Although the ratio of farmers to the whole population may still decrease, the actual number of farmers will increase. The rural districts will fill up. More young men and women will remain on farms and more persons will go from towns to farms as rapidly as the business becomes as lucrative as other businesses requiring equal investment, risks, and intelligence. The open country will probably fillup mostly with the natural increase of the country population, and there will be some to spare for the cities. We shall face the question of congestion of farm districts.
The general growth of population will make additional demands on the farm, not only because there will be more persons to supply, but also because desires increase with the increase of wealth. It may require no more food to sustain a well-to-do person than a poor-to-do person, but as one increases his income he greatly extends the range of his food and improves its quality. Luxuries increase.
But beyond his actual food, one's desires increase directly with his income; and, aside from the minerals and metals, most of the material that is used in the arts and manufactures, in clothing, shelter, and adornment, is raised from the land. The human-food products do not comprise one-half the output of the land.
We have covered in a way the "easy" farming regions. But in the end, all the country will be needed for productive uses; and the bestcivilization will come only when we conquer the difficult places as well as utilize the easy ones. We shall develop greater skill in farming than we have yet dreamed of. The raw and ragged open country that we see everywhere from trolley-lines and railway-trains is not at all a necessary condition; it is only a phase of a transition period between the original conquest of the country and the growing utilization of our resources. The more completely we conquer and utilize it, the more resourceful and hopeful our people should be. Country life will become more differentiated and complex. Speaking broadly, we are now in the rough and crude stage of our agricultural development; but the situation will develop only as it pays and satisfies persons to live in the country.
To meet the economic, social, educational, religious, and other needs of these great open regions will require the very best efforts that our people can put forth; and our institutions are not now sufficiently developed to meet the situation adequately.
All forms of reclamation, by which lands are made available for agricultural use, profoundly affect society and institutions; and any person who is interested in rural civilization must necessarily, therefore, be interested in these means and their results. Because reclamation by irrigation has progressed farther than other means, and has become a national policy, I shall confine my remarks to it chiefly.
The best rural civilization will develop out of native rural conditions rather than be imposed from without. Irrigation makes a rural condition: it provides the possibility for a community to develop; and it must, therefore, color the entire life of the community.
Irrigationcommunities are compact. As all the people depend on a single utility, so must the community life tend to be solidified and tense. Probably no other rural communities will be so unified and so intent on local social problems. We shall look, therefore, for a very distinct and definite welfare to arise in these communities; and they will make a peculiar contribution to rural civilization.
The life of the irrigation community will be expressed not only in institutions of its own, but in a literature of its own. Much of the world's literature does not have significance to country-life conditions, and very little of it has significance to an irrigation civilization. I look for poetry to come directly out of the irrigation ditch and to express the outlook of the people who depend for their existence on the canal and the flood-gate.
The people have made it possible for irrigation-reclamation to be developed; for whether the work is performed by government directly orby private enterprise, it nevertheless rests mostly on national legislation; and this legislation expresses the consent and the interest of society in the work. All the people have not only a right to an interest in irrigation-reclamation, but they carry an obligation to be interested in it, since it reclaims and utilizes the fundamental heritage of all the people. I take it that society's interest in the work is of two kinds: to see that the land is properly utilized and protected; to see that persons desiring homes shall have an opportunity to secure them. Society is not interested in speculation in land or in mere exploitation.
I hope that the irrigation people realize their obligation to the society that makes it possible for them to develop their irrigation systems. Not every person in the nation agrees to the policy of national reclamation, but society has given it a trial. The people in the West are interested in developing their localities and their commonwealths, and in securing settlers to them; and with this feeling we all must sympathize. The people in the Easthave a remoter interest, but it is none the less real. I have no fear that the irrigation-settlement of the West will set up disastrous competition in products with the East, as many Eastern people anticipate; the areas involved in the new irrigation projects are too small and the development too slow for that. But there is danger that the producing-power of the land may not be safeguarded, and all the people, East as well as West, must have concern for use of Western land. The very fact that irrigation-farming is intensive increases the danger. From an agricultural point of view, the greatest weakness in this farming is the fact that the animal, or live-stock, does not occupy a large place in the system. Other systems of maintaining fertility must be developed.
Society has a right to ask that we be careful of our irrigated valleys. They are abounding in riches. It is easy to harvest this wealth, by the simple magic of water. We will be tempted to waste these riches, and the time will come quickly when we will be conscious oftheir decline. This seems remote now, but the danger is real. Not even the fertility of the irrigation waters will maintain the land in the face of poor agricultural practice.
I am not contending that irrigation-farming is proceeding in a wasteful way, or that systems are not developing that will protect society; I am calling attention to the danger and to the interest of all the people in this danger; and I hope that we may profit by the errors of all new settlements thus far made in the history of the world.
It is the flat valleys of the great arid West that will be opened by irrigation. These valleys are small areas compared with the uplands, the hills, and the unirrigable regions. Society is interested also that we be careful of the uplands and hills, for in the arid regions they give small yield in forage and in timber; this forage and timber must be most thoughtfully protected. When the producing-power of the irrigated lands begins to decline, the West cannot fall back on its dry hills.
Weare everywhere in need of better agriculture, not only that every agriculturist may do a better business, but also that agriculture may contribute its full share to the making of a better civilization. Here and there, as we learn how to adapt ourselves to the order of nature, we begin to see a really good agriculture in the process of making. A good agriculture is one that is self-sustaining and self-perpetuating, not only increasing its yields year after year from the same land, but leaving the land better and richer at each generation. This must come to pass from the land itself and from the animals and crops that one naturally brings to the land, and not merely by the addition of mined fertilizing materials brought from the ends of the earth. Thus far in history, it is only when the virgin fatness begins to be used up, speaking broadly, that we put our wits to work. Then the rebound comes. The best agriculture thus far has developed only after we have struck bottom, and we begin a constructive effort rather than an exploitative effort; and this comesin a mature country. This is why so great part of the European agriculture is so much better than our own, and why in old New England such expert and hopeful farming is now beginning to appear. The East is in the epoch of rebound. The East is in the process of becoming more fertile; the West is in the process of becoming less fertile.
In Western North America, the business systems have been developed to great perfection, and the people are possessed of much activity, and are so far escaped from tradition that they are able to do things in new ways and to work together. I hope that this great region also will apply at the outset all the resources of business and of science to develop an agriculture that will propagate itself.
When all the lands are taken that can be developed or reclaimed by private resources, there remain vast areas that require the larger powers, and perhaps even the larger funds, of society (or the government) to bring into utilization. Oneclass of lands can be utilized by means of irrigation. This form of land-reclamation is much in the public mind, and great progress has been made in it.
There remain, however, other lands to be reclaimed by other means. There is much more land to be reclaimed by the removal of water than by the addition of water. There are many more acres to be adapted to productive uses by forest planting and conservation than by irrigation. There are vastly larger areas waiting reclamation by the so-called "dry-farming" (that is, by moisture-saving farming completely adapted to dry regions). And all the land in all the states must be reclaimed by better farming. I am making these statements in no disparagement of irrigation, but in order to indicate the relation of irrigation to what should be a recognized national reclamation movement.
Let me say further that irrigation is properly not a practice of arid countries alone. Irrigationis for two purposes: to reclaim land and make it usable; to mitigate the drought in rainfall regions. As yet the popular imagination runs only to reclamation-irrigation. This form of irrigation is properly regulated by the federal government.
Now and then a forehanded farmer in the humid region, growing high-class crops, installs an irrigation plant to carry him through the dry spells. As our agriculture becomes more developed, we shall greatly extend this practice. We shall find that even in humid countries we cannot afford to lose the rainfall from hills and in floods, and we shall hold at least some of it against the time of drought as well as for cities and for power. We have not yet learned how to irrigate in humid regions, but we certainly shall apply water as well as manures to supplement the usual agricultural practices.
We must learn to reckon with drought as completely as we reckon with winter or with lessening productiveness. We probably lose far more from dry spells than from all the bugs and pests.
But even though we should recognize a national reclamation movement to include all these phases and others, it may not be necessary or advisable in the interest of all the people, that every last acre in the national domain be opened for exploitation or settlement in this decade or even in this century. The nation may well have untouched reserves. No one knows what our necessities will be a hundred years hence. Land that has never been despoiled will be immeasurably more valuable to society then than now; and society holds the larger interest.
When the pressure of population comes, we shall fall back on our reserves. The rain-belt states will fall back on their wet lands, their uplands, and their hills. These hills are much more usable than those of the arid and semi-arid West can ever be. The Eastern and old Southern states have immense reserves, even though the titles may be largely in private ownership. New York is still nearly half in woodsand swamps and waste, but practically all of it is usable. New York is an undeveloped country, agriculturally. The same is true of New England and Pennsylvania and great regions southwards. Forests and sward grow profusely to the summits of the mountains and hills. Vast areas eastward are undeveloped and unexploited. Even the regions of the so-called "abandoned farms" are yet practically untouched of their potential wealth.
I have no regret that these countries are still unsettled. There is no need of haste. When the great arid West has brought every one of its available acres into irrigation, and when population increases, the Eastern quarter of the country will take up the slack. It is by no means inconceivable that at that time the Eastern lands, newly awakened from the sleep of a century, will be the fresh lands, and the older regions will again become the new.
We should be careful not to repeat, even on a small scale, the recklessness and haste with which we have disposed of our reserves before their time.
We know that the whole basis of civilization is changing. Industry of every kind is taking the place of the older order. Its most significant note is that it brings the people of the world together in consultation and in trade. We are escaping our localism, and we look on all problems in their relation to all mankind. Brotherhood has become a real power in the world.
But what does industry in itself, including all forms of land-culture, offer as an ultimate goal to civilized man? What are to be the man's ideals toward which he should lead his thoughts?
I am not one of those who consider a sordid and commercial end to be the necessary result of industrialism. We must develop the ideals in an industrial civilization, that they may lead us intothe highest personal endeavor; and everywhere it should be possible for a man to make the most of himself. There must be something in every business beyond the financial gain if it is to make any final contribution to civilization. Finding this ultimate, industrial society will grow into perfect flower.
So far as agriculture is concerned, I see two points of high endeavor within the business, lying beyond the making of a good living, and toward which the coming countryman may set his imagination.
A new social order must be evolved in the open country, and every farmer of the new time must lend a strong hand to produce it. We have been training our youth merely to be better farmers; this, of course, is the first thing to do, but the man is only half trained when this is done. What to do with the school, the church, the rural organizations, the combinations of trade, the highways, the architecture, the library, the beauty of the landscape, the countrystore, the rousing of a fine community helpfulness to take the place of the old selfish individualism, and a hundred other activities, is enough to fire the imagination and to strengthen the arm of any young man or woman.
The farmer is to contribute his share to the evolution of an industrial democracy.
Theodore Roosevelt, with his power to discern essentials, has given us a good rallying phrase in "the fighting edge." When man ceases to be a conqueror, he will lose his virility and begin to retrograde. As localism gives way to brotherhood, militarism will pass out; but this does not mean that mankind will cease to contend.
The best example I have seen of the development of determination and fine social brotherhood is in the making of the Panama Canal. The making of the Canal is in every sense a conquest. It is a new civilization that the 40,000 or 50,000 folk are constructing down there, and every man, whether he is employed inthe commissariat, the sanitary department, in an office, on a steam shovel, or with a construction gang, will tell you that he is building the Canal. All these people are giving a good account of themselves because they are doing the work under the flag and because they are contending with vast difficulties.
We have scarcely begun even the physical conquest of the earth. It is not yet all explored. The earth is an island, and it is only two years ago that we got to one end of it. There are mountains to pierce, sea-shores to reclaim, vast stretches of submerged land to drain, millions of acres to irrigate and many more millions to utilize by dry-farming, rivers to canalize, the whole open country to organize and subdue by means of local engineering work, and a thousand other great pieces of construction to accomplish, all calling for the finest spirit of conquest and all contributing to the training of men and women. There is no necessity that the race become flabby.
Now, my point is that the prime high endeavor laid before every farmer is to conquer hisfarm, and this means contest with storm and flood and frost, with blight and bug and pest, and with all the other barriers that nature has put against the man that tills the land. We have made a tremendous mistake, in my estimation, in trying to portray farming merely as an easy business. The sulky-plow has been too much emphasized. We are giving the young men more means and tools by which to wage the contest, but the contest can never stop. In the nature of things, farming cannot be an easy and simple business, and this is why it has produced a virile lot of men and women, and why it will continue to do so. It is a question whether, if our civilization is ever evened up, we shall not look again to the open country for strong working classes, for the course of much of our city industrialism is to make dependent men and managed men, and we need to exercise every precaution that it does not make clock-watchers and irresponsible gang-servers(page 139).
Farming will attract folk with the feeling of mastery in them, even more in the future than inthe past, because the hopelessness, blind resignation, and fatalism will be taken out of it. Those who are not masterful cannot conquer a farm. The man weighing one hundred and fifty pounds who is afraid of a San José bug would better go to the city, where he can find some one to help him fight his battles. The farmer will learn how to adapt his scheme to nature, and how to conquer the things that are conquerable; and this should make it worth his while to be a farmer.
How to make country life what it is capable of becoming is the question before us; and while we know that the means is not single or simple, we ought to be able to pick out the first and most fundamental thing that needs now to be done.
It is perfectly apparent that the fundamental need is to place effectively educated men and women into the open country. All else depends on this. No formal means can be of any permanent avail until men and women of vision and with trained minds are at hand to work out the plans in an orderly way.
And yet it is frequently said that the first necessity is to provide more income for the farmer; but this is the result of a process, not the beginning of it. And again it is said that organization is the first necessity, even to make itpossible to use the education. If organization is necessary to make the best use of education, then it assumes education as its basis. Educated men will make organization possible and effective, but economic organization will not insure education except remotely, as it becomes a means of consolidating an unorganic society.
But there is no longer any need to emphasize the value of education. It would now be difficult to find an American farmer who requires convincing on this point. Yet I have desired to say that there is no other agency, using education in its broad sense, that can by any possibility be placed ahead of it.
Agriculture is now a school subject. It is recognized to be such by state syllabi, in the minds of the people, and in the minds of most school men. It is finding its way into high-schools and other schools here and there.
There is no longer much need to propagate the idea that agriculture is a school subject. Itis now our part to define the subject, organize it, and actually to place it in the schools.
We must understand that the introduction of agriculture into the schools is not a concession to farming or to farmers. It is a school subject by right.
It is the obligation of a school to do more than merely to train the minds of its students. The school cannot escape its social responsibilities; it carries these obligations from the very fact that it is a school supported by public money.
The schools, if they are to be really effective, must represent the civilization of their time and place. This does not mean that every school is to introduce all the subjects that engage men's attention, or that are capable of being put into educational form; it means that it must express the main activities, progress, and outlook of its people. Agriculture is not a technical profession or merely an industry, but a civilization. It is concerned not only with the production of materials, but with the distribution and selling of them, and with the makingof homes directly on the land that produces the material. There cannot be effective homes without the development of a social structure.
Agriculture therefore becomes naturally a part of a public-school system when the system meets its obligation. It is introduced into the schools for the good of the schools themselves. It needs no apology and no justification; but it may need explanation in order that the people may understand the situation.
If agriculture represents a civilization, then the home-making phase of country life is as important as the field farming phase(page 93). As is the home, so is the farm; and as is the farm, so is the home. Some of the subjects that are usually included under the current name of home economics, therefore, are by right as much a part of school work as any other subjects; they will be a part of city schools as much as of country schools if the city schools meet their obligations. They are not to be introduced merely as concessions to women or only as a means of satisfying popular demand;they are not to be tolerated: they are essential to a public-school program.
The American college-of-agriculture phase of education is now well established. It is the most highly developed agricultural education in the world. It is founded on the democratic principle that the man who actually tills the soil must be reached,—an idea that may not obtain in other countries.
We are now attempting to extend this democratic education by means of agriculture to all ages of our people, and there is promise that we shall go farther in this process than any people has yet gone; and this fact, together with the absence of a peasantry, with the right of personal land-holding, and with a voice in the affairs of government, should give to the people of the United States the best country life that has yet been produced.
America's contribution to the country-life situation is a new purpose and method in education, which is larger and freer than anything thathas yet been developed elsewhere, and which it is difficult for the Old World fully to comprehend.
The founding of the great line of public-maintained colleges and experiment stations means the application of science to the reconstruction of a society; and it is probably destined to be the most extensive and important application of the scientific method to social problems that is now anywhere under way.
It is not to extol our education experiment that I am making this discussion, but to measure the situation; and I think that there are perils ahead of us, which we should now recognize.
There are two grave dangers in the organization of the present situation: (1) the danger that we shall not develop a harmonious plan, and thereby shall introduce competition rather than coöperation between agencies; (2) the danger that the newer agencies will not profit fully by our long experience in agriculture-teaching.
Aninternal danger is the giving of instruction in colleges of agriculture that is not founded on good preparation of the student or is not organized on a sound educational basis. Winter-course and special students may be admitted, and extension work must be done; but the first responsibility of a college of agriculture is to give a good educational course: it deals with education rather than with agriculture, and its success in the end will depend on the reputation it makes with school men.
There is also danger that new institutions will begin their extension work in advance of their academic educational work; whereas, extension and propaganda can really succeed only when there is a good background of real accomplishment at home.
There is necessity that we now reorganize much of our peripatetic teaching. It is no longer sufficient to call persons together and exhort them and talk to them. We have come about to the end of agricultural propaganda. All field and itinerant effort should have a follow-up system with the purpose to set every manto work on his own place with problems that will test him. We have been testing soils and crops and fertilizers and live-stock and machines: it is now time to test the man.
There is also danger that we consolidate too many rural schools in towns. If it is true that the best country life is developed when persons live actually on their farms, then we should be cautious of all movements that tend to centralize their interests too far from home, and particularly to centralize them in a town or in a village. The good things should come to the farm rather than that the farm should be obliged to go to the good things.
We must first understand what our institutions of education are. The extension of agriculture-education in institutions in the United States (beyond the regular colleges of agriculture) is in four lines: as a part of the regular public-school work; in unattached schools of agriculture publicly maintained; in departments attached to other colleges or universities; inprivate schools. The last category (the private schools) may be eliminated from the present discussion.
The separate or special-school method is well worked out in Wisconsin (county plan), in Alabama and Georgia (congressional-district plan), Minnesota (regional plan), with other adaptations in Louisiana, Oklahoma, Michigan, Maryland, and elsewhere.
In New York, the movement for special schools has taken an entirely new direction. Two schools are connected with existing institutions of higher learning of long-established reputation (being the only schools of this kind, state-maintained, attached to liberal arts universities) and one is unattached; none of them has a defined region or territory. These institutions are established on a more liberal financial plan than the special schools of other states, standing somewhat between those schools and the agricultural college type.
While much publicity has been given to the unattached-school plan, the main movement is the adding of agriculture-education to the existingpublic-school systems. Only eight or ten of the states have entered into any regular development of separate or unattached schools, whereas in every state the movement for agriculture in the public schools is well under way. The public schools are of definite plan; the unattached schools are of several plans, or of no plan; and in some states an intermediate course is developing by the establishing of public high-schools (one to a county, a congressional district, or other region) in which instruction in agriculture and household subjects is highly perfected.
Aside from the foregoing particular institutions, many general colleges and universities are introducing agricultural work in order to meet the increasing demand and to keep up with educational progress.
Agricultural work is proceeding in nearly all the states under the auspices of the United States Department of Agriculture, some of it distinctly educational in character; and there is agitation for the passage of a national bill to further secondary or special agriculture-education in the states.
Statedepartments of agriculture, the indispensable experiment stations, veterinary colleges, departments of public instruction, farmers' institutes, voluntary societies, are all attacking the country-life problem in their own ways; and the powerful work of the agricultural press, although not coming within the scope of this paper, should not be overlooked as an educational agency.
In the meantime, the colleges of agriculture are growing rapidly and are approaching the subject from every side, and are assuming natural and inevitable leadership.
There is no doubt that all these agencies are contributing greatly to the solution of the rural problem, and there is now probably very little inharmony and little duplication of effort. In the newness and enthusiasm of the effort, good fellowship holds the work together in all the states or at least keeps it from collision. But the situation is inherently weak, because there is no plan or system, and no united discussion ofthe grounds on which the work rests. I have been in correspondence on this question with public men in every state in the Union, and I find a general feeling that the present situation is fraught with danger, and that there is great need of organization or at least of federation of the forces within each state; and ultimately there must be federation on a national basis. The work should be coöperative rather than competitive.
What is to be the policy of the state in agriculture-education? Where is the headship to lie? What are to be the spheres of the different institutions and agencies? What board or agency is to correlate and unify all the parts, to insure a progressive and well-proportioned program?
A general law should define the state's policy in education by means of agriculture and in the development of rural affairs, and outline methods that it proposes to follow, so that the work may be coördinated throughout the state and that a definite plan may be projected. Theduties of all the classes of institutions should be defined and relations should be established between them. The people should know to what they are committing themselves.
This law should not, of course, be designed to suppress the activities of any institution. It might not place any institution under the domination of any other institution. The schools, colleges, and other institutions for the betterment of agriculture should have their own autonomy and responsibility, and they should be developed to the highest point of efficiency in their respective spheres.
The fundamental consideration in such a law should be to develop the agriculture and advance the country life of the state by organizing the work of all the agencies on a systematic plan, so that an orderly development may be secured. Such a recognized general policy should do much to insure each institution in the system its proper state support.
It is probably too much to expect that a fundamental state law could be projected abstractly. Laws are gradually built up to meet urgentneeds as they arise; but if the principles are kept in mind, the making of separate and special laws might be so guided as to produce a harmonious result.
Some of the particular points that I think should be desired in such a law or series of laws are these:
1. It should propound a policy in the development of country life;2. It should name the classes of institutions that it proposes to utilize in the execution of this policy;3. It should define the functions of the different classes of institutions;4. It should state the organic relationships that ought to exist between them all;5. It might provide an advisory council to guide agricultural education and advancement in the state. I think that the directors or responsible heads of such institutions established for the betterment of agriculture throughout the state should constitute such consulting body, to which questions of policyand procedure should be referred and which, of course, should serve without remuneration. This council might include also the commissioner of agriculture and the superintendent of public instruction. It might be well to have one, two, or three other persons appointed by the governor. The council would constitute a natural conference of the parties that are immediately responsible for this work, without taking the management of any institution out of the hands of an existing board. The idea of such a body is to further the coördination by conference, rather than to have plenary power. Its moral influence ought to be all the greater because of its lack of conferred power.
1. It should propound a policy in the development of country life;
2. It should name the classes of institutions that it proposes to utilize in the execution of this policy;
3. It should define the functions of the different classes of institutions;
4. It should state the organic relationships that ought to exist between them all;
5. It might provide an advisory council to guide agricultural education and advancement in the state. I think that the directors or responsible heads of such institutions established for the betterment of agriculture throughout the state should constitute such consulting body, to which questions of policyand procedure should be referred and which, of course, should serve without remuneration. This council might include also the commissioner of agriculture and the superintendent of public instruction. It might be well to have one, two, or three other persons appointed by the governor. The council would constitute a natural conference of the parties that are immediately responsible for this work, without taking the management of any institution out of the hands of an existing board. The idea of such a body is to further the coördination by conference, rather than to have plenary power. Its moral influence ought to be all the greater because of its lack of conferred power.
As soon as a state has produced strong institutions for research and education in agriculture, it will need to provide an agency for utilizingthe results. A state extension program, on a coördinating plan between all the institutions but proceeding from one educational center, and which all the institutions would have a right to use for the spread of their work among the people, could accomplish vast benefits. It should comprise institutes, utilize the state system of fairs educationally, afford an organ for the making of agricultural surveys and demonstrations, spread an educational propaganda on the agricultural law, collect and collate the experience of the farmers of the state. It could assort and apply the information that the state, at great expense, accumulates through its various separate agencies. It could utilize the students, whom the state provides with free tuition. The germ of such an enterprise already exists in most of the states.
I am committed to the idea that there should be strong local centers of interest in rural communities, forthereby we develop local pride and incentive. There are several ways, on the educational side, of developing local institutions and interest.
The first way is to make it possible and practicable for the existing public schools to introduce agriculture and domestic economy. I suggest that many or most localities would do better to develop the country-life work in the existing schools than to ask the legislature for a separate special school. We have only begun to understand what such redirected and expanded schools may accomplish.
Another means of securing local knowledge and developing local interest is by the establishing of demonstration farms and field-laboratories. It is doubtful whether a permanent demonstration farm in a community is desirable; in general, the demonstration may be temporary, depending on the presence in the community of some special difficulty. In some circumstances, the enterprise may amount to a local testing station. Enterprises of this sort are bound to take on great importance in the redirection of country life.
Localsocieties and organizations may be encouraged to take up educational and experiment work.
Departments of agriculture will probably be added by colleges or other educational institutions, and these will serve as local centers at the same time that they reach the larger field.
Again, a winter school or short-course of, say, a month's or two months' duration may be held in different parts of the state. The localities should coöperate in the expenses, thereby becoming partakers in the enterprise.
Eventually there should be an agricultural agent resident in every county, and perhaps even for smaller regions, whose office should be to give advice, to keep track of animal and plant diseases and pests and secure the services of experts in their control, to organize conferences, winter-courses, and the like, and otherwise to be to the agricultural affairs what the pastor is to religious affairs and the teacher to educational affairs. (See "The Training of Farmers," p. 257.)
Finally, we may ask the state to place a specialschool of agriculture in the locality, but only after it is clear that other means cannot produce the desired results. An unattached school of agriculture is not an easy thing to administer successfully, even at the best; and the difficulty would be all the greater if its care were to be confined to local boards, which would probably have small understanding of the peculiar educational requirements. It is probable that a state may wisely establish a very few special schools, but an educational program needs first to be worked out, a competent system of control must be found, and the people should know in advance what is involved. It is not enough merely that a locality desires a school: the larger question is the state's interest. In all local enterprises of this kind in which state aid is asked for, it ought to be understood that the locality itself is to coöperate in the securing of equipment and funds.
The demand for agriculture-education is now widespread; the subject is becoming "popular."All kinds of plans are being tried or discussed.
Persons do not seem to realize that we have had about one hundred years of experience in the United States in agriculture-education, and that this experience ought to point the way to success, or at least to the avoiding of serious errors. The agricultural colleges have come up through a long and difficult route, and their present success is not accidental, nor is it easy to duplicate or imitate. First and last, about every conceivable plan has been tried by them, or by others in their time or preceding them; and this experience ought to be utilized by the other institutions that are now being projected in all parts of the country.
Plans that certainly cannot succeed are now being projected. The projectors seem to proceed on the idea that it requires no background of experience to enable an institution to teach agriculture, whereas agriculture-education is the most difficult and also the most expensive of all education yet undertaken.
To teach agriculture merely by giving a new directionor vocabulary to botany, chemistry, geology, physics, and the like is not to teach agriculture at all, although it may greatly improve these subjects themselves. To put a school of agriculture in the hands of some good science-teacher in a general college faculty with the idea that he can cover the agricultural work and at the same time keep up his own department, is wholly ineffective (except temporarily) and out of character with the demands of the twentieth century (but in high-schools a good science teacher may handle the work, or an agriculture teacher may carry the science). To suppose that "agriculture" is one subject for a college course, to be sufficiently represented by a "chair," is to miss the point of modern progress. To give only laboratory and recitation courses may be better than nothing, but land-teaching, either as a part of the institution or on adjacent farms, must be incorporated with the customary school work if the best results are to be secured. To make a school farm pay for itself and for the school is impossible unless the school is a very poor or exceedinglysmall one; and yet this old fallacy is alive at the present day. To have a distant farm to visit and look at, in order to "apply" the "teachings" of chemistry, botany, and the like, falls far short of real agriculture instruction. To develop a "model farm" that shall be a pattern to the multitude in exact farming is an exploded notion: there are many farmers' farms that are better adapted to such purpose (the demonstration farm is the modern adaptation of the idea, and it is educationally sound).
To teach agriculture of college grade requires not only persons who know the subject, but an organization well informed on the educational administration that is required. There must be a body of experience in this line of work behind any teaching on a college plane that shall be really useful; when this body of experience does not exist, the work must necessarily grow slowly and be under the most expert direction. The presumption is still against successful agriculture work in the literary and liberal arts institutions, because such teachingdemands a point of view on education that the men in these institutions are likely not to possess. Agriculture cannot be introduced in the same way that a department or chair of history or mathematics can be organized; it requires a different outlook on educational procedure, a different order of equipment and of activities, and its own type of administration.
I am much afraid that some of the newer unattached institutions, in their eagerness to make departures and to be self-sufficient, will not profit by our long development, and that the secondary schools and others may make many of the mistakes that the regular colleges of agriculture long ago have made. The presumption is against any school that expects to develop merely a local enterprise, without reference to other schools or to experience.
I am sure we all want to encourage the introduction of agriculture into all educational institutions, but we should not be misled merely by the word "agriculture"; and in the interestof good work we should be careful not to encourage any enterprise of this kind until convinced that it has been well studied and that it will be administered in the interest of rural progress.
On the women depend to a greater degree than we realize the nature and extent of the movement for a better country life, wholly aside from their personal influence as members of families. Farming is a co-partnership business. It is a partnership between a man and a woman. There is no other great series of occupations in which such co-partnership is so essential to success. The home is on the farm, and a part of it. The number of middle-aged unmarried men living on farms is very small. It is quite impossible to live on a farm and to run it advantageously without family relation.
It follows, then, that if the farming business is to contribute to the redirection of country life, the woman has responsibilities as well as the man. As the strength of a chain is determined by its weakest link, so will the progress ofrural civilization be determined by the weakness of the farm as an economic unit, or by the weakness of the home as a domestic and social unit.
Now, the farmer himself cannot have great influence in redirecting the affairs of his community until he is first master of his own problem,—that is, until he is a first-class farmer. In the same way, a woman cannot expect to have much influence in furthering the affairs of her rural community until she also is master of her own problem, and her problem is primarily the home-making part of the farm. In the mastering of his or her own problem, the farmer or his wife may also contribute directly to the progress of the community. Every advance in the management of the household contributes to the general welfare: it sets new ideas under way.
If the farming business must in general be reorganized, so also must the householding part of it be reorganized. The solution of the farm-labor problem, for example, lies not alone merely in securing more farm "hands," but in sodirecting and shaping the business that less farm hands will be needed to secure a given economic result; so also the solution of the household-labor problem is not merely the securing of more household help, but the simplification of householding itself.
So far as possible, the labor that is necessary to do the work of the open country, whether in-doors or out-doors, should be resident labor. The labor difficulty increases with reduction in the size of the family. Families of moderate size develop responsibility, and coöperation is forced on all members of it, with marked effect on character. The single child is likely to develop selfishness rather than coöperation and sense of responsibility. To a large extent, the responsibility of the household should rest on the girls of the family; and all children, whether boys or girls, should be brought up in the home in habits of industry.
It is fairly possible by means of simplification of householding and by a coöperative industry amongst all members of the family, soto reduce the burden of the farm wife that she may have time and strength to give to the vital affairs of the community.
It is essential that we simplify our ideals in cooking, in ornament, in apparel, and in furnishing; that we construct more convenient and workable residences; that we employ labor-saving devices for the house as well as for the barns and the fields.
We are so accustomed to the ordinary modes of living that we scarcely realize what amount of time and strength might be saved by a simplified table and by more thoughtful methods of preparing food. In respect to houses, it should be remembered that the present farm dwellings are getting old. A good part of the farm houses must soon be either rebuilt or remodeled. The first consideration is so to build or remodel them that steps may be saved to the housewife. We have not thought, in the past, that a woman's steps cost time and energy. Within twenty years all first-classfarm houses will have running water, both into the house and out of the house.
It is rather strange that in our discussions of the farm-labor problem, we do not realize that a gasoline engine or a water engine may save the labor of a man. Farmers are putting power into their barns. They should also put power into the house. This may be accomplished by means of a small movable engine that can be used either in the house or barn, or else by installing an engine in a small building betwixt the house and the barn, so that it can be connected either way. This can be used to lighten much household labor, as pumping of water, meat-chopping, laundering, dish-washing, vacuum-cleaning, and the like.
Eventually, there must be some form of community coöperation in the country to save household labor. Already the care of milk has been taken from great numbers of farm homes by the neighborhood creamery, or at least by the building of a milk-house in which the men by the use of machinery perform labor that was once done by the housewife. Whenever thereis a coöperative creamery, there may also be other coöperative attachments, as a laundry, or other appliances. It will be more difficult to bring about coöperation in these regards in country districts than in the city, but with the coming of good roads, telephones, and better vehicles, it will be constantly more easy to accomplish.
I have said that it is important that the country woman have strength and time to engage in the vital affairs of the community. I am thinking of the public sentiment that women can make on any question that they care to discuss thoroughly and collectively, whether this sentiment is for better orcharding, better fowls, better roads, extending of telephones, improving the schoolhouse or church or library. It is needful that women in the country come together to discuss woman's work, and also to form intelligent opinions on farming questions in general.
The tendency of all "sociables" in country andtown is to bring persons together to eat, to gossip, and to be entertained. We need to redirect all these meetings, and to devote at least a part of every such meeting to some real and serious work which it is worth while for busy and intelligent persons to undertake.
Every organization of women should endeavor to extend its branches and its influence into the open country as well as into the cities and towns. Every public movement now has responsibility to country-life questions as well as to town questions.
I think it important that there be some means and reason for every farm woman going away from home at least once a week, and this wholly aside from going to town to trade. There should be some place where the women may come together on a different basis from that of the ordinary daily routine and the usual buying and selling. I do not know where this social center should develop, and in an atmosphere that is not conducive to gossip. In some neighborhoods it might focalize in the church parlor. The center should be permanent, if possible.It should be a place to which any woman in a community has a right to go. An ideal place for such a center would be the rural library, and I hope that such libraries may arise in every country community, not only that they may supply books but that they may help provide a meeting-place on semi-social lines. I think that if I were a woman in charge of a rural library, I should never be satisfied with my work until I had got every woman in the community in the habit of coming to the library once every week.
The woman needs very much to have the opportunity to broaden her horizon. The farmer has lived on his farm; he is now acquiring a world outlook. The woman has lived in her house; she also is acquiring a world outlook. As the house has been smaller and more confining than the farm, it has followed that woman's outlook has been smaller than man's.
I think it is necessary also that the woman ofthe farm, as well as the man, have a real anchor in her nature environment. It is as necessary to the woman as to the man that her mind be open to the facts, phenomena, and objects that are everywhere about her, as the winds and weather, the plants and birds, the fields and streams and woods. It is one of the best resources in life to be able to distinguish the songs and voices of the common fields, and it should be a part of the education of every person, and particularly of every country person, to have this respite. The making of a garden is much more than the growing of the radishes and strawberries and petunias. It is the experience in the out-of-doors, the contact with realities, the personal joy of seeing things germinate and grow and reproduce their kind.
If country women are to develop a conscious sense of responsibility in country-life betterment, education facilities must be afforded them. The schools must recognize home-making subjects equally with other subjects. Whatbecomes a part of the school eventually becomes a part of the life of the people of the region.
The leadership in such subjects is now being taken by the colleges of agriculture. This is not because domestic subjects belong in a college of agriculture more than elsewhere, but only that these colleges see the problem, and most general colleges or universities have not seen it. The college of agriculture, if it is highly developed, represents a civilization rather than a series of subjects; and it cannot omit the home-making phase if it meets its obligation to the society that it represents(page 64).
If the customary subjects in a college of agriculture are organized and designed to train a man for efficiency in country life and to develop his outlook, so also is a department of home economics to train a woman for efficiency and to develop her outlook to life.
Home economics is not one "department" or subject, in the sense in which dairying or entomology or plant-breeding is a department. Itis not a single specialty. It stands for the whole round of woman's work and place. Many technical or educational departments will grow out of it as time goes on. That is, it will be broken up into its integral parts, and it will then cease to be an administrative department of an educational institution; and very likely we shall lose the terms "home economics," "household economics," "domestic science," and the rest.
I would not limit the entrance of women into any courses in a college of agriculture; on the contrary, I want all courses open to them freely and on equal terms with men; but the subjects that are arranged under the general head of home economics are her special field and sphere. On the other hand, I do not want to limit the attendance of men in courses of home economics; in fact, I think it will be found that an increasing number of men desire to take these subjects as the work develops, and this will be best for society in general.
Furthermore, I do not conceive it to be essential that all teachers in home economic subjectsshall be women; nor, on the other hand, do I think it is essential that all teachers in the other series of departments shall be men. The person who is best qualified to teach the subject should be the one who teaches it, whether man or woman.
As rapidly as colleges and universities come to represent society and to develop in all students a philosophy of life, the home-making units will of necessity take their place with other units.
It is generally agreed that one of the greatest insufficiencies in country life is its lack of organization or cohesion, both in a social and economic way. Country people are separated both because of the distances between their properties, and also because they own their land and are largely confined to its sphere of activities. There is a general absence of such common feeling as would cause them to act together unitedly and quickly on questions that concern the whole community, or on matters of public moment.
This lack of united action cannot be overcome by any single or brief process, but as one result of a general redirection of rural effort and the stimulating of a new or different point of view toward life. It will come as a result ofa quickened agricultural life rather than as an effect of any direct plan or propaganda. When the rural social sense is thoroughly established, we shall be in a new epoch of rural civilization.
It is now the habit to say that this desired rural life must be coöperative. A society that is fully coöperative in all ways is one from which the present basis of competition is eliminated. I think that no one intends, however, in the common discussion of coöperation to take sides on the theoretical question as to whether society in the end will be coöperative or competitive; these persons only mean that coöperative association is often the best means to secure a given result and that such association may exert great educational influence on the coöperators.
Theoretically, the coöperative organization of society may be the better. Practically, a capitalistic organization may be better: it quickly recognizes merit and leadership; but if it is better, it is so only when it is very carefully safeguarded.
It cannot be contended that a coöperative organizationis correct because the majority rules. Majorities show only what the people want, not necessarily what is best. Minorities are much more likely to be right, because thinking men and fundamental students are relatively few; yet it may be the best practice, in common affairs, to let the majority have its way, for this provides the best means of education.
It will now be interesting to try to picture to ourselves some of the particular means by which social connection in the open country may be brought about. It is commonly, but I think erroneously, thought that community life necessarily means a living together in centers or villages. I conceive, on the contrary, that it is possible to develop a very effective community mind whilst the persons still remain on their farms. In this day of rapid communication, transportation, and spread of intelligence, the necessity of mere physical contiguity has partly passed away.
That is, "isolation," as the city man conceives of it, is not necessarily a bar to community feeling. The farmer does not think in terms of compactneighborhoods, trolley cars, and picture shows. The country is not "lonely" to him, as it is to a city man. He does not search for amusement at night.
It is said that the American farmer must live in hamlets, as does the European peasant. The hamlet system that exists in parts of Europe represents the result of an historical condition. It is the product of a long line of social evolution, during which time the persons who have worked the land have been peasants, and to a greater or less extent have not owned the land that they have worked.
Some persons fear that the American farmer is drifting toward peasantry. This notion has no doubt arisen from the fact that in certain places the man who works the land is driven to great extremity of poverty, and he remains uneducated and undeveloped; but ignorance and poverty do not constitute peasantry. The peasanthood of the Old World is a social caste or class, and is in part a remnant of feudal government,of religious subjugation, and of the old necessity of protection. The present day is characterized by the rise of the people on the land; this movement is a part of the general rise of the common people (or the proletariat). If popular education, popular rights, and the general extension of means of communication signify anything, it is that we necessarily are developing away from a condition of peasantry rather than toward it, however much degradation or unsuccess there may be in certain regions or how much inadjustment there may be in the process(page 129).
In contradistinction to the exclusive hamlet system of living together, I would emphasize the necessity that a first-rate good man must live on the farm if he is to make the most of it. Farming by proxy or by any absentee method is just as inefficient and as disastrous in the long run as the doing of any other business by proxy; in fact, it is likely to be even more disastrous in the end because it usually results in the depletion of the fertility of the land, or in the using up of the capital stock;and this becomes a national disaster. I hold that it is essential that the very best kind of people live actually on the land. The business is conducted on the land. The crops are there. The live-stock is there. The machinery is there. All the investment is in the place itself. If this business is to be most effective, a good man must constantly be with it and manage it. A farm is not like a store or a factory, that is shut up at night and on Sunday.
The more difficult and complex the farming business becomes, the greater will be the necessity that a good man remain with it.
We must remember also that if the landowner or the farmer lives in a village or hamlet and another man lives on his farm, a social division at once results, and we have a stratification into two classes of society; and this works directly against any community of interest. It is not likely that the farmer who has retired to town and the hired man who works his farm under orders will develop any very close personal relation. The farmer becomes an extraneous element injected into the town, and haslittle interest in its welfare, and he has taken his personality, enterprise, and influence out of the country. He is in a very real sense "a man without a country." The increase of his living expenses in town is likely to cause him to raise the rent on his farm, or, if the tenant works for wages, to reduce the improvements on the place to the lowest extent compatible with profit. We need above all things to produce such a rural condition as will satisfy the farmer to live permanently in the country rather than to move to town when the farm has given him a competence.
I am not to be understood as saying that farmers ought never to live in town. There will always be shifting both ways between town and country. In some cases, small-area farming develops around a village; or a village grows up because the farms are small and are intensively handled. In irrigation regions, the whole community may be practically a hamlet or village. In parts of the Eastern states, small farmers sometimes live in the village and go to the farm each day, to work it themselves. Butall these are special adaptations, and do not constitute a broad agricultural system.
In time we probably shall develop a new kind of rural settlement, one that will be the result of coöperative units or organizations, and not a consolidation about the present kinds of business places; but it is a question whether these will be villages or hamlets in the sense in which we now use these words.