FOOTNOTES:

FOOTNOTES:[6]Rev. Charles Stelzle.

[6]Rev. Charles Stelzle.

The third type in American agriculture is the exploiter. Between the farmer and the husbandman there is an economic revolution. In fact the exploiter himself is a transition type between the farmer and the husbandman. "The fundamental problem in American economics always has been that of the distribution of land," says Prof. Ross. The exploiter is, I presume, a temporary economic type, created in the period of re-distribution of land. The characteristic of the exploiter is his commercial valuation of all things. He is the man who sees only the value of money.

It was natural that with the maturing of an American population, the exploitation of the natural resources should come. We have exploited the forest, removing the timber from the hills and making out of its vast resources a few fortunes. We wasted in the process nine-tenths for every one-tenth of wealth accumulated by the exploiter. We have exploited the coal and iron and other minerals. The exploitation of the oil deposits and natural gas reservoirs has been a national experience and a national scandal. The tendency to exploit everyopportunity for private wealth has characterized the past two decades.[7]

There are those who exploit the child vitality of the families of working people, and the States have put legal checks in the way of child labor. The exploitation of the labor of women has gone so far as to threaten the vitality of the generation to be born, and laws have been passed which forbid the employment of women except within limits. The ethical discussion of the past decade is largely a keen analysis of the methods of exploitation of resources, of men and of communities, and an attempt to fix the bounds of the exploitation of values for private wealth.

There are those who exploit the farm. "Farms which from the original entry until 1890 had been owned by the same family, or which had changed owners but once or twice, and whose owners were proud to assert that their broad acres had never been encumbered with mortgages, since 1890 have been sold, in some instances as often as ten times, in more numerous instances four or five times, and a large part of the purchase price is secured by encumbering the estates!"[8]

Agriculture, especially of the Middle West, is affected in all its parts by the exploitation of land. To a traveller from the Eastern States, the sellingand re-selling of farm land, without fertilization or improvement by any of the successive owners, is a source of amazement.

"The new lands opened under the Homestead act of half a century ago were often exploited for temporary profit by soil robbers who were experts of their kind. Owing to such farm management, the yield of the acre in the United States gradually decreased. Very little intensive farming was done."[9]

The commercial exploitation of land dissolves every permanent factor in the farm economy. The country community of the land-farmer type is being undermined and is crumbling away under the influence of exploitation. The pioneers were a Westward emigration, pushing Westward the boundaries of the country at the rate of fifty miles in a decade; but since 1890 emigration has been eastward, and it is made up of farmers who move to ever cheaper and cheaper lands to the East, the tide of higher prices coming from the West. Already in central Illinois the values of land seem to have reached the high water mark. About Galesburg "the Swedes have got hold of the land and they will not sell." Among the last recorded sales in this district were some at prices between two hundred and two hundred fifty dollars per acre.

It is not generally understood that this exploitation of farm lands has extended over nearly the wholecountry. Its spread is increasingly rapid in the last two years. In the Gulf States and the Carolinas and in Tennessee and Kentucky prices of farm land have increased in the last five years from twenty-five to one hundred per cent. Even in the most conservative counties in Pennsylvania the prices of farm land have increased twenty to twenty-five per cent.

The sign of this exploitation is a rapid increase in the market values of farm land, due to frequent sale and purchase. This increase is independent of any increase in essential value to the farmer. The net income of the farmer may have been increased only five per cent, as in the State of Indiana, whereas the values of farm land have increased in the same period more than one hundred per cent. That is, the speculative increases have been twenty times as much as the agricultural increase.

Along with this change in farm values goes the increase or decrease in the number of tenant farmers and the shifting of the ownership of land to farm landlords. In some parts of the country this exploitation has taken a purely speculative form. In all parts it is speculative in character, but in some sections of the country the exploiters are themselves farmers and the process is imposed upon the farmers themselves by economic causes. This is true of the Illinois and Indiana lands, which are under the influence of a system of drainage, but there are other portions of the country in which the process is chieflyspeculative. In some Western States the exploitation of farm land is in the hands of speculators themselves, doing real estate business purely as a matter of trade. It would be a mistake, however, to attribute a process so general as this one to the power exerted by a class of real estate agents. Its causes are deeper than the commercial process. They go into the very roots of modern life. This should be clearly understood, because when frankly realized it compels the adjustment of social, educational and religious work to the period of exploitation.

The effect of this process is upon all the life of country people. It has created its own class of men. There was no intention in the mind of earlier Americans that we should ever have a tenant class in America. The assumption on which all our ideals are built has been that we would be a land-owning people, but we are confronted with a tenantry problem as difficult as any in the world. The process of exploiting land has added to the social and economic life of the country the farm landlord, whose influence upon the immediate future of the American country community, church and school, in all sections will be great, and in many communities will be dominating.

The exploitation of land has produced the retired farmer. He is a pure example of the weakness of the exploiter economy. Originally he was a homesteader, or perhaps a purchaser of cheap land in the early days. He expected not to remain a farmer,but hoped for removal to the East or to a college town. The motives which animated him were varied, but among them none was so prominent as a desire for better education than was provided for his children in the country community of the farmer type. So that at forty or fifty years of age he seized an opportunity to sell his land, as the prices were rising, and retired to the town with a cash fortune for investment.

Immediately the economic forces to which he had submitted himself made of him a new type, for the retired farmer in the Middle West is a characteristic type of the leading towns and cities. Some whole streets in large centers are peopled with retired farmers. The civic policies of scores of small municipalities are controlled in a measure by them, so that journalists, religious leaders, reformers and politicians have very clear-cut opinions as to the value of the retired farmer.

The analysis of this situation is as follows. While the land which he sold continued to increase in value, his small fortune began to diminish in value. The interest on his money has been less every ten years; whereas he formerly could loan at first for six and sometimes seven per cent, he cannot loan safely now for more than five or six per cent.

Meantime the prices of all things he has to buy are expressed in cash,—no longer in kind as on the farm; and these cash prices are growing. In the past decade they have almost doubled. This meansthat he is a poorer man. His money has a diminished purchasing power and he has a smaller yearly income.

In addition to this, his wants, and the wants of the members of the family are increased two or three times. They cannot live as they lived on the farm. They cannot dress as they dressed in the country. The pressure of these increasing economic wants, demanding to be satisfied out of a diminished income, with higher prices for the things to be purchased, keeps the retired farmer a poor man. The result is that the retired farmer is opposed to every step of progress in the growing town in which he lives. He opposes every increase of taxation and fights every assessment. He dreads a subscription list and hates to hear of contributions. Although an intelligent and pious man, he has come to be an obstacle to the building of libraries, churches and schools and opposed to all humane and missionary activities. He is suffering from a great economic mistake.

Before leaving the exploiter it is to be said he also has his church. The exploiter has built no community. He has contributed the retired farmer to the large towns and small cities of the Middle West. It is natural, therefore, that few exploiter churches are found in the country. But in the larger centers there are churches whose doctrine and methods are those of the exploiter. Indeed, at the present time the exploiter's doctrine in ethics andreligion is highly popular. It is the doctrine of the consecration of wealth.

There are in the larger cities churches whose business is to give; Sunday after Sunday they hear pleas and consider the cases of college presidents, superintendents of charities, secretaries of mission boards and other official solicitors. These churches have systematized the discipline of giving. Their boards of officers control the appeals that shall be made to their people. Such churches are highly individualist in character, and the preacher who ministers in such a church has a doctrine of individual culture and responsibility.

The exploiter's doctrine of systematic giving has gone into all of the communities in which prosperous people live. It has become a moral code for millionaires, and the response to it is annually measured in the great gifts of men of large means to institutions which exist for the use of all mankind.

But not all the farm exploiters retired from the farm. The stronger and more successful have become absentee landlords. These men have invested their cash in farm lands. Distrusting the investments of the city market, and fearing Wall Street, they have purchased increased acreage in the country, and when the local market was exhausted, they have invested in the Southwest and the far West, buying ever more and more land. They haveproven that "It is possible to maintain a vicious economic method on a rising market."[10]

These landlords have leased their land in accordance with mere expediency. No plans have been made in the American rural economy for a tenantry. The lease, therefore, throughout the United States generally is for only one year. This gives to the landlord the greatest freedom, and to the tenant the least responsibility. Neither is willing to enter into a contract by which the land itself can be benefitted. The landlord is looking for the increase of the values of land, and is ever mindful of a possible buyer. Moreover, he is watchful of the market for the crop and of the size of the crop, so that he desires to be free at the end of the year to make other arrangements.

The tenant on his part is somewhat eager to do as he pleases for a year. He expects to be himself an owner, and he does not expect to remain permanently as a tenant on that farm. He reckons that he can get a good deal out of the land in the year, and is unwilling to bind himself for a long period. "The American system of farm tenantry is the worst of which I have knowledge in any country."[11]

It is true that in some parts of the country leases of three and five years are granted to tenants by the landlords. At Penn Yan, New York, a reliable class of Danes secure such leases from the owners. I amaware, also, that in Delaware, in an old section dependent upon fertilization for its crops, where the land is in the hands of a few representatives of the old farmer type who have held it for generations, that the tillage of the soil shows specialization. The landlord and the tenant co-operate. The leases, while they are for but a year, specify how the land shall be tilled, how fertilized. They require the rotation of crops and the keeping of a certain number of cattle by the tenants. The landlord personally oversees the tillage of several farms. This seems the beginning of husbandry, instead of exploitation of the land.

Another instance of the landlord who is more than a mere exploiter is that of David Rankin, recently deceased. In the last years of his life Mr. Rankin owned about thirty thousand acres of land in Missouri. It was said in 1910 that he had seventeen thousand acres of corn. He had a genius for estimating the values of land, the expensiveness of drainage, and the possibilities of the market. He was an expert buyer of cattle, and a master of the problems entering into progressive farming on a large scale.

From his vast acreage Mr. Rankin sold not one bushel of corn. All his crops "went off on four legs." "He drove his corn to market," as they say in the Middle West. He bought cattle from the ranches, for none were bred on his own land. He fattened them for the market, translating corn intobeef and he was well aware of the values of pork in the economy of such a farm. Nothing went to waste. According to the formula in Nebraska, "For every cow keep a sow, that's the how." Mr. Rankin made large profits from his cattle and hogs.

It is true that he cared nothing for the community or its institutions. On his wide acres family life was replaced by boarding-houses. Schools and churches were closed, and many farmhouses built by the homesteaders rotted down to their foundations. But David Rankin was a husbandman, if not a humanist. His tillage of the soil was successful in that it maintained the fertility of the soil, that it produced large quantities of food for the consumer, and that it was profitable.

The following is a description of community life under the influence of such great landlords, by a Western observer:—

"The city of Casselton, North Dakota, was originally started about the year 1879. Thirty years ago the first settlers came to this great prairie region from the New England and Central States. It was shortly before this or about this time that the Northern Pacific Railroad was built across this western prairie. The government gave to the road every other section of land on each side of the railroad for thirty miles as a bonus. That land was sold in the early days by the railroad to purchasers for fifty cents an acre. It was some of the finest farming land in the wide world. Out of those salesgrew some of the immense farms that have been so famous over the country and while they are great business concerns managed with fine business ability, yet they are not much of a help in the settling of the country. Here within one mile of Casselton is the famous Dalrymple farm of twenty-eight thousand acres. This farm employs during the busy season what men it needs from the drifting classes and puts no families on its broad acres. These men are here a short season in the summer, then are gone. They are rushed with work for that season, Sundays as well as other days from early morning to late at night, making it almost impossible to touch their religious life or even to count them a part of the community life.

"Another farm is the Chaffee farm of thirty-five thousand acres. Mr. Chaffee is a thorough business man but is a fine Christian and places a good family on each section of land. He allows no Sunday work. Has a little city kept up in beautiful condition in the center of his land where he lives with his clerks and immediate helpers. Here they have a neat little Congregational church and support their own minister. His fine influence is felt all over the country. The partners in this farm also have a land and loan corporation and also a large flour mill in Casselton which employs about twenty-eight men, running day and night during the busy season.

"There are many farms smaller, from one thousand acres and up. Many also of a quarter section.Casselton was built simply as a center for this beautiful and rich farming region. It is in the center of a strip six miles long and twenty-five miles wide which is said to be one of the finest sections in the land. There are other towns sprung up in the same section also. Through the past thirty years farmers have retired, well to do, and moved into the city. Here are now maintained excellent schools."

In conclusion: the exploitation of farm lands is a process with which the church in the country cannot deal by persuasion. It is an economic condition. They who are engaged in this process or are concerned in its effects are in so far immune to the preacher who ignores or who does not understand these economic conditions. Their action is conditioned by their status. They will infallibly act with relation to the church in accordance with the motives which arise out of their condition. That is, they will act as tenant farmers, as retired farmers or as absentee landlords. They must be treated on these terms. Their whole relation to organized religion will be that of the condition in which they live and by which they get their daily bread. This is a matter independent of personal goodness. The church is dependent not on personal good influences, but upon the response which a man makes in accordance with his economic and social character.

For instance, in Wisconsin a church worker found that thousands of acres in a certain section were owned by a Milwaukee capitalist. He foundthat the tenant farmers on these acres were poor and struggling for a better living, and he could not, among them, finance an adequate church. He promptly went to Milwaukee and secured five minutes of the time and attention of the absentee landlord. When he had stated the case and the reasons why this large owner should give to the country church on his acres, the man promptly said, "You have stated what I never before realized and I will give you a contribution of one hundred dollars per year for that church until you hear from me to the contrary."

In contrast to this there is in Central Illinois a large estate of five thousand acres. The owner lives in a distant city and his son tills the land. It is known among the neighbors that the son has orders to oppose all improvements of churches and of schools, "because there is no money for us in the church or the school."

It is useless to complain of the position in which a man is. The minister's duty is to utilize him in his own status and to enable him to practise the virtues which are open to him. The retired farmer can become an active and devoted evangelist, preacher or organizer. He should be made a leader in the intellectual development of the farmer's problem of the region. He has leisure and intelligence and is often a devout man. It is the business of the minister to transform this into religious and social efficiency. The temperance movement inthe Middle West has had generous and devoted support from the retired farmers living in the towns. The families of these one time farmers are seeking after culture. The literary and aesthetic aspects of the community can well be committed to members of these families. Their value for the community is probably in these directions. Above all it is the business of the minister to sympathize with the life they are living and to enable them to live it to the highest advantage.

The energies of the church should be devoted to the tenant farmer. Of this more will be said in another place. He also must be treated in sympathy with his social and economic experience and the religious service rendered to him must be the complete betterment of his life as he is trying to live it. He is not a sinner because he is a tenant and what he does as a tenant is therefore not a misdemeanor, but a normal reaction upon life. The church can help him in purging his life from the iniquities peculiar to a tenant and a dependent. The noblest motives must be brought out and the life he is to live should be given its own ideals.

Above all the period of exploitation must be understood by the teacher and the preacher to be a preparation, a transition through which country people are coming to organized and scientific agriculture. Gradually the influence of science and the leadership of the departments and colleges of agriculture are being extended in the country. Littleby little, whether through landlord or tenant, farming is becoming a profession requiring brains, science and trained intelligence. The country church should promote this process because only through its maturity can the country church in the average community find its own establishment. The reconstruction of the churches now going on corresponds to the exploitation of the land. The duty of the church in the process of exploitation is to build the community and to make itself the center of the growing scientific industry on which the country community in the future will be founded.

The religion of the exploiter moves in the giving of money. Consecration of his wealth is consecration of his world and of himself. The church that would save him must teach him to give. His sins are those of greed, his virtues are those of benevolence. His own type, not the least worthy among men, should be honored in his religion. No man's conversion ever makes him depart from his type, but be true to his type. Therefore the religion for the exploiter of land is a religion of giving, to the poor at his door, to the ignorant in this land, and to the needy of all lands.

FOOTNOTES:[7]The Conservation of Natural Resources in the United States, by Van Hise.[8]J. B. Ross—"Agrarian Changes in the Middle West."[9]Secretary of Agriculture, James Wilson at the United States Land and Irrigation Exposition, Chicago, Nov. 19, 1910.[10]The Rural Life Problem in the United States, by Sir Horace Plunkett.[11]Dean Chas. F. Curtiss, State College of Iowa.

[7]The Conservation of Natural Resources in the United States, by Van Hise.

[8]J. B. Ross—"Agrarian Changes in the Middle West."

[9]Secretary of Agriculture, James Wilson at the United States Land and Irrigation Exposition, Chicago, Nov. 19, 1910.

[10]The Rural Life Problem in the United States, by Sir Horace Plunkett.

[11]Dean Chas. F. Curtiss, State College of Iowa.

The scientific farmer is dependent upon the world economy. He is the local representative of agriculture, whose organization is national and even international. He raises cotton in Georgia, but he "makes milk" in Orange County, New York, because the market and the soil and the climate and other conditions require of him this crop.

He is dependent upon the college of agriculture for the methods by which he can survive as a farmer. Tradition, which dominated the agriculture of a former period, is a disappearing factor in husbandry of the soil. The changes in market conditions are such as to impoverish the farmer who learns only from the past. Tradition could teach the farmer how to raise the raw materials, under the old economy, in which the farmhouse and community were sufficient unto themselves. But in a time when the wool of the sheep in Australia goes halfway round the world in its passage from the back of a sheep to the back of a man, the sheep farmer becomes dependent upon the scientist. He cannot afford to raise sheep unless the scientific man assures himthat in the production of wool his land has its highest utility. "The American farm land is passing into the hands of those who will use it to the highest advantage."[12]

The dependence of the scientific farmer or husbandman upon the world market and upon the scientists who are studying agriculture enlarges the circle of his life from the rural household to the rural community. In the rural community agriculture can be taught; in the household it cannot. The only teaching of the household is tradition; the teaching of the community is in terms of science. The country school and the country church take a greater place as community institutions just so soon as the farmer passes out of the period of exploitation into that of scientific husbandry.

The husbandman is the economist in agriculture. He is to the farm what the husband was to the household in old times. One is tempted to say also that the husbandman is he who marries the land. American farm land has suffered dishonor and degradation, but it has known all too little the affection which could be figuratively expressed in marriage. The Bible speaks of "marrying the land."—"Thy land shall be called Beulah for thy land shall be married." Side by side in this country we have the lands which have been dishonored, degraded, abandoned, dissolute, and the lands husbanded, fertilized, enriched and made beautiful.

The husbandman or rural economist cares more for qualities than for quantity. He works not merely for intensive cultivation of the soil, but also for the preservation of the soil and use of it in its own terms, at its highest values.

The principle at work is not the increase in the farmer's material gains or possessions. The husbandry of the soil is not a mere increase in market values. It is a deeper and more ethical welfare than that which can be put in the bank. "Agriculture is a religious occupation." When it sustains a permanent population and extends from generation to generation the same experiences, agriculture is productive in the highest degree of moral and religious values. In the words of Director L. H. Bailey, of Cornell, "The land is holy."

This is especially true at the present time, when the land is limited in amount. Already the whole nation is dependent upon the farmer in the degree intimated by the statement of Dean Bailey. "The census of 1900 showed approximately one-third of our people on farms or closely connected with farms, as against something like nine-tenths, a hundred years previous. It is doubtful whether we have struck bottom, although the rural exodus may have gone too far in some regions, and we may not permanently strike bottom for sometime to come."[13]

The service of the few to the many, therefore, is the present status of the husbandman. The veryfact that one-third of the people must feed all the people imposes religious and ethical conditions upon the farmer. The dependence of the greater number for their welfare upon those who are to till the soil brings that obligation, which the farmer is well constituted to bear and to which his serious spirit gives response.

This means that with the growing consciousness of the need of scientific agriculture there will arise, indeed is now arising, a new ethical and religious feeling among country people. The church which is made up of scientific farmers is a new type of church.

A notable testimony to the influence of the church in developing husbandry is by Sir Horace Plunkett,[14]who testifies to the religious influence that led to the agrarian revolution in Denmark.

"My friends and I have been deeply impressed by the educational experience of Denmark, where the people, who are as much dependent on agriculture as are the Irish, have brought it by means of organization to a more genuine success than it has attained anywhere else in Europe. Yet an inquirer will at once discover that it is to the 'High School' founded by Bishop Grundtvig, and not to the agricultural schools, which are also excellent, that the extraordinary national progress is mainly due. A friend of mine who was studying the Danish system of state aid to agriculture, found this to be theopinion of the Danes of all classes, and was astounded at the achievements of the associations of farmers not only in the manufacture of butter, but in a far more difficult undertaking, the manufacture of bacon in large factories equipped with all the most modern machinery and appliances which science had devised for the production of the finished article. He at first concluded that this success in a highly technical industry by bodies of farmers indicated a very perfect system of technical education. But he soon found another cause. As one of the leading educators and agriculturists of the country put it to him: 'It's not technical instruction, it's the humanities.' I would like to add that it is also, if I may coin a term, the 'nationalities,' for nothing is more evident to the student of Danish education or, I might add, of the excellent system of the Christian Brothers in Ireland, than that one of the secrets of their success is to be found in their national basis and their foundation upon the history and literature of the country."

Every observer of these Danish Folk High Schools testifies to their religious enthusiasm, their patriotism and above all to the songs with which their lecture hours are begun and ended. A graduate of these schools living for years in America, the mother of children then entering college, said, "Those songs helped me over the hardest period of my life. I can always sing myself happy with them." The spirit which pervades the schools was influential in Danishagriculture, as expressed in the title of Grundtvig's best known hymn, "The Country Church Bells." Under such an influence as this has the agricultural life of Denmark taken the lead over its urban and manufacturing life.

The modifying influence of husbandry upon the church and its teaching is illustrated in the following incident. A farmer in Missouri had a good stand of corn which promised all through the summer to produce an excellent crop. Abundance of sun and rain favored the farmer's hope that his returns would be large, but in the fall the crop proved a failure. The farmer at once cast about for the cause of this disappointment. He had his soil analyzed by a scientist and discovered that it was deficient in nitrogen. The next year he devoted to supplying this lack in the soil and in the year following had an abundant return in corn. "Now that experience turned me away," said he, "from the country church, because the teaching of the country church as I had been accustomed to it was out of harmony with the study of the situation and the conquest over nature. I had been taught in the country church to surrender under such conditions to the will of Providence." The country church of the husbandman must therefore be a church in harmony with the tillage of the soil by science. Like the farm households about it, the church will possess a large wealth of tradition, but the church of the scientific farmer must be open to the teachings of science andmust be responsive, intelligent and alert in the intellectual leadership of the people.

A church of this sort is at West Nottingham, Maryland. The minister Rev. Samuel Polk, had been discouraged by the inattention of his people to his message. He had come to feel that this is an unbelieving age and had surrendered himself to the steadfast performance of his duties, the preaching of the truth faithfully and the ministry to his people so far as they would receive it. In addition he had the task of tilling forty acres of land which belongs to the church. This he was doing faithfully, but without much intelligent interest.

An address on the country church in an agricultural college sent him home with new ideas. He saw that his life as a farmer and as a preacher had to be made one. He determined to preach to farmers and to till his land as an example of Christian husbandry. He began as a scholar by studying the scientific use of his land. He found at once that the farmers about him were forced to study the tillage of their soil, because it had been exhausted of fertility by methods of farming no longer profitable. In the first year the preacher raised, by means of a dust mulch through a dry summer, a crop of one hundred and seventy-five bushels of potatoes. Meantime his preaching had been enlivened with new illustrations and he was enabled to enforce, to the amazement of his hearers, new impressions with old truths. The Scripture teaching which had becomedull and scholastic became live and modern, as he preached the Old Testament to a people who were recognizing the sacredness of land. His audiences began to increase. His influence on his people very shortly passed bounds and reserves. When at the end of the season his potato crop came in, the farmers gave sign of recognizing his leadership as a farmer and as a preacher. Within a year this man had taken a place as a first citizen, which no one else in the community could hold. Because he was a preacher he could become the leading authority upon farming and because he must needs be a farmer he found it possible to preach with greater acceptance.

This pastor gave up the methods of bookish preparation for preaching. He preached as the Old Testament men did, to the occasion and to the event. He spoke to the community as being a man himself immersed in the same life as theirs. On a recent occasion when a woman was very sick in one of the farm houses and had suffered from the neglect of her neighbors, his sermon consisted of an appeal to visit the sick. That afternoon the invalid was called on by thirty-eight people and sent a message before night, begging the minister to hold the people back.

There are a few ministers throughout the country who are successful farmers. Many ministers are speculators in farm land. They belong in the exploiter class. One more instance should be givenof the preacher who promotes agriculture. In a recent discussion the writer was asked, "Do you then believe that the minister should attend the agricultural college," and he replied, "No. The agricultural college should be brought to the country church."

At Bellona, New York, the ministers of two churches, Methodist and Presbyterian, united with their officers in a farmers' club, to which others were admitted. This club under the leadership of Rev. T. Maxwell Morrison, makes the nucleus of its work the study of the agriculture of the neighborhood and the improvement of it. Lecturers from Cornell University are brought throughout the year into the country community to take up in succession the various aspects of farming which may be improved. The market is studied, by chemical analysis the nature of the soil is determined, and the possibilities of the community are raised to their highest value by careful investigation.

This farmers' club has social features as well. Other topics besides farming are occasionally studied but the business of the club is economic promotion of the well-being of the community. Incidentally, it has furnished a social center for the countryside. The churches which have had to do with it have been enlarged, their membership extended and even their gifts to foreign missions have been increased in the period of growth of the farmers' club.

The elements of permanent cultivation of thesoil are found in greater numbers among the Mormons, Scotch Irish Presbyterians, Pennsylvania Germans, who are the best American agriculturists, than among the more unstable populations of farmers. Those elements, however, are, simply speaking, the following.

A certain austerity of life always accompanies successful and permanent agriculture. By this is meant a fixed relation between production and consumption.[15]Successful tillers of the soil labor to produce an abundant harvest. They live at the same time in a meager and sparing manner. Production is with them raised to its highest power and consumption is reduced to its lowest. This means austere living. Such communities are found among the Scotch Irish farmers. Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, is peopled with them and their tillage of the soil has continued through two centuries.

A notable illustration is in Illinois. The permanence of the conditions of country life in this community is indicated by the long pastorate of the minister who has just retired. Coming to the church at forty-eight years of age, after other men have ceased from zealous service, he ministered forty-two years to this parish of farmers, and has recently retired at the age of ninety, leaving the church in ideal condition. "The Middle Creek Church is distinctly a country charge, located in theSouthwest corner of Winnebago Township, of the County of Winnebago.

"The church was organized in June, 1855, in a stone schoolhouse. The present house of worship was erected and dedicated in 1861. Five ministers served the church as supplies until 1865, when the Rev. J. S. Braddock, D. D., became the pastor and carried on a splendid work for forty-two years, when he laid down his pastorate in 1907, at the age of ninety."

"This community was settled by homesteaders and pioneers in the early days of the West. Many of them came from Pennsylvania and some of them were of Scotch descent. The history of the community has been but the history of the development of a fertile Western Prairie country. It was settled by strong Presbyterian men, and their descendants are now the backbone of the community. There has been little change, but steady growth."

The second element in the community of husbandmen is mutual support. Professor Gillin of the University of Iowa has described to me the community of Dunkers whom he has studied,[16]being deeply impressed with their communal solidarity. Whenever a farm is for sale these farmers at the meeting-house confer and decide at once upon a buyer within their own religious fellowship. In the week following the minister or a church member writes back to Pennsylvania and the correspondence is pressed,until a family comes out from the older settlements in the Keystone State to purchase this farm in Iowa and to extend the colony of his fellow Dunkers. Reference is made elsewhere to the communal support given to their own members who suffer economic hardship. The serious tillage of the soil necessarily involves mutual support and the husbandman's life is in his community.

The third factor in communal husbandry is progress. Everyone testifies to the leadership of the "best families" in the transformation of the older modes of the tillage of the soil to the newer. It is impossible for the scientific agriculturist to make much improvement upon a country community until the more progressive spirits and the more open minds have been enlisted. Thereafter the better farming problem is solved. There can be no modern agriculture in a community in which all are equal. The communities of husbandmen will be as sharply differenced from one another, so far as I can see, as men are in the great cities. Leadership is the essential of progress. Gabriel Tardé has clearly demonstrated that only those who are at the top of the social scale can initiate social and economic enterprises. The cultivation of the soil for generations to come must be highly progressive. To recover what we have lost and to restore what has been wasted will exhaust the resources of science and will tax the intelligence of the leaders among husbandmen.

For this reason the ministers, teachers, and social workers in the country should be not discouraged, but hopeful, when confronted with rural landlords and capitalists. The business of the community leader is to enlist in the common task those persons whose privileges are superior and inspire them with a progressive spirit. Without their leadership the community cannot progress. Without their privileges, wealth and superior education, no progress is possible in the country.

If these pages tell the truth, then agriculture is a mode of life fertile in religious and ethical values. But it must be husbandry, not exploitation. Religious farming is a lifelong agriculture, indeed it involves generations, and its serious, devoted spirit waits for the reward, which was planted by the diligent father or grandfather, to be reaped by the son or grandson. Men will not so consecrate themselves to their children's good without the steadying influence of religion. So that agriculture and religion are each the cause, and each the effect, of the other.

If this is true, then the country church should promote the husbandry of the soil. The agricultural college should be brought into the country parish, for the church's sake. Indeed the minister would do well if his scholarship be the learning of the husbandman. No other science has such religious values. No other books have such immediate relation to the well-being of the people. The minister is not ashamed to teach Greek, or Latin,—dead languages. Why should he think it beneath him "to teach the farmer how to farm," provided he can teach the farmer anything? If he be a true scholar, the farmer, who is a practical man, needs his learned co-operation in the most religious of occupations, that the land may be holy.

FOOTNOTES:[12]Rural Economics, by Prof. Thos. Nixon Carver.[13]"The Country-Life Movement," by L. H. Bailey.[14]"Ireland in the New Century," by Sir Horace Plunkett.[15]Professor Thomas Nixon Carver.[16]See Chapter V.

[12]Rural Economics, by Prof. Thos. Nixon Carver.

[13]"The Country-Life Movement," by L. H. Bailey.

[14]"Ireland in the New Century," by Sir Horace Plunkett.

[15]Professor Thomas Nixon Carver.

[16]See Chapter V.

Most of this volume is devoted to the average conditions which prevail throughout the United States. The attempt is made to deal with those causes which are generally operative. It is the writer's opinion that the causes dealt with in other chapters are the prevailing causes of religious and social experience in the most of the United States. As soon as the community, after its early settlement, becomes mature, these causes show the effects here described. But there are exceptions which should be noted and the cause of their different life made clear. These exceptions are represented in the Mormons, the Scottish Presbyterians and the Pennsylvania Germans.

"The best farmers in the country are the Mormons, the Scotch Presbyterians and Pennsylvania Germans." This sentence expresses a general observation of Prof. Carver of Harvard, speaking as an economist. The churches among these three classes of exceptionally prosperous farmers show great tenacity and are free from the weakness which otherwise prevails in the country church. There is a group of causes underlying this exceptional character of the three classes of farmers.

These exceptional farmers are organized in the interest of agriculture. The Mormons represent this organization in the highest degree. Perhaps no other so large or so powerful a body of united farmers is found in the whole country. They have approached the economic questions of farming with determination to till the soil. They distrust city life and condemn it. They teach their children and they discipline themselves to love the country, to appreciate its advantages and to recognize that their own welfare is bound up in their success as farmers, and in the continuance of their farming communities. This agricultural organization centers about their country churches. They have turned the force of religion into a community making power, and from the highest to the lowest of their church officers the Mormon people are devoted to agriculture as a mode of living.

This principle of organizing the community consciously for agriculture results in the second condition of the life of these three exceptional peoples.

They build agricultural communities. The Mormons are organized by an idea and by the power of leadership. They have recruited their population through preachers and missionaries. This new population is woven at once into the fabric of the community. They are not merely employed in the community: they are married to the community. The organization on which the Mormon community is based becomes embodied at once in a society,with its own modes of religious, family, and moral feeling and thought.

These two principles are discovered in the Pennsylvania Germans. For more than two centuries they have continued their settlements in Pennsylvania. They are today a chain of societies loosely related to one another through religious sympathy and a common tradition, but united only in the possession of certain characteristics. They also are an organization for agricultural life, though not so consciously organized as the Mormons. Their societies are older and they have replaced with instinctive processes that which is among the Mormons a matter of logic and shrewd application of principles.

The life of the Pennsylvania Germans is expressed in the community. They have as much aversion to other people as they have fondness for their own. Their religion consists of a set of customs in which to them the character of the Christian is embodied. These customs can be expressed and embodied only in the life of common people working on the land. They make plainness, industry, and patience, austerity of life and other agricultural virtues constitute sanctity. It is impossible to believe sincerely in their mode of life and not be a farmer. It is easy to believe the Pennsylvania Germans' code, if one is a farmer, and it is profitable as well.

The Scotch and the Scotch Irish Presbyterians represent a third principle of agricultural success.Their churches are tenacious and their country communities outlive those of the average type. In them is represented in the highest degree the principle of austerity. By this I mean, as defined by an economist, the custom of living so as to produce much and consume little. These people look upon life with severity. They have little sympathy with the expansive and exuberant life of the young. The men of the community, who are the producers, occupy a relatively greater position than the women, who are the consumers. They exemplify to a slight degree the conscious organization for agriculture, and in a high degree the resultant social life which we have noted among the Mormons and the Pennsylvania Germans; but to the highest degree the Scottish Presbyterians represent this self-denial and rigidity of life—which appears in the others also—and they embody it in their creed. This austerity gives to them a forbidding character, and robs them of some of the esthetic interest attaching to the other two, but it is possible that they are more nearly the ideal type of American farmer because of certain other traits possessed by them.

The Scotch farmer has not in the United States settled in communities or colonies, as he has in Canada, but the typical farming community of this stock is Scotch Irish. As Prof. R. E. Thompson has shown,[17]the emigrants from the North of Ireland, who are themselves of Scotch extraction, have colonizedextensively. That is, they have settled their populations so as to cover a territory and possess it for themselves. But the Scotch, from whom they derive many characteristics, have settled no colony in the world except in the North of Ireland.[18]The peculiarity of these Scotch Irish farming settlements, as shown especially in Pennsylvania, is their capacity to produce leaders in sympathy with the whole of American life. The Mormons produce leaders, but their influence is compromised by religious prejudices. The Pennsylvania Germans have produced no leaders whom they can call their own, and very few writers or educators. The Scotch Irish, on the other hand, considered as farmers, have contributed an extraordinary proportion of the leadership of the United States. They have been able to maintain their own communities in the country and to find for these communities a sufficient leadership, and they have sent forth into the general population a multitude of men for leadership in the army, in the legislatures, in the colleges and universities, and above all, in the pulpit.

In these three types of successful farmers religion is an essential factor. No history can be written of the Mormons, of the "Pennsylvania Dutch" or of the Scotch Presbyterian without recording their religious devotion, their obedience to leaders, to customs and to creed. One cannot live among themwithout feeling the peculiar religious atmosphere which belongs to each of them. They are admirable or obnoxious, according as one likes or dislikes this religious character of theirs, but it pervades the whole life of the community. If it be true that there is no type of farmer—except the scientific farmer of the past few years—who has succeeded as these three types have succeeded, and there is no country community so tenacious as their communities are, and if it be true that these farmers more uniformly than other farmers are religiously organized, then it follows that there is an essential relation so far as American agriculture goes, between successful and permanent agriculture and a religious life. The country church becomes the expression of a permanent and abiding rural prosperity. Agriculture is shown by its very nature to require a religious motive. An element of piety appears to be necessary in the makeup of the successful farmer.

In these three types of successful farmer there appears another principle which is common to them all. They are not only organized for farming, but they are organized as a mutual prosperity association, based on their consciousness of kind. Prof. Gillin has called attention to the habit of the Dunkers in Iowa, who are of the Pennsylvania German sects, by which they extend their farming communities.

"The thing that is needed is to make the church the center of the social life of the community. That is easier where there is but one church than wherethere are several, but federation is not essential. Thought must be taken by the leaders to make the church central in every interest of life. I know of a community where that has been done. It is the community located south of Waterloo, Ia., in Orange Township. It is composed of an up-to-date community of Pennsylvania Dutch Dunkers. From the very first they have made the church central. When these great changes of which I have spoken began to occur, the leaders of that community began to take measures to checkmate the attractions of the towns for their young people. For example, Fourth of July was made a day of celebration at the church. When the people of other communities were flocking to town by hundreds, the youth of that community were gathering, in response to plans well thought out beforehand, to the church grounds where patriotic songs were sung, games were played, a picnic dinner was served, and a general good time was provided for the young. They have also arranged that their young people have a place to come to on Sunday nights where they can meet their friends. The elders look to it that provisions are made for the gatherings of the young people on Sunday so that they shall 'have a good time,' with due arrangements for the boys and girls to get together under proper conditions for their love-making. Even their church 'love feasts' held twice a year, are also neighborhood gatherings for the young people. The church is the center of everything. Is a farmers'institute to be held in the community, or a teachers' institute? The church until very recently was open to it. Is a farm to rent or for sale? At once the leaders get busy with the mail, and soon a family from the East is on their way to take it. This country church has not remained strong and dominant in the country just by accident or even by federation. It has survived because it had wise leaders who have met the changes with new devices to attract the interest of the community and make the church serve the community in all its affairs, but especially on the social side. Such thought takes account of the 'marginal man' too. The hired man and the hired girl, the foreigner and the tramp are welcome there. No difference is made. There is pure democracy. With the growth of the class spirit I do not know how that can survive. These hirelings are not talked down to; they are considered one with the rest. They will some day get enough to buy a farm and become leaders in the community, perhaps. The church is theirs as much as anyone's else. It looks after their interest, not only for the hereafter, but here and now. Under its fostering care they form their life attachments, it provides for their social pleasures, it is the center to which they come to discuss their farming affairs or whatever interests them. And in spite of the fact that the preaching has little contact with life and its interests, so strong is the social spirit that the preaching can be left out of account. What could be accomplished werethe preaching as consciously directed to forwarding the social interests of the community one can only speculate."[19]

Thus they work for the propagation and extension of their own community. The Scotch Presbyterians in like manner favor their own kindred and their kindred in the faith, though, I think, in a lesser degree. The Mormons are consolidated both by formal organization and by instinctive preference for their own in a multitude of co-operating habits, through which they build up their communities and contend with one another against their economic and religious opponents. It is not enough to say that this is clannishness; it is a mingling of kinship and religious preferences. It constitutes the strongest form of agricultural co-operation to be found in the United States.

A Quaker community represents ideal community life. There is none poor. The margin of the community is well cared for by the conscious and deliberate service of the central and leading spirits in the community.

At Quaker Hill, New York, there has been for almost two centuries a community of Friends. The Meeting has now been "laid down" but the customs and manners by which these peculiar people maintain their community life have been wrought into the social texture of the present population of QuakerHill. During two centuries this community has cared for its own members in need. It was not beneath the dignity of the Meeting to raise money and purchase a cow, early in the eighteenth century, to "loan to the widow Irish," and at the close of the nineteenth century, the few Quakers and the many Irish and other "world's people" took part more than once in subscriptions by which the burden was borne, which had fallen upon some workingman or poorer neighbor through the death of horse or cow, or even to bear the expense incidental to the death of his child.

These Quakers co-operated in their business life. They made themselves responsible that no member of their Meeting should be long in debt. From 1740 for 100 years and more, the records of the Meeting show that marriage was made impossible and other vital experiences were forbidden by the Meeting, unless the individual Quaker paid his debts and maintained his business on a level dictated by the common opinion of the Quaker body.[20]

In 1767, Oblong Meeting of Quaker Hill, New York, began the legislative opposition of the Society of Friends to the institution of slavery. This great economic movement expressed the degree to which the Quaker discipline merged the religious life in the economic life. This consolidation of religious and economic life was essential in the community building of the Quakers.

It is surprising to many to discover that the "Pennsylvania Dutch" were part of the same movement of population which brought the Quakers into Pennsylvania. William Penn spoke German as well as English. His mother was a German. When he inherited his father's claim against the British Crown, and received from Charles the Second the grant of that extensive territory in America on which he launched his Holy Experiment, he began to advertise and to seek for settlers on the Continent as well as in England.

William Penn was a Quaker, and on the Continent he found immediate response in the greatest number of cases among the various branches of Mennonites, Anabaptist, and other sects, who shared a common group of beliefs and experienced at this time a common persecution. William Penn, therefore, reaped a harvest of responses in the territory between the mouth of the Rhine and the Alps. His proposal made its own selection, and brought to America a population calculated like the Quaker population for the building of communities. The largest single contribution was made by the Palatinates, who were at that period undergoing extreme persecution.

The communities founded within the first century after the opening of Pennsylvania have remained to the present day, and the earliest establishments of Mennonites and Quaker communities in Pennsylvania have been duplicated in the westward streamof immigration, especially in Ohio and in Iowa. These people are roughly called the "Pennsylvania Dutch." Even when one meets them in Michigan, Iowa or Minnesota, this name clings to them, and the form of social organization which they elaborated in Eastern Pennsylvania still persists.

This social organization has varying characteristics. It is somewhat difficult to analyze the intricate windings and entanglements of doctrinal and practical belief in custom among the Mennonites, Amish and Dunkers. Old school and new school have been formed in almost every one of these sects. Eccentric and peculiar principles of belief in organization have formed the lesser and the least permanent groups; but there is a common principle in them all. Their ability to form communities in the midst of hostile populations and adverse conditions has been due to the co-operation between their religious and their economic habits.

The "Pennsylvania Dutch" have simple doctrinal characteristics. They have never worked out in detail the logic of their beliefs. They put the weight of their organization upon practical customs, as the Quakers did. In some cases, this applied to clothing; in some or all of these sects to the manner of speech; to family customs; but, the one peculiar principle in it all, which has been vital to the success, to the persistence, to the wide extension of these sectarian groups has been that the religious life has penetrated the economic life. They have not permitted members of their community to be poor. They have turned the attention of their religious sympathies to the economic margin of the community. They have enforced the payment of debts, and they have governed and controlled marriage conditions. By subtle enforcement of custom having the power of laws, they have governed the community in its vital relations, and perfected the system by which the poorest man shall make his living and by which the richest man shall make his fortune.

Recently, I was in Lancaster, Penn., and passing through a market I was told by a resident that all the truck farming of the market for that city had come into the hands of the Amish, and my friend added, "If you go at an early hour to buy, and ask the price of certain vegetables, you will probably be told, 'We do not know the price yet; we will have to wait until all the farmers come in.'" That is, after two hundred and more years of living as farmers in this section of Pennsylvania, these sectarians maintain their community life, co-operate in the monopolizing of an industry, and in fixing the price of the monopolized product in the markets of a Pennsylvania city.

This survey of community-building peoples in America may throw light upon the recommendations of Sir Horace Plunkett for the organization of country life upon an economic basis. The present writer heartily agrees with him that the center of the community must be economic. He says that "Better business must come first" in constructive policies for American country life, but "by failing to combine, American and British farmers persistently disobey an accepted law."

Social division is the impending danger which threatens the future of the American community in the country. For if the analysis of agricultural success in this chapter is correct, then the farmer is exceedingly dependent upon his neighbor, and the permanence of rural populations depends upon the social unity of the farmers in the community. The highest expression of this social unity is in the farmer's religion. Worship thus becomes a symbol of agricultural prosperity. The writers and the orators have then truly spoken who symbolized the beauty of rural life in the church steeple. The farmer himself seems to recognize, in the church spire rising above the roofs of the hamlet, the symbol of prosperous and satisfactory life in the country.

As the tillers of the soil come to the necessity of co-operation in the new order of life in the country, as the old isolation passes away and the modern farmer comes to recognize his necessary dependence upon other farmers in the community, a common place of worship will become necessary to the community. One church will of necessity express the life of the community and the periodic meeting of all the people in one house of worship will be the highest and most essential symbol of the feelingand the thought and the aspirations of that community after true prosperity and permanence.

The purpose of this chapter has been to present the general characteristics of the most exceptional communities in the country. These are Mormon, Scotch Presbyterian and Pennsylvania German. By their very names they indicate religious organization of the community and "birthright membership" associations. They are grouped under the one principle, that in them the religious organization is an expression of their social economy. Their social and economic life is under the domination of their religion.

These farmers are organized in the interest of agriculture. The resultant social life constitutes a most intense organization in which voluntary and conscious combination matures in instinctive union embodied in blood relationship, neighborliness and economic union. These populations show the correspondence between economic and religious austerity. Thrift takes the form of dogmatic repression and finally their organization and their relationship express themselves in organized efforts for the well-being of the community. They deliberately as well as instinctively co-operate.

It is the writer's belief that these exceptional communities exhibit the principles on which American life must be organized, if the farmer is to be a success, if his schools are to progress, his churches to be maintained, and if the country community isto be a good place to live in. None of these populations can be imitated. It would be impossible for a community to take over their modes any more than it could imbibe their motives. The study of them throws light upon the problem of country life in America. Above all things it illustrates the especial union of the country church with the social economy of the farmer and his household. It shows that the life of country people is co-operative, that it is undermined by division and disunion and that in the open country where man is least seen his society is most evident. The dependence of each man upon his neighbor is increased in modern times by the thinning out of the rural population and the increased economic burden laid upon the farmer.

Finally, the exceptional populations present an exceptional victory over economic and natural forces. They abolish poverty within their own bounds. Every one of the communities just described turns the power of its common organization upon the problem of maintaining the lower margin of the community. They who are in danger of falling behind are sustained and carried on. None in these communities is permitted to fall into pauperism. The workingman without capital, whether he be in their meetings or only employed on their farms, is kept from want. The widow with her little house and one cow is insured against the loss of any feature of her small property. This seems to me to be the greatest triumph of these communities.It is the test, I am convinced, of their organizations and of their success. In this they demonstrate one of the greatest possibilities of country life. They show that in the open country it is possible for men to live without the suffering and degradation of poverty.

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