritage that must be most carefully saved; and this, in particular, is the country-life phase of the conservation movement.
To my mind, the conservation movement has not sufficiently estimated or emphasized this problem. It has laid stress, I know, on the enormous loss by soil erosion and has said something of inadequate agricultural practice, but the main question is yet practically untouched by the movement,—the plain problem of handling the soil by all the millions who, by skill or blundering or theft, produce crops and animals out of the earth. Peoples have gone down before the lessening fertility of the land, and in all probability other peoples will yet go down.The course of empire has been toward the unplundered lands.
Thinner than a skin of an apple is the covering of the earth that a man tills. The marvelously slight layer that the farmer knows as "the soil," supports all plants and all men, and makes it possible for the globe to sustain a highly developed life. Beyond all calculation and all comprehension are the powers and the mysteries of this soft outer covering of the earth. For all we know, the stupendous mass of materials of which the planet is composed is wholly dead, and only on the surface does any nerve of life quicken it into a living sphere. And yet, from this attenuated layer have come numberless generations of giants of forests and of beasts, perhaps greater in their combined bulk than all the soil from which they have come; and back into this soil they go, until the great life principle catches up their disorganized units and builds them again into beings as complex as themselves.
Thegeneral evolution of this soil is toward greater powers; and yet, so nicely balanced are these powers that within his lifetime a man may ruin any part of it that society allows him to hold; and in despair he throws it back to nature to reinvigorate and to heal. We are accustomed to think of the power of man in gaining dominion over the forces of nature,—he bends to his use the expansive powers of steam, the energy of the electric current, and he ranges through space in the light that he concentrates in his telescope; but while he is doing all this, he sets at naught the powers in the soil beneath his feet, wastes them, and deprives himself of vast sources of energy. Man will never gain dominion until he learns from nature how to maintain the augmenting powers of the disintegrating crust of the earth.
We can do little to control or modify the atmosphere or the sunlight; but the epidermis of the earth is ours to do with it much as we will. It is the one great earth-resource over which we have dominion. The soil may be madebetter as well as worse, more as well as less; and to save the producing powers of it is far and away the most important consideration in the conservation of natural resources.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to devise a system of farm accounting that shall accurately represent the loss in producing power of the land (or depreciation in actual capital stock). The rising sentiment on the fertility question is just now reflected in the proposal to ask Congress and the states to make it a misdemeanor for a man to rob his land and to lay out for him a farm scheme. This is a chimerical notion; but the people are bound to express themselves unmistakably in some way on this subject.
Even if we should ultimately find that crops do not actually deplete land by the removal of stored plant-food in the way in which we have been taught, it is nevertheless true that poor management ruins its productivity; and whatever the phrase we use in our speaking and writing, we shall still need to hold the land-usurer to account.
The man who tills and manages the soil owes a real obligation to his fellow-men for the use that he makes of his land; and his fellow-men owe an equal obligation to him to see that his lot in society is such that he will not be obliged to rob the earth in order to maintain his life. The natural resources of the earth are the heritage and the property of every one and all of us. A man has no moral right to skin the earth, unless he is forced to do it in sheer self-defense and to enable him to live in some epoch of an unequally developed society; and if there are or have been such social epochs, then is society itself directly responsible for the waste of the common heritage. We have given every freeholder the privilege to destroy his farm.
The man who plunders the soil is in very truth a robber, for he takes that which is not his own, and he withholds bread from the mouths of generations yet to be born. No man really owns his acres: society allows him theuse of them for his lifetime, but the fee comes back to society in the end. What, then, will society do with those persons who rob society? The pillaging land-worker must be brought to account and be controlled, even as we control other offenders.
I have no socialistic program to propose. The man who is to till the land must be educated: there is more need, on the side of the public welfare, to educate this man than any other man whatsoever(page 36). When he knows, and his obligations to society are quickened, he will be ready to become a real conservator; and he will act energetically as soon as the economic pressure for land-supplies begins to be acute. When society has done all it can to make every farmer a voluntary conservator of the fatness of the earth, it will probably be obliged to resort to other means to control the wholly incompetent and the recalcitrant; at least, it will compel the soil-robber to remove to other occupation, if economic stress does not itself compel it. We shall reach the time when we shall not allow a man to till the earth unless heis able to leave it at least as fertile as he found it.
I do not think that our natural soil resources have yet been greatly or permanently depleted, speaking broadly; and such depletion as has occurred has been the necessary result of the conquest of a continent. But a new situation will confront us, now that we see the end of our raw conquest; and the old methods cannot hold for the future. The conquest has produced great and strong folk, and we have been conserving men while we have been free with our resources. In the future, we shall produce strong folk by the process of thoroughness and care.
This discussion leads me to make an application to the conservation movement in general. We are so accustomed to think of privileged interests and of corporation control of resources that we are likely to confuse conservation and company ownership. The essence of conservation is to utilize our resources with no waste, andwith an honest care for the children of all the generations. But we state the problem to be the reservation of our resources for all the people, and often assume that if all the resources were in private ownership the problem would thereby be solved; but, in fact, the conservation question is one thing and the ownership of property quite another. A corporation may be the best as well as the worst conservator of resources; and likewise, private or individual ownership may be the very worst as well as the best conservator. The individual owner, represented by the "independent farmer," may be the prince of monopolists, even though his operations compass a very small scale. The very fact that he is independent and that he is intrenched behind the most formidable of all barriers—private property rights—insure his monopoly.
In the interest of pure conservation, it is just as necessary to control the single men as the organized men. In the end, conservation must deal with the separate or the individual man; that is, with a person. It matters not whether thisperson is a part of a trust, or lives alone a hundred miles beyond the frontier, or is the owner of a prosperous farm,—if he wastes the heritage of the race, he is an offender.
We are properly devising ways whereby the corporation holds its property or privileges in trust, returning to government (or to society) a fair rental; that is, we are making it responsible to the people. What shall we do with the unattached man, to make him also responsible? Shall we hold the corporate plunderer to strict account, and let the single separate plunderer go scot-free?
The conservation of natural resources, therefore, resolves itself into the philosophy of saving, while at the same time making the most and best progress in our own day. We have not developed much consciousness of saving when we deal with things that come free to our hands, as the sunshine, the rain, the forests, the mines, the streams, the earth; and the American has found himself so much in the midstof plenty that saving has seemed to him to be parsimony, or at least beneath his attention. As a question of morals, however, conscientious saving represents a very high development. No man has a right to waste, both because the materials in the last analysis are not his own, and because some one else may need what he wastes. A high sense of saving ought to come out of the conservation movement. This will make directly for character-efficiency, since it will develop both responsibility and regard for others.
The irrigation and dry-farming developments have a significance far beyond their value in the raising of crops: they are making the people to be conservators of water, and to have a real care for posterity.
Civilization, thus far, is built on the process of waste. Materials are brought from forest, and sea, and mine, certain small parts are used, and the remainder is destroyed(page 20); more labor is wasted than is usefully productive; but what is far worse, the substance of the land is taken in unimaginable measure, and dumped wholesaleinto endless sewer and drainage systems. It would seem as if the human race were bent on finding a process by which it can most quickly ravish the earth and make it incapable of maintaining its teeming millions. We are rapidly threading the country with vast conduits by which the fertility of the land can flow away unhindered into the unreachable reservoirs of the seas.
The fundamental problem for the human race is to feed itself. It has been a relatively easy matter to provide food and clothing thus far, because the earth yet has a small population, and because there have always been new lands to be brought into requisition. We shall eliminate the plagues and the devastations of war, and the population of the earth will tremendously increase in the centuries to come. When the new lands have all been opened to cultivation, and when thousands of millions of human beings occupy the earth, the demand for food will constitute a problem which we scarcelyapprehend to-day. We shall then be obliged to develop self-sustaining methods of maintaining the producing-power of land.
We think we have developed intensive and perfected systems of agriculture; but as a matter of fact, and speaking broadly, a permanent organized agriculture is yet unknown. In certain regions, as in Great Britain, the producing-power of the land has been increased over a long series of years, but this has been accomplished to a great extent by the transportation of fertilizing materials from the ends of the earth. The fertility of England has been drawn largely from the prairies and plains of America, from which it has secured its food supplies, from the guano deposits in islands of the seas, from the bones of men in Egypt and the battlefields of Europe.
We begin to understand how it is possible to maintain the producing-power of the surface of the earth, and there are certain regions in which our knowledge has been put effectively into operation, but we have developed no conscious plan or system in a large way for securing this result.It is the ultimate problem of the race to devise a permanent system of agriculture. It is the greatest question that can confront mankind; and the question is yet all unsolved.
The best agriculture, considered in reference to the permanency of its results, develops in old regions, where the skinning process has passed, where the hide has been sold, and where people come back to utilize what is left. The skinning process is proceeding at this minute in the bountiful new lands of the United States; and in parts of the older states, and even also in parts of the newer ones, not only the skin but the tallow has been sold.
We are always seeking growing-room, and we have found it. But now the Western civilization has met the Eastern, and the world is circumferenced. We shall develop the tropics and push far toward the poles; but we have now fairly discovered the island that we call the earth, and we must begin to make the most of it.
Practically all our agriculture has been developed on a rainfall basis. There is ancient irrigation experience, to be sure, but the great agriculture of the world has been growing away from these regions. Agriculture is still moving on, seeking new regions; and it is rapidly invading regions of small rainfall.
About six-tenths of the land surface of the globe must be farmed, if farmed at all, under some system of water-saving. Of this, about one-tenth is redeemable by irrigation, and the remainder by some system of utilization of deficient rainfall, or by what is inappropriately known as dry-farming. The complementary practices of irrigation and dry-farming will develop a wholly new scheme of agriculture and a new philosophy of country life(page 44).
Even in heavy rainfall countries there is often such waste of water from run-off that the lands suffer severely from droughts. No doubt the hilly lands of our best farming regions are greatly reduced in their crop-producing power because peopledo not prepare against drought as consciously as they provide against frost(page 52). It is often said that we shall water Eastern lands by irrigation, and I think that we shall; but our first obligation is to save the rainfall water by some system of farm-management or dry-farming.
Agriculture rests on the saving of water.
The farmer is rapidly beginning to realize his obligation to society. It is usual to say that the farmer feeds the world, but the larger fact is that he saves the world.
The economic system depends on him. Wall Street watches the crops.
As cities increase proportionately in population, the farmer assumes greater relative importance, and he becomes more and more a marked man.
Careful and scientific husbandry is rising in this new country. We have come to a realization of the fact that our resources are not unlimited. The mining of fertilizing materials fortransportation to a few spots on the earth will some day cease. We must make the farming sustain itself, at the same time that it provides the supplies for mankind.
We all recognize the necessity of the other great occupations to a well-developed civilization; but in the nature of the case, the farmer is the final support. On him depends the existence of the race. No method of chemical synthesis can provide us with the materials of food and clothing and shelter, and with all the good luxuries that spring from the bosom of the earth.
I know of no better conservators than our best farmers. They feel their responsibility. Quite the ideal of conservation is illustrated by a farmer of my acquaintance who saves every product of his land and has developed a system of self-enriching live-stock husbandry, who has harnessed his small stream to light his premises and do much of his work, who turns his drainage waters into productive uses, and who is now troubled that he cannot make some use of the winds that are going to waste on his farm.
What I have meant to impress is the fact that the farmer is the ultimate conservator of the resources of the earth. He is near the cradle of supplies, near the sources of streams, next the margin of the forests, on the hills and in the valleys and on the plains just where the resources lie. He is in contact with the original and raw materials. Any plan of conservation that overlooks this fact cannot meet the situation. The conservation movement must help the farmer to keep and save the race.
In the preceding pages I have tried to develop the reader's point of view. To do this, I have gone over very briefly some of the questions that are now actively under discussion. There are other matters, of a more personal nature, that need to be discussed, or at least mentioned, in connection with even a sketchy consideration of the country-life movement; and some of these I now place together in a closing budget.
It may first be said that the reconstruction of the open country must depend in the main on the efforts of the country people themselves. We are glad of all interchange of populations; the influx of country blood has thus far been invaluable to cities; the outgo of city people has set new aspirations into the country, and itis still necessary to call on the cities for labor in times of pressure: but stated in its large terms, the open country will rise no higher than the aspirations of the people who live there, and the problems must be solved in such way that they will meet the conditions as they exist on the spot.
It may then be said that it is the first duty of every man to earn a decent living for himself and those dependent on him; and a countryman cannot expect to have much influence on his time and community until he makes his farm pay in dollars and cents.
But the final object in life is not to make money, but to use money in developing a higher type of endeavor and a better neighborhood. The richest farming regions do not necessarily have the best society or even the best living conditions. Social usefulness must become a fact in country districts. The habit of life in the usual farm family is to take everything to itselfand to keep it. Standards of service must take the place of standards of property.
The country-life movement does not imply that all young persons who hereafter shall remain in the country are to be actual farmers. The practice of customary professions and occupations will take on more importance in country districts. The country physician, veterinary, pastor, lawyer, and teacher are to extend greatly in influence and opportunity.
But aside from all this, entirely new occupations and professions are to arise, even the names of which are not yet known to us. Some of them are already under way. There will be established out in the open country plant doctors, plant-breeders, soil experts, health experts, pruning and spraying experts, forest experts, farm machinery experts, drainage and irrigation experts, recreation experts, market experts, and many others. There will be housekeeping experts or supervisors. There will be need for overseers of affiliated organizationsand stock companies. These will all be needed for the purpose of giving special advice and direction(page 78). We shall be making new applications of rural law, of business methods for agricultural regions, new types of organization. The people will find that it will pay to support such professions or agents as these.
Country life will become more complex as rapidly as it becomes more efficient.
The attitude toward one's world has much to do both with his effectiveness and with his satisfaction in living; and this is specially true with the farmer, because he is so much alone and has so few conventional sources of entertainment. It may be important to provide new entertainment for the farmer; but it is much more important to develop his personal resources.
The simple life, as Pastor Wagner so well explains, is a state of mind. It is a simplification of desire, a certain directness of effort andof purpose that brings us quickly to a result, and such an attitude that we derive our satisfactions from the humble and the near-at-hand. The countryman is the man who has the personal touch with his environment.
With the increasing differentiation of country life, it is of the first importance that the country people do not lose their simplicity of desires.
It is too little appreciated that every natural object makes a twofold appeal to the human mind: its appeal in the terms of its physical or material uses, and its appeal to our sense of beauty and of personal satisfaction. As the people progresses in evolution, the public mind becomes constantly more sensitive to the conditions in which we live, and the appeal to the spiritual satisfaction of life constantly becomes stronger. Not only shall the physical needs of life be met, but the earth will constantly be made a more satisfactory place in which to live.
We must not only save our forests in order thatthey may yield timber and conserve our water supplies, but also that they may adorn and dominate the landscape and contribute to the meaning of scenery. It is important that our coal supplies be conserved not only for their use in manufacture and the arts, but also that smoke does not vitiate the atmosphere and render it unhealthful, and discolor the objects in the landscape. It is of the greatest importance that water supplies be conserved by storage reservoirs and other means, but this conservation should be accomplished in such a way as not to menace health or offend the eye or destroy the beauty of contiguous landscape. The impounding of waters without regard to preserving natural water-falls, streams, and other scenery, is a mark of a commercial and selfish age, and is a procedure that cannot be tolerated in a highly developed society. It is important that regulations be enacted regarding the operation of steam roads through woody districts, not only that the timber may be saved, but also that the natural beauty of the landscape may be protected from fire and other forms of destruction.The fertility of the soil must be saved, not only that products may be raised with which to feed and clothe the people, but also that the beauty of thrifty and productive farms may be saved to the landscape. The property-right in natural scenery is a tenure of the people, and the best conservation of natural resources is impossible until this fact is recognized.
On this point the Commission on Country Life makes the following statement: "In estimating our natural resources we must not forget the value of scenery. This is a distinct asset, and it will be more recognized as time goes on. It will be impossible to develop a satisfactory country life without conserving all the beauty of landscape and developing the people to the point of appreciating it. In parts of the East, a regular system of parking the open country of the entire state is already begun, constructing the roads, preserving the natural features, and developing the latent beauty in such a way that the whole country becomes part of one continuing landscape treatment. Thisin no way interferes with the agricultural utilization of the land, but rather increases it. The scenery is, in fact, capitalized, so that it adds to the property values and contributes to local patriotism and to the thrift of the commonwealth."
The general tendency of our time is to dump everything into the cities, particularly into the large cities. It is there that we assemble our treasures of art, our libraries, our dramatic skill, our specimens of statuary and architecture; and it is there that the aspiring men also assemble to work out their destinies. And yet there have been events in the open country. Great men have lived there. Things have come to pass. We should be interested to record these events of the rural country, as well as the events that are associated with the congested city. Persons of quickened intelligence will not live contentedly in the outer country if it provides nothing more than subsistence. Every new memorial in the farming countryis one additional reason for people to live there.
The open country as well as the city has a history; but one would not discover the fact from monuments that he may see.
It may not be possible now to erect elaborate monuments far in the country to commemorate historical events, but records may be made, and it is at least possible to roll up a pile of stones.
Of late years there has sprung up a line of societies in villages and small cities whose province it is to create public sentiment for the betterment of the place in general good looks, and which, for lack of a better name, are generally collectively known as "village improvement societies." These organizations have had much effect in making the villages attractive. Their influence extends far and wide, but the organization itself in any case ought to take in all the surrounding territory, with the purpose to secure a coöperative action between town and country(page 122). The entire region,not city or town alone, should be organized.
In many rural communities, there could well be an open-country improvement society; or an organization might be formed, from the church or otherwise, to care for a particular interest, as the school ground or the cemetery. The average country cemetery particularly needs attention.
The care of all the public or semi-public property of a township or a neighborhood is somebody's responsibility, and this responsibility should be recognized in organization. The pride of the community could be greatly stimulated if a group of people should associate to look after roadsides, lake shores and river banks, waste places, deserted and dilapidated buildings, weeds, raw spots, paths, dangerous places, mosquito ponds, breeding places of insects, stray dogs, horse sheds, trees, birds, wild flowers, telegraph and telephone depredations, cemeteries, church grounds, school grounds, almshouse grounds, picnic grounds, historic places, patriotic events, bits of good scenery, andto give advice on lawns, back-yards and barn-yards, advertising signs.
All persons seem to be agreed that more entertainment and recreation should be provided for country residents; but it does not follow that vaudeville, and the usual line of moving pictures, and the traveling concert would add anything really worth while, although these are often recommended by town folk. The Board Walk kind of pageant may very well be left at the sea-shore.
But we certainly need entertainment that will help country people over the hard and dry places, and raise their lives out of monotony. The guiding principles are two: an entertainment that shall express the best that there is in country life; one that shall set the people themselves at work to produce it, rather than to bring it in bodily from the outside.
I would not eliminate good things merely because they come from the outside, and no one would deny the countryman the touch withany of the masterpieces; but I am speaking now of a form of effort that shall quicken an entire country district and leave a permanent impression on it. I would rather leave the situation as it is than to introduce the meaningless performances of the city thoroughfare and the resorts.
The movement to provide new and better sports, games, and general recreation is now well under way, and I do not need to explain it here; but two things ought to begin to receive attention: music and drama.
Themusic spiritseems to be dying out in the country. I hear very little joyous song there, even though the people may be joyous. The habit of self-expression in song and music needs much to be encouraged in home and school and grange and church. I think the lack is in part due to the over-mastering influence of professional town music, and in part to the absence of study of simple country forms. Simplicity is not now the fashion in music. The single player with a simple theme and the single singer with a melodious and untrilled strainare not much heard at gatherings now. Some of the best singing I hear is now and then out among the folk,—a simple direct song as plain and sweet as a bird's note. I hope we shall not lose it.
Adramaof some kind is very much needed for country districts. It should be a new form, something in the way of representing the end of the planting, the harvest, the seasons, the leading crops, the dairy, the woods, the history and traditions of the neighborhood or the region. Many of the pieces should be acted out of doors, and they should be produced chiefly by local talent. Such simple plays for the most part need yet to be written, but the themes are numerous. Why not have a festival or a generous spectacle of Indian corn, and then fill the whole occasion full of the feeling of the corn? As pure entertainment, this would be worth any number of customary theatricals, and as a means of bringing out the talent of the community it would have very positive social value. The traveling play usually leaves nothing behind it.
Thethemes for short, simple, and strong dramatic presentation are almost numberless,—such episodes and events, for example, as the plowing, the reaping, the husking, the horse-shoeing, the hay-stacking, the wood-chopping, the threshing, the sugaring, the raising of the barn, the digging of the well, the herding of the cattle, the felling of the tree, the building of the church, the making of the wagon, the bridging of the creek, the constructing of the boat, the selling of the farm, the Indians, the settlers, the burst of spring, the dead of winter, the season of bloom, the heyday of summer.
We do not sufficiently appreciate how widespread and native is the desire to dramatize. The ritual of fraternal orders is an illustration. We see it in the charades of evening parties. The old school "exhibition" made a wonderful appeal. Every community likes to see its own people "take parts." At nearly every important grange meeting, and at other country meetings, some one must "recite," and the recitation usually has characters, situations, and "take-offs." It is too bad that we do not have betterliterature to put in the hands of these reciters; in the meantime, I hope that the custom will not die out.
One who has seen the consummate Passion Play at Oberammergau must have had the thought impressed on him that there is much latent talent among the country folk, and also that it is much worth the while of a community to develop this talent. Aside from its transcendent theme, this stupendous play appeals to the world because of its simplicity and directness and because of its reality, for these are the very kind of folk that might have taken part in the mighty drama had the Great Master lived in Oberammergau.
The nativeness of the play impresses one. The very absence of so much that we associate with the ordinary drama gives the play an appeal,—the absence of the studied stride and strut, of the exaggerated make-ups, and of the over-doing of the parts. The play is grounded in the lives of the people in the community.
We cannot expect another place to become anOberammergau, but it is possible for something good to come out of any spot. This thought is vividly expressed by W. T. Stead in his account of the Passion Play:
"As I write, it is now two days after the Passion Play. The crowd has departed, the village is once more quiet and still. The swallows are twittering in the eaves, the blue and cloudless sky over-arches the amphitheater of hills. All is peace, and the whole dramatic troupe pursue with equanimity the even tenor of their ordinary life. Most of the best players are woodcarvers; the others are peasants or local tradesmen. Their royal robes or their rabbinical costumes laid aside, they go about their ordinary work in the ordinary way as ordinary mortals. But what a revelation it is of the mine of latent capacity, musical, dramatic, intellectual, in the human race, that a single mountain village can furnish, under a capable guidance, and with adequate inspiration, such a host competent to set forth such a play from its tinkers, tailors, plowmen, bakers, and the like! It is not native capacity that is lacking tomankind. It is the guiding brain, the patient love, the careful education, and the stimulus and inspiration of a great idea. But, given these, every village of country yokels from Dorset to Caithness might develop artists as noble and as devoted as those of Oberammergau."
After all is said and done, the first question still remains,—the opportunity to make a good living on a farm, and the possibility of leading a life that will be personally satisfactory.
There has never been a time when farming as a whole has been so prosperous as now, notwithstanding the fact that there are hardships in many regions. The whole occupation is undergoing a process of readjustment, and it is natural that the readjustment has become more complete and perfect in some places and in some kinds of farming than in others. We have but recently passed through a time in which the farming business, except in special regions or special cases, could not be really profitable and attractive.
Tomake a good and satisfactory living on the farm is a matter both of temperament and of first-class training. There are great series of city vocations in which any person with fair ability can succeed; but farming is a personal business and each man is his own manager. No one should ever go into farming impersonally.
Many persons are making a comfortable living on farms, a better living in fact than persons of similar ability and expending similar energy are making in town. Other persons are failing.
I am not advising anybody to establish himself in the open country; but I am saying that the time has now come when good talent need not avoid the open country.
This is a good time for the well-trained farm-minded young man or woman to go into agriculture; but one should be sure that he has the qualifications.
There is no need that farming provide only a narrow and deadening life. One may express there all the resources of a good education.
The college man is now beginning to affect the sentiment and the practice in rural communities. Formerlya college man going back to the farm was likely to be the subject of distrust and even ridicule. This attitude is passing very rapidly in the good rural regions.
In his public relations, most of the ambition of the countryman has been to hold office. It is a form of small political entertainment, too often with no thought of any particular service to the community. We have a wholly distorted idea of the "honor" of holding office; there is no honor in an office unless it contributes something worth while to society. We cannot expect strong leadership to develop in the open country until there are better things to look forward to than merely to hold the small political places. Many opportunities for rendering prominent public service will now arise in the farm country; perhaps this book will suggest a few of them. And it ought to be some satisfaction to a young man or woman to know that he or she is part of a world-movement, and to feel that it is no longer necessary to explain or to apologize for being a countryman or a farmer.
Wehave been living in a get-rich-quick age. Persons have wanted to make fortunes. Our business enterprises are organized with that end in view. Persons are now asking how they may live a satisfactory life, rather than placing the whole emphasis on the financial turnover of a business. There is greater need of more good farmers than of more millionaires.
My reader may wish to know what constitutes a good farmer. I think that the requirements of a good farmer are at least four:
The ability to make a full and comfortable living from the land;
to rear a family carefully and well;
to be of good service to the community;
to leave the farm more productive than it was when he took it.