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SOCIETY
ITS ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT
BY
HENRY KALLOCH ROWE, Ph.D.
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND SOCIOLOGY IN NEWTON
THEOLOGICAL INSTITUTION
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK CHICAGO BOSTON
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
PREFACE
In studying biology it is convenient to make cross-sections of
laboratory specimens in order to determine structure, and to watch
plants and animals grow in order to determine function. There seems to
be no good reason why social life should not be studied in the same
way. To take a child in the home and watch it grow in the midst of the
life of the family, the community, and the larger world, and to cut
across group life so as to see its characteristics, its interests, and
its organization, is to study sociology in the most natural way and to
obtain the necessary data for generalization. To attempt to study
sociological principles without this preliminary investigation is to
confuse the student and leave him in a sea of vague abstractions.
It is not because of a lack of appreciation of the abstract that the
emphasis of this book is on the concrete. It is written as an
introduction to the study of the principles of sociology, and it may
well be used as a prelude to the various social sciences. It is
natural that trained sociologists should prefer to discuss the
profound problems of their science, and should plunge their pupils
into material for study where they are soon beyond their depth; much
of current life seems so obvious and so simple that it is easy to
forget that the college man or woman has never looked upon it with a
discriminating eye or with any attempt to understand its meaning. If
this is true of the college student, it is unquestionably true of the
men and women of the world. The writer believes that there is need of
a simple, untechnical treatment of human society, and offers this book
as a contribution to the practical side of social science. He writes
with the undergraduate continually in mind, trying to see through his
eyes and to think with his mind, and the references are to books that
will best meet his needs and that are most readily accessible. It is
expected that the pupil will read widely, and that the instructor will
show how principles and laws are formulated from the multitude of
observations of social phenomena. The last section of the book sums up
briefly some of the scientific conclusions that are drawn from the
concrete data, and prepares the way for a more detailed and technical
study.
If sociology is to have its rightful place in the world it must become
a science for the people. It must not be permitted to remain the
possession of an aristocracy of intellect. The heart of thousands of
social workers who are trying to reform society and cure its ills is
throbbing with sympathy and hope, but there is much waste of energy
and misdirection of zeal because of a lack of understanding of the
social life that they try to cure. They and the people to whom they
minister need an interpretation of life in social terms that they can
understand. Professional persons of all kinds need it. A world that is
on the verge of despair because of the breakdown of harmonious human
relations needs it to reassure itself of the value and the possibility
of normal human relations. Doubtless the presentation of the subject
is imperfect, but if it meets the need of those who find difficulty in
using more technical discussions and opens up a new field of interest
to many who hitherto have not known the difference between sociology
and socialism, the effort at interpretation will have been worth
while.
HENRY K. ROWE
NEWTON CENTRE, MASSACHUSETTS.
CONTENTS
PART ONE--INTRODUCTORY
CHAPTER PAGE
I. CHARACTERISTICS OF SOCIAL LIFE 1
II. UNORGANIZED GROUP LIFE 16
PART TWO--LIFE IN THE FAMILY GROUP
III. FOUNDATIONS OF THE FAMILY 24
IV. THE HISTORY OF THE FAMILY 29
V. THE MAKING OF THE HOME 37
VI. CHILDREN IN THE HOME 42
VII. WORK, PLAY, AND EDUCATION 51
VIII. HOME ECONOMICS 60
IX. CHANGES IN THE FAMILY 67
X. DIVORCE 74
XI. THE SOCIAL EVIL 81
XII. CHARACTERISTICS AND PRINCIPLES 88
PART THREE--SOCIAL LIFE IN THE RURAL COMMUNITY
XIII. THE COMMUNITY AND ITS HISTORY 91
XIV. THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE 99
XV. OCCUPATIONS 104
XVI. RECREATION 108
XVII. RURAL INSTITUTIONS 115
XVIII. RURAL EDUCATION 120
XIX. THE NEW RURAL SCHOOL 127
XX. RURAL GOVERNMENT 136
XXI. HEALTH AND BEAUTY 144
XXII. MORALS IN THE RURAL COMMUNITY 151
XXIII. THE RURAL CHURCH 156
XXIV. A NEW TYPE OF RURAL INSTITUTION 162
PART FOUR--SOCIAL LIFE IN THE CITY
XXV. FROM COUNTRY TO CITY 169
XXVI. THE MANUFACTURING ENTERPRISE 180
XXVII. THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM 186
XXVIII. EXCHANGE AND TRANSPORTATION 201
XXIX. THE PEOPLE WHO WORK 212
XXX. THE IMMIGRANT 221
XXXI. HOW THE WORKING PEOPLE LIVE 230
XXXII. THE DIVERSIONS OF THE WORKING PEOPLE 238
XXXIII. CRIME AND ITS CURE 248
XXXIV. AGENCIES OF CONTROL 256
XXXV. DIFFICULTIES OF THE PEOPLE WHO WORK 263
XXXVI. CHARITY AND THE SETTLEMENTS 271
XXXVII. EDUCATIONAL AGENCIES 280
XXXVIII. THE CHURCH 287
XXXIX. THE CITY IN THE MAKING 294
PART FIVE--SOCIAL LIFE IN THE NATION
XL. THE BUILDING OF A NATION 300
XLI. ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL FUNCTIONS OF THE PEOPLE AS
A NATION 305
XLII. THE STATE 313
XLIII. PROBLEMS OF THE NATION 324
XLIV. INTERNATIONALISM 333
PART SIX--SOCIAL ANALYSIS
XLV. PHYSICAL AND PERSONAL FACTORS IN THE LIFE OF
SOCIETY 340
XLVI. SOCIAL PSYCHIC FACTORS 348
XLVII. SOCIAL THEORIES 357
XLVIII. THE SCIENCE OF SOCIOLOGY 364
INDEX 373
SOCIETY: ITS ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT
PART I--INTRODUCTORY
CHAPTER I
CHARACTERISTICS OF SOCIAL LIFE
1. =Man and His Social Relations.=--A study of society starts with the
obvious fact that human beings live together. The hermit is abnormal.
However far back we go in the process of human evolution we find the
existence of social relations, and sociability seems a quality
ingrained in human nature. Every individual has his own personality
that belongs to him apart from every other individual, but the
perpetuation and development of that personality is dependent on
relations with other personalities and with the physical environment
which limits his activity.
As an individual his primary interest is in self, but he finds by
experience that he cannot be independent of others. His impulses, his
feelings, and his ideas are due to the relations that he has with that
which is outside of himself. He may exercise choice, but it is within
the limits set by these outside relations. He may make use of what
they can do for him or he may antagonize them, at least he cannot
ignore them. Experience determines how the individual may best adapt
himself to his environment and adapt the environment to his own needs,
and he thus establishes certain definite relationships. Any group of
individuals, who have thus consciously established relationships with
one another and with their social environment is a society. The
relations through whose channels the interplay of social forces is
constantly going on make up the social organization. The
readjustments of these relations for the better adaptation of one
individual to another, or of either to their environment, make up the
process of social development. A society which remains in equilibrium
is termed static, that which is changing is called dynamic.
2. =The Field and the Purpose of Sociology.=--Life in society is the
subject matter of sociological study. Sociology is concerned with the
origin and development of that life, with its present forms and
activities, and with their future development. It finds its material
in the every-day experiences of men, women, and children in whatever
stage of progress they may be; but for practical purposes its chief
interest is in the normal life of civilized communities, together with
the past developments and future prospects of that life. The purpose
of sociological study is to discover the active workings and
controlling principles of life, its essential meaning, and its
ultimate goal; then to apply the principles, laws, and ideals
discovered to the imperfect social process that is now going on in the
hope of social betterment.
3. =Source Material for Study.=--The source material of social life
lies all about us. For its past history we must explore the primitive
conduct of human beings as we learn it from anthropology and
archæology, or as we infer it from the lowest human races or from
animal groups that bear the nearest physical and mental resemblance to
mankind. For present phenomena we have only to look about us, and
having seen to attempt their interpretation. Life is mirrored in the
daily press. Pick up any newspaper and examine its contents. It
reveals social characteristics both local and wide-spread.
4. =Social Characteristics--Activity.=--The first fact that stands out
clearly as a characteristic of social life is _activity_. Everybody
seems to be doing something. There are a few among the population,
like vagrants and the idle rich, who are parasites, but even they
sustain relations to others that require a certain sort of effort.
Activity seems fundamental. It needs but a hasty survey to show how
general it is. Farmers are cultivating their broad acres, woodsmen are
chopping and hewing in the forest, miners are drilling in underground
chambers, and the products of farm, forest, and mine are finding their
way by river, road, and rail to the great distributing centres. In the
town the machinery of mill and factory keeps busy thousands of
operatives, and turns out manufactured products to compete with the
products of the soil for right of way to the cities of the New World
and the Old. Busiest of all are the throngs that thread the streets of
the great centres, and pour in and out of stores and offices. Men rush
from one person to another, and interview one after another the
business houses with which they maintain connection; women swarm about
the counters of the department stores and find at the same time social
satisfaction and pecuniary reward; children in hundreds pour into the
intellectual hopper of the schoolroom and from there to the
playground. Everybody is busy, and everybody is seeking personal
profit and satisfaction.
5. =Mental Activity.=--There is another kind of activity of which
these economic and social phases are only the outward expression, an
activity of the mind which is busy continually adjusting the needs of
the individual or social organism and the environment to each other.
Some acts are so instinctive or habitual that they do not require
conscious mental effort; others are the result of reasoning as to this
or that course of action. The impulse of the farmer may be to remain
inactive, or the schoolboy may feel like going fishing; the call of
nature stimulates the desire; but reason reaches out and takes control
and directs outward activity into proper channels. On the other hand,
reason fortifies worthy inclinations. The youth feels an inclination
to stretch his muscles or to use his brains, and reason re-enforces
feeling. The physical need of food, clothing, and shelter acts as a
goad to drive a man to work, and reason sanctions his natural
response. This mental activity guides not only individual human
conduct but also that of the group. Instinct impels the man to defend
his family from hardship or his clan from defeat, and reason confirms
the impulse. His sociable disposition urges him to co-operate in
industry, and reason sanctions his inclination. The history of society
reveals an increasing influence of the intellect in thus directing
instinct and feeling. It is a law of social activity that it tends to
become more rational with the increase of education and experience.
But it is never possible to determine the quantitative influence of
the various factors that enter into a decision, or to estimate the
relative pressure of the forces that urge to activity. Alike in mental
and in physical activity there is a union of all the causative
factors. In an act of the will impulse, feeling, and reflection all
have their part; in physical activity it is difficult to determine how
compelling is any one of the various forces, such as heredity and
environment, that enter into the decision.
6. =The Valuation of Social Activities.=--The importance to society of
all these activities is not to be measured by their scope or by their
vigor or volume, but by the efficiency with which they perform their
function, and the value of the end they serve. Domestic activities,
such as the care of children, may be restricted to the home, and a
woman's career may seem to be blighted thereby, but no more important
work can be accomplished than the proper training of the child.
Political activity may be national in scope, but if it is vitiated by
corrupt practices its value is greatly diminished. Certain activities
carry with them no important results, because they have no definite
function, but are sporadic and temporary, like the coming together of
groups in the city streets, mingling in momentary excitement and
dissolving as quickly.
The true valuation of activities is to be determined by their social
utility. The employment of working men in the brewing of beer or the
manufacture of chewing-gum may give large returns to an individual or
a corporation, but the social utility of such activity is small.
Business enterprise is naturally self-centred; the first interest of
every individual or group is self-preservation, and business must pay
for itself and produce a surplus for its owner or it is not worth
continuing from the economic standpoint; but a business enterprise
has no right selfishly to disregard the interests of its employees and
of the public. Its social value must be reckoned as small or great,
not by the amount of business carried on, but by its contribution to
human welfare.
Take a department store as an illustration. It may be highly
profitable to its owners, giving large returns on the investment,
while distributing cheap and defective goods and paying its employees
less than a decent living wage. Its value is to be determined as small
because its social utility is of little worth. When the value of
activity is estimated on this basis, it will be seen that among the
noblest activities are those of the philanthropist who gives his time
and interest without stint to the welfare of other folk; of the
minister who lends himself to spiritual ministry, and the physician
who gives up his own comfort and sometimes his own life to save those
who are physically ill; of the housewife who bears and rears children
and keeps the home as her willing contribution to the life of the
world; and of the nurses, companions, and teachers who are mothers,
sisters, and wives to those who need their help.
7. =Results of Activity.=--The product of activity is achievement. The
workers of the world are continually transforming energy into material
products. To clear away a forest, to raise a thousand bushels of
grain, to market a herd of cattle or a car-load of shoes, to build a
sky-scraper or an ocean liner, is an achievement. But it is a greater
achievement to take a child mind and educate it until it learns how to
cultivate the soil profitably, how to make a machine or a building of
practical value, and how to save and enrich life.
The history of human folk shows that achievement has been gradual, and
much of it without conscious planning, but the great inventors, the
great architects, the great statesmen have been men of vision, and
definite purpose is sure to fill a larger place in the story of
achievement. Purposive progress rather than unconscious, telic rather
than genetic, is the order of the evolution of society.
The highest achievement of the race is its moral uplift. The man or
woman who has a noble or kindly thought, who has consecrated life to
unselfish ends and has spent constructive effort for the common good,
is the true prince among men. He may be a leader upon whom the common
people rely in time of stress, or only a private in the ranks--he is a
hero, for his achievement is spiritual, and his mastery of the inner
life is his supreme victory.
8. =Association.=--A second characteristic of social life is that
activity is not the activity of isolated individuals, but it is
_activity in association_. Human beings work together, play together,
talk together, worship together, fight together. If they happen to act
alone, they are still closely related to one another. Examine the
daily newspaper record and see how few items have to do with
individuals acting in isolation. Even if a person sits down alone to
think, his mind is working along the line on which it received the
push of another mind shortly before. A large part of the work of the
world is done in concert. The ship and the train have their crew, the
factory its hands, the city police and fire departments their force.
Men shout together on the ball field, and sing folk-songs in chorus.
As an audience they listen to the play or the sermon, as a mob they
rush the jail to lynch a prisoner, or as a crowd they riot in high
carnival on Mardi Gras. The normal individual belongs to a family, a
community, a political party, a nation; he may belong, besides, to a
church, a few learned societies, a trade-union, or any number of clubs
or fraternities.
Human beings associate because they possess common interests and means
of intercourse. They are affected by the same needs. They have the
power to think in the same grooves and to feel a common sympathy.
Members of the same race or community have a common fund of custom or
tradition; they are conscious of like-mindedness in morals and
religion; they are subject to the same kind of mental suggestion; they
have their own peculiar language and literature. As communication
between different parts of the world improves and ability to speak in
different languages increases, there comes a better understanding
among the world's peoples and an increase of mutual sympathy.
Experience has taught the value of association. By it the individual
makes friends, gains in knowledge, enlarges interests. Knowing this,
he seeks acquaintances, friends, and companions. He finds the world
richer because of family, community, and national life, and if
necessary he is willing to sacrifice something of his own comfort and
peace for the advantages that these associations will bring.
9. =Causes of Association.=--It is the nature of human beings to enjoy
company, to be curious about what they see and hear, to talk together,
and to imitate one another. These traits appear in savages and even in
animals, and they are not outgrown with advance in civilization. These
inborn instincts are modified or re-enforced by the conscious workings
of the mind, and are aided or restricted by external circumstances. It
is a natural instinct for men to seek associates. They feel a liking
for one and a dislike for another, and select their friends
accordingly. But the choice of most men is within a restricted field,
for their acquaintance is narrow. College men are thrown with a
certain set or join a certain fraternity. They play on the same team
or belong to the same class. They may have chosen their college, but
within that institution their environment is limited. It is similar in
the world at large. Individuals do not choose the environment in which
at first they find themselves, and the majority cannot readily change
their environment. Within its natural limits and the barriers which
caste or custom have fixed, children form their play groups according
to their liking for each other, and adults organize their societies
according to their mutual interests or common beliefs. With increasing
acquaintance and ease of communication and transportation there comes
a wider range of choice, and environment is less controlling. The will
of the individual becomes freer to choose friends and associates
wherever he finds them. He may have widely scattered business and
political connections. He may be a member of an international
association. He may even take a wife from another city or a distant
nation. Mental interaction flows in international channels.
10. =Forms of Association.=--It is possible to classify all forms of
association in two groups as natural, like a gang of boys, or
artificial, like a political party. Or it is possible to arrange them
according to the interests they serve, as economic, scientific, and
the like. Again they may be classified according to thoroughness of
organization, ranging from the crowd to the closely knit corporation.
But whatever the form may be, the value of the association is to be
judged according to the degree of social worth, as in the case of
activities. On that basis a company of gladiators or a pugilist's club
ranks below a village improvement society; that in turn yields in
importance to a learned association of physicians discussing the best
means of relieving human suffering. In the slow process of social
evolution those forms that do not contribute to the welfare of the
race will lose their place in society.
11. =Results of Association.=--The results of association are among
the permanent assets of the race. Man has become what he is because of
his social relations, and further progress is dependent upon them. The
arts that distinguish man from his inferiors are the products of
inter-communication and co-operation. The art of conversation and the
accompanying interchange of ideas and thought stimulus are to be
numbered among the benefits. The art of conciliation that calms
ruffled tempers and softens conflict belongs here. The art of
co-operation, that great engine of achievement, depends on learning
through social contact how to think and feel sympathetically. Finally,
there is the product of social organization. Chance meetings and
temporary assemblies are of small value, though they must be noted as
phenomena of association. More important are the fixed institutions
that have grown out of relations continually tested by experience
until they have become sanctioned by society as indispensable. Such
are the organized forms of business, education, government, and
religion. But all groups require organization of a sort. The gang has
its recognized leader, the club its officers and by-laws. Even such
antisocial persons as outlaws frequently move in bands and have their
chiefs. Organization goes far to determine success in war or
politics, in work or play. Like achievement, organization is the
result of a gradual growth in collective experience, and must be
continually adapted to the changing requirements of successive periods
by the wisdom of master minds. It must also gradually include larger
groups within its scope until, like the International Young Men's
Christian Association or the Universal Postal Union, it reaches out to
the ends of the earth.
12. =Control.=--The public mirror of the press reveals a third
characteristic of social life. Activity and association are both under
_control_. Activity would result in exploitation of the weak by the
strong, and finally in anarchy, if there were no exercise of control.
Under control activities are co-ordinated, individuals and classes are
brought to work in co-operation and not in antagonism, and under an
enlightened and sanctioned authority life becomes richer, fuller, and
more truly free.
Social control begins in the individual mind. Instincts and feelings
are held in the leash of rational thought. Intelligence is the guide
to action. Control is exerted externally upon the individual from
early childhood. Parental authority checks the independence of the
child and compels conformity to the will of his elders. Family
tradition makes its power felt in many homes, and family pride is a
compelling reason for moral rectitude. Every member of the family is
restrained by the rights of the others, and often yields his own
preferences for the common good. When the child goes out from the home
he is still under restraint, and rigid regulations become even more
pronounced. The rules of the schoolroom permit little freedom. The
teacher's authority is absolute during the hours when school is in
session. In the city when school hours are over there are municipal
regulations enforced by watchful police that restrict the activity of
a boy in the streets, and if he visits the playground he is still
under the reign of law. Similarly the adult is hedged about by social
control. Custom decrees that he must dress appropriately for the
street, that he must pass to the right when he meets another person,
and that he must raise his hat to an acquaintance of the opposite sex.
The college youth finds it necessary to acquaint himself with the
customs and traditions that have been handed down from class to class,
and these must be observed under pain of ostracism. Faculty and
trustees stand in the way of his unlimited enjoyment. His moral
standards are affected by the atmosphere of the chapter house, the
athletic field, and the examination hall. In business and civil
relations men find themselves compelled to recognize laws that have
been formulated for the public good. State and national governments
have been able to assert successfully their right to control corporate
action, however large and powerful the corporation might be. But
government itself is subject to the will of the people in a democratic
nation, and public opinion sways officials and determines local and
national policies. Religious beliefs have the force of law upon whole
peoples like the Mohammedans.
Social control is exercised in large measure without the mailed fist.
Moral suasion tends to supersede the birch stick and the policeman's
billy. Within limits there is freedom of action, and the tacit appeal
of society is to a man's self-control. But the newspaper with its
sensation and police-court gossip never lets us forget that back of
self-control is the court of judicial authority and the bar of public
opinion.
The result of the constant exercise of control is the existence of
order. The normal individual becomes accustomed to restraint from his
earliest years, and it is only the few who are disorderly in the
schoolroom, on the streets, or in the broader relations of life.
Criminals make up a small part of the population; anarchy never has
appealed to many as a social philosophy; unconventional people are
rare enough to attract special attention.
13. =Change.=--A fourth characteristic of social life is _change_.
Control tends to keep society static, but there are powerful dynamic
forces that are continually upsetting the equilibrium. In spite of the
natural conservatism of institutions and agencies of control, group
life is as continually changing as the physical elements in nature.
Continued observation recorded over a considerable period of time
reveals changing habits, changing occupations, changing interests,
even changing laws and governments. Inside the group individuals are
continually readjusting their modes of thought and activity to one
another, and between groups there is a similar adjustment of social
habits. Without such change there can be no progress. War or other
catastrophe suddenly alters wide human relations. External influences
are constantly making their impression upon us, stimulating us to
higher attainment or dragging us down to individual and group
degeneration.
14. =Causes of Change.=--The factors that enter into social life to
produce change are numerous. Conflict of ideas among individuals and
groups compels frequent readjustment of thought. The free expression
of opinion in public debate and through the press is a powerful
factor. Travel alters modes of conduct, and wholesale migration
changes the characteristics of large groups of population. Family
habits change with accumulation of wealth or removal from the farm to
the city. The introduction of the telephone and the free mail delivery
with its magazines and daily newspapers has altered currents of
thought in the country. Summer visitors have introduced country and
city to each other; the automobile has enlarged the horizon of
thousands. New modes of agriculture have been adopted through the
influence of a state agricultural college, new methods of education
through a normal school, new methods of church work through a
theological seminary. Whole peoples, as in China and Turkey, have been
profoundly affected by forces that compelled change. Growth in
population beyond comfortable means of subsistence has set tribes in
motion; the need of wider markets has compelled nations to try
forcible expansion into disputed areas. The desire for larger
opportunities has sent millions of emigrants from Europe to America,
and has been changing rapidly the complexion of the crowds that walk
the city streets and enter the polling booths. Certain outstanding
personalities have moulded life and thought through the centuries,
and have profoundly changed whole regions of country. Mohammed and
Confucius put their personal stamp upon the Orient; Cæsar and Napoleon
made and remade western Europe; Adam Smith and Darwin swayed economic
and scientific England; Washington and Lincoln were makers of America.
Through such social processes as these--through unconscious
suggestion, through communication and discussion that mould public
opinion, through changes in environment and the influence of new
leaders of thought and action--the evolution of folk life has carried
whole races, sometimes to oblivion, but generally out of savagery and
barbarism into a material and cultural civilization.
15. =Results of the Process.=--The results of the process of social
change are so far-reaching as to be almost incalculable. Particularly
marked are the changes of the last hundred years. The best way to
appreciate them is by a comparison of periods. Take college life in
America as an example. Scores of colleges now large and prosperous
were not then in existence, and even in the older colleges conditions
were far inferior to what they are in the newer and smaller colleges
to-day. There were few preparatory schools, and the young man--of
course there were no college women--fitted himself as best he could by
private instruction. To reach the college it was necessary to drive by
stage or private conveyance to the college town, to find rooms in an
ill-equipped dormitory or private house, to be content with plain food
for the body and a narrow course of study for the mind. The method of
instruction was tedious and uninspiring; text-books were unattractive
and dull. There were no libraries worthy of the name, no laboratories
or observatories for research. Scientific instruction was conspicuous
by its absence; the social sciences were unknown. Gymnasiums had not
been evolved from the college wood-pile; intercollegiate sports were
unknown. Glee clubs, dramatic societies, college journalism, and the
other arts and pastimes that give color and variety to modern
university life were unknown.
In the same period modes of thinking have changed. Scientific
discoveries and the principles that have been based on them have
wrought a revolution. Evolution has become a word to conjure with.
Scholars think in terms of process. Biological investigation has opened
wide the whole realm of life and emphasized the place of development in
the physical organism. Psychological study has changed the basis of
philosophy. Sociology has come with new interpretations of human life.
Rapid changes are taking place at the present time in education, in
religion, and in social adjustments. The rate of progress varies in
different parts of the world; there are handicaps in the form of race
conservatism, local and individual self-satisfaction and independence,
maladjustments and isolation; sometimes the process leads along a
downward path. On the whole, however, the history is a story of
progress.
16. =Weaknesses.=--In the thinking of not a few persons the handicaps
that lie in the path of social development bulk larger than the
engines of progress. They are pessimistic over the _weaknesses_ that
constitute a fifth characteristic of social life. These are certainly
not to be overlooked, but they are an inevitable result of incomplete
adaptations during a constant process of change. There are numerous
illustrations of weakness. Social activity is not always wisely
directed. Association frequently develops antagonism instead of
co-operation. In trade and industry individuals do not "play fair."
Corporations are sometimes unjust. Politics are liable to become
corrupt. In the various associations of home and community life
indifference, cruelty, unchastity, and crime add to the burdens of
poverty, disease, and wretchedness. A yellow press mirrors a
scandalous amount of intrigue, immorality, and misdemeanor. Government
abuses its power; public opinion is intolerant and unjust; fashion is
tyrannical; law is uncompromising. In times like our own economic
interests frequently overshadow cultural interests. In college
estimation athletics appear to bulk larger than the curriculum. In the
public mind prejudice and hasty judgments take precedence over
carefully weighed opinions and judicial decisions. Conservatism blocks
the wheels of progress, or radicalism, in its unbalanced enthusiasm,
destroys by injudiciousness the good that has been gradually
accumulating. The social machinery gets out of gear, or proves
inefficient for the new burdens that frequently are imposed upon it.
The social order is not perfect and needs occasional amendment.
17. =Resultant Problems.=--These weaknesses precipitate specific
social problems. Some of them are bound up in the family
relationships, like the better regulation of marriage and divorce, the
prevention of desertion, and the rights of women and children. Others
are questions that relate to industry, such as the rights of employees
with reference to wages and hours of labor, or the unhealthy
conditions in which working people live and toil. Certain matters are
issues in every community. It is not easy to decide what shall be done
with the poor, the unfortunate, and the weak-willed members of
society. Some problems are peculiar to the country, the city, or the
nation, like the need of rural co-operation, the improvement of
municipal efficiency, or the regulation of immigration. A few are
international, like the scourge of war. Besides such specific problems
there are always general issues demanding the attention of social
thinkers and reformers, such as the adjustment of individual rights to
social duties, and the improvement of moral and religious efficiency.
18. =The Social Groups.=--A broad survey of the current life of
society leads naturally to the questions: How is this social life
organized? and How did it come to be? The answers to these questions
appear in certain social groupings, each of which has a history and
life of its own, but is only a segment of the whole circle of active
association. These groupings include the family, the rural community,
the city, and the nation. In the natural environment of the home
social life finds its apprenticeship. When the child has become in a
measure socialized, he enters into the larger relations of the
neighborhood. Half the people of the United States live in country
communities, but an increasing proportion of the population is found
in the midst of the associations and activities of the larger civic
community. All are citizens or wards of the nation, and have a part
in the social life of America. Consciously or not they have still
wider relations in a world life that is continually growing in social
content. Each of these groups reveals the same fundamental
characteristics, but each has its peculiar forms and its dominant
energies; each has its perplexing problems and each its possibilities
of greater good. Through the environment the forces of the mind are
moulding a life that is gradually becoming more nearly like the social
ideal.
READING REFERENCES
GIDDINGS: _Principles of Sociology_, pages 363-399.
SMALL AND VINCENT: _Introduction to the Study of Society_, pages
237-240.
DEALEY: _Sociology_, pages 58-73.
ROSS: _Social Control_, pages 49-61.
ROSS: _Foundations of Sociology_, pages 182-255.
BLACKMAR AND GILLIN: _Outlines of Sociology_, pages 271-282.
CHAPTER II
UNORGANIZED GROUP LIFE
19. =Temporary Groups.=--A study of the organization and development
of social life is mainly a study of the mental and physical activities
of individuals associated in permanent groups. Conditions change and
there is a continual shifting of contacts as in a kaleidoscope, but
the group is a fixed institution in the life of society. But besides
the permanent groups there are temporary unorganized associations that
have a place in social life too important to be overlooked. They vary
in size from a chance meeting of two or three friends who stop on the
street corner and separate after a few minutes of conversation, to the
great mass-meeting, that is called for a special purpose and interests
a whole neighborhood, but adjourns _sine die_. Such groups are subject
to the same physical and psychic forces that affect the family, the
community, and the nation, but they tend to act more on impulse,
because there is no habitual subordination to an established rule or
order. A simple illustration will show the influences that work to
produce these temporary groupings and that govern conduct.
20. =How the Group Forms.=--Imagine a working man on the morning of a
holiday. Without a fixed purpose how he will spend the day, his mind
works along the line of least resistance, inviting physical or mental
stimulus, and sensitive to respond. He is not accustomed to remain at
home, nor does he wish to be alone. He is used to the companionship of
the factory, and instinctively he longs for the association of his
kind. He is most likely to meet his acquaintances on the street, and
he feels the pull of the out-of-doors. The influences of instinct and
habit impel him to activity, and he makes a definite choice to leave
the house. Once on the street he feels the zest of motion and the
anticipation of the pleasure that he will find in the companionship
of his fellows. Reason assures him from past experience that he has
made a good choice, and on general principles asserts that exercise is
good for him, whatever may be the social result of his stroll. Thus
the various factors that produce individual activity are at work in
him. They are similarly at work in others of his kind. Presently these
factors will bring them together.
Unconsciously the working man and his friend are moving toward each
other. The attention and discrimination of each man is brought into
play with every person that he meets, but there is no recognition of
acquaintance until each comes within the range of vision of the other.
They greet each other with a hail of good-fellowship and a cordial
hand-shake and stop for conversation. An analysis of the psychological
elements that enter into such an incident would make plain the part of
sense-perception and memory, of feeling and volition in the act of
each, but the significant fact in the incident is that these mental
factors are set to work because of the contact of one mind upon the
other. It is the mental interaction arising from the moment's
association that produces the social phenomenon. What are the social
phenomena of this particular occasion? They are the acts that have
taken place because of association. The individual would not greet
himself or shake hands with himself, or stop to talk with himself.
They are dependent upon the presence of more than one person; they are
phenomena of the group. Why do they shake hands and talk? First,
because they feel alike and think alike, and sympathy and
like-mindedness seek expression in gesture and language, and,
secondly, because their mode of action is under the control of a
social custom that directs specific acts. If the meeting was on the
continent of Europe the men might embrace, if it was in the jungle of
Africa they might raise a yell at sight of each other, but American
custom limits the greeting to a hand-clasp, supplemented on occasion
by a slap on the shoulder. In Italy the language used is peculiar to
the race and is helped out by many gestures; in New England of the
Puritans the language used would be of a type peculiar to itself, and
would hardly have the assistance of a changing facial expression.
To-day two men have formed a temporary group, group action has taken
place, and the action, while impulsive, is under the constraint of
present custom. What happens next?
21. =The Working of the Social Mind.=--Conversation in the group
develops a common purpose. The two men are conscious of common desires
and interests, or through a conflict of ideas the will of one
subordinates the will of the other, and under the control of the joint
purpose, which is now the social mind, they move toward one goal. This
goal soon appears to be the objective point of a larger social mind,
for other men and boys are converging in the same direction. At the
corner of another street the two companions meet other friends, and
after a mutual greeting the augmented party finds its way to the
entrance of a ball park. The same instincts and habits and the same
feelings and thoughts have stirred in every member of the group; they
have felt the pull of the same desires and interests; they have put
themselves in motion toward the same goal; they have greeted one
another in similar fashion, and they find satisfaction in talking
together on a common topic; but they do not constitute a permanent or
organized group, and once separated they may never repeat this chance
meeting.
22. =The Impulse of the Crowd.=--Once within the ball park and seated
on the long benches they are part of a far larger group of like-minded
human beings, and they feel a common thrill in anticipation of the
pleasure of the sport. They feel the stimulus that comes from
obedience to a common impulse. A shout or a joke arouses a sympathetic
outburst from hundreds. When they came together at first most of them
were strangers, but common interests and emotions have produced a
group consciousness. The game is called, and hundreds in unison fix
their attention on the men in action. A hit is made, in breathless
suspense the crowd watches to see the result, and with a common
impulse cries out simultaneously in approbation or disgust over the
play. As the game proceeds primitive passions play over the crowd and
emotions find free expression in the language that habit and custom
provide. The crowd is in a state of high suggestibility; it responds
to the stimulus of a chance remark, the misplay of a player, or the
misjudgment of an umpire; one moment it is thrown into panic by the
prospect of defeat, and the next into paroxysms of delight as the tide
of victory turns. On sufficient provocation the crowd gets into
motion, impelled by a common excitement to unreasoning action; it
pours upon the field, and, unless prevented, wreaks its anger upon
team or umpire that has aroused it to fury, but met with superior
force the crowd melts away, dissolving into its smaller groups and
then into its individual elements. A crowd of the sort described
constitutes one type of the incomplete group. It is a chance assembly,
moved by a common purpose but coalescing only temporarily, guided by
elemental impulses, and readily breaking up without permanent
achievement other than obtaining the recreation sought.
23. =The Mass-Meeting.=--Another and more orderly type appears in a
meeting of American residents in a foreign city to protest against an
outrage to their flag or an injustice to one of their number. Those
who assemble are not members of a definite organization with a regular
machinery for action. They are, however, moved by common emotion and
purpose, because they are conscious of a permanent bond that creates
mutual sympathy. They are citizens of the same country. They are
mindful of a national history that is their common heritage. They are
proud of the position of eminence that belongs to the Western
republic. There is a peculiar quality to the patriotism that they all
feel and that calls out a unanimous expression. Their minds work
alike, and they come together to give expression to their feelings and
convictions. They are under the direction of a presiding officer and
the procedure of the meeting is according to the parliamentary rules
that guide civilized assemblies. However urgent of purpose, the
speakers hold themselves in leash, and the listeners content
themselves with conventional applause when their enthusiasm is
aroused. After a reasonable amount of discussion has taken place, the
assembly crystallizes its opinions in the form of resolutions couched
in earnest but dignified language and disperses to await the action of
those in authority.
24. =International Association.=--Still another type is the incomplete
group that is composed of men and women of similar moral or religious
convictions who never assemble in one place, but constitute a certain
kind of association. Kipling could sing,
"The East is East and the West is West
And never the twain shall meet,"
yet through missionary efforts people of very different races and
habits of living and thinking have been brought to cherish the same
beliefs and to adopt similar customs. Thousands of such people in all
parts of the world constitute a unified group because of their mental
interaction, though they may never meet and are not organized in
common. The only medium through which one section has influenced
another may be a single missionary or book, but the electric current
of sympathy passes from one to another as effectively as the wireless
carries a message across leagues of space. In the same way sentiment
and opinion spread and reproduce themselves, even through long periods
of time. Before the middle of the nineteenth century Chinese sentiment
was so strong against the importation of opium from India that war
broke out with England, with the result that the curse was fastened
upon the Orient. The evil increased, spreading through many countries.
Meantime international fortunes brought the United States to the
Philippines and trade carried opium to the United States. Foreigners
in China combated the evil. The nation took a determined stand, and
finally, through international agreement under American leadership,
the trade and the consumption of opium were checked. Similarly slavery
was put under the opprobrium of Christendom, public opinion in one
nation after another was formed against it, laws were passed
condemning it, and at last it received an international ban. At the
present time, through agitation and conference, a world sentiment
against war is increasing, and pacifists in every land constitute an
expanding group of like-minded men and women who are determined that
wars shall cease in the future. These are all examples of unorganized
associations or incomplete groups.
25. =Experiments in Association.=--In the history of human kind
numerous experiments in association have been made; those which have
served well in the competition between groups have survived, and have
tended to become permanent types of association, receiving the
sanction of society, and so to be reckoned as social institutions;
others have been thrown on the rubbish heap as worthless. It is
generally believed, for example, that many related families in
primitive times associated in a loosely connected horde, but the horde
could not compete successfully with an organized state and gave way
before it. The local community in New England once carried on its
affairs satisfactorily in yearly mass-meeting, where every citizen had
an equal privilege of speaking and voting directly upon a proposed
measure, but there proved to be a limit to the efficiency of such
government when the population increased, so that a meeting of all the
citizens was impossible, and a constitutional assembly of
representative citizens was devised. Similarly national governments
have been organized for greater efficiency and machinery is being
invented frequently to increase their value.
26. =Kinds of Unorganized Groups.=--Unorganized groups are of three
kinds: There are first the normal groups that are continually being
formed and dissolved, but that perform a useful function while they
exist. Such are the chance meetings and conversations of friends in
all walks of life, and the crowds that gather occasionally to help
forward a good cause. They promote general intelligence, provide a
free exchange of ideas, and help to form a body of public opinion for
social guidance. There is often an open-mindedness among the common
people that is not vitiated by the grip of vested interests upon their
unwarped judgments, and the people can be trusted in the long run to
make good. Democracy is based upon the reliability of public opinion.
The second kind of unorganized group is one that is on the way to
becoming a permanent group sanctioned by society. A group of this type
is the boy's gang. By most persons the spontaneous association of a
dozen boys who live near together and range over a certain district
has been condemned as a social evil; recently it has become recognized
as a normal group, forming naturally at a certain period of boy life
and falling to pieces of its own accord a few years later. The
tendency of boy leaders is not only to give it recognition as
legitimate, but to use the gang instinct to promote definite
organizations of greater value to their members and to the community.
Another group of the same type is a so-called "movement," composed of
a few individuals who associate themselves in a loose way to further a
definite purpose, like the promotion of temperance, hold
mass-meetings, and create public opinion, but do not at once proceed
to a permanent organization. Eventually, when the movement has
gathered sufficient headway or has shown that it is permanently
valuable, a fixed organization may be accomplished.
The third kind of unorganized group is an abnormality in the midst of
civilization, a relic of the primitive days when impulse rather than
reason swayed the mind of a group. Such is the crowd that gathers in a
moment of excitement and yields to a momentary passion to lynch a
prisoner, or a revolutionary mob that loots and burns out of a sheer
desire for destruction. Such a group has not even the value of a
safety-valve, for its passion gathers momentum as it goes, and, like a
conflagration, it cannot be stopped until it has burned itself out or
met a solid wall of military authority.
27. =The Popular Crowd vs. the Organized Group.=--In the routine life
of a disciplined society there is always to be found at least one of
these types. Even the abnormal type of the passionate crowd is not
unusual in its milder form. Any unusual event like a fire or a circus
will draw scores and hundreds together, and the crowd is always liable
to fall into disorder unless officers of the law are in attendance.
This is so well understood that the police are always in evidence
where there are large congregations of people at church or theatre,
where a prominent man is to be seen or a procession is to pass. But
the popular mass is a volatile thing, and in proportion to its size it
expends little useful energy. It is never to be reckoned as equal in
importance to the organized company, however small it may be, that has
a definite purpose guiding its regular action, and that persists in
its purpose for years together. It is the fixed group, the social
institution, that does the work of the world and carries society
forward from lower to higher levels of civilization. Social efficiency
belongs to the organized type.
READING REFERENCES
COOLEY: _Social Organization_, pages 149-156.
GIDDINGS: _Elements of Sociology_, pages 129-140.
ROSS: _Foundations of Sociology_, pages 120-138.
ROSS: _Social Psychology_, pages 43-82.
MÜNSTERBERG: _Psychology, General and Applied_, pages 269-273.
DAVENPORT: _Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals_, pages 25-31.
PART II--LIFE IN THE FAMILY GROUP
CHAPTER III
FOUNDATIONS OF THE FAMILY
28. =The Fundamental Importance of the Family.=--Social life can be
understood best by taking the simplest organized group of human beings
and analyzing its activities, its organization, and its development.
The family is such a group and is, therefore, a natural basis for
study. It illustrates most of the phases of social activity, it is
simple in its organization, its history goes back to primitive times,
and it is rapidly changing in the present. Family life is made up of
the interactions of individual life, and, therefore, the individual in
his social relations and not the family is the unit of sociological
investigation, but until recent years the family group has been
regarded as of greater importance than the individual, and in the
Orient the family still occupies the place of importance. Out of the
family have developed such institutions as property, law, and
government, and on the maintenance of the family rests the future
welfare of society. It has been claimed that "the study of the single
family on its homestead would yield richer scientific knowledge and
more practical results in the great social sciences than almost any
other single object in the social world. Pursued historically, the
student would find himself at the roots of property, separate
ownership of land, inheritance, taxation, free trade and tariff, and
discover the germs of international law and the state. The great
questions of the day, as we call them, are little more than incidents
to the working out of the great social institutions, and these are the
expansions and modified forms of the family amid its unceasing support
and activity."
29. =The Family on the Farm.=--The best environment in which to study
the family is the farm. There the relations and activities of the
larger world appear in miniature, but with a greater simplicity and
unity than elsewhere. There the family gets closer to the soil, and
its members feel their relation to nature and the restrictions that
nature imposes upon human activity. There appear the occupations of
the successive stages of history--hunting, the care of domesticated
animals, agriculture, and manufacturing; there are the activities of
production, distribution, and consumption of economic goods. There a
consciousness of mutual dependence is developed, and the value of
co-operation is illustrated. There the mind ranges less fettered than
in the town, yet is less inclined toward radical changes. There the
family preserves and hands down from one generation to another the
heritage of the past, and stimulates its members to further progress.
In the family on the farm children learn how to live in association
with their kin and with hired employees; there much of the mental,
moral, and religious training is begun; and there is found most of the
sympathy and encouragement that nerves the boy to go out from home for
the struggle of life in the larger community and the world.
30. =Physical Conditions of Farm Life.=--Every group, like every
individual, is dependent in a measure on its physical environment. The
prosperity of the family on the farm and the daily activities of its
members wait often upon the quality of climate and soil and the temper
of the weather. The rocky hillsides of mountain lands like Switzerland
breed a hardy, self-reliant people, who make the most of small
opportunities for agriculture. A well-watered, rolling country pours
its riches into the lap of the husbandman; in such surroundings he is
likely to be more cheerful but less gritty than the Scottish
highlander. The pioneer settlers of America, in their trek into the
ulterior, faced the forest and its terrors, and every member of the
family who was old enough added his ounce of effort to the struggle to
subdue it. Their descendants enjoy the fruits of the earlier victory.
The well-trimmed woodland and fertile field are attractive to him;
nature in varying moods interests him. Even on the edge of the Western
desert the farmer is the master of a process of dry farming or
irrigation, so that he can smile at nature's effort to drive him out.
Science and education have helped to make man more independent of
natural forces and natural moods, but still it is nature that provides
the raw materials, that supplies the energy of wind and water and
sunshine, and that hastens prosperity if man learns to co-operate with
it. Success in the economic struggle of the family has always been
conditioned upon the physical environment, and it will always remain
one of the factors that shape human destiny.
31. =Inheritance of Family Traits.=--Another factor that enters into
family life is the physical nature of its members, the quality of the
stock from which the family is descended. Heredity is as important in
sociological study as environment. It is well known that a child
inherits racial and family traits from his ancestors, and these he
cannot shake off altogether as he grows older. Families have their
peculiarities that continue from one generation to another. The family
endowment is often the foundation of individual success. Without
physical sturdiness the man and woman on the farm are seriously
handicapped and are liable to succumb in the struggle for existence;
without mental ability and moral stamina members of the family fail to
make a broad mark on the community, and the family influence declines.
Mere acquisition or transmission of wealth does not constitute good
fortune. This fact of heredity must therefore be reckoned with in all
the activities of the family, and cannot be overlooked in a study of
the psychic factors which are the real social forces.
32. =The Domestic Function of the Family.=--The farm family for the
purpose of study may be thought of as composed of husband and wife,
children and servants, but the makers of the family are of first
importance for its understanding. The family has a long history, but
it exists, not because it is a long-established institution, but
because it satisfies present human needs, as all institutions must if
they are to survive. The family serves many ends, but as the primary
social instincts are to mate and to eat, so the principal functions of
the family are the _domestic_ and the _economic_. The normal adult
desires to mate, to have and rear children, and to make a home. To
this his sexual and parental instincts impel him; they are nature's
provision for the perpetuation of the race. The sex instinct attracts
the man and the woman to each other, and marriage is the sanction of
society to their union; the parental instinct gives birth to children
and leads the father and mother to protect the child through the long
years of dependence. Marriage and parenthood are twin obligations that
the individual owes to the race. Celibacy makes no contribution to the
perpetuation of the race, and unregulated sexual intercourse is a
blight upon society. Marriage lays the foundation of the home and
makes possible the values that belong to that institution. Children
hold the family together; separation and divorce are most common in
childless homes. Personal service and sacrifice are engendered in the
care of children; therefore it is that the family without children is
not a perfect family, but an abnormality as a social institution. For
these reasons custom and law protect the home, and religion declares
marriage a sacred bond and reproduction a sacred function.
It is the long experience of the race that has made plain the
fundamental importance of the marriage relation, and history shows how
step by step man and woman have struggled toward higher standards of
mutual appreciation and co-operation. From past history and present
tendencies it is possible to determine values and weaknesses and to
point out dangers and possibilities. As the family group is
fundamental to an understanding of the community, so the relation of
man and woman are essential to a comprehension of the complete family,
and investigation of their relations must precede a study of the
social development of the child in the home, or of the economic
relations of the farmer and his assistants. Nothing more clearly
illustrates the factors that enter into all human relations than the
story of how the family came to be.
READING REFERENCES
HENDERSON: _Social Elements_, pages 62-70.
ELLWOOD: _Sociology and Modern Social Problems_, 1913 edition,
pages 74-82.
BOSANQUET: _The Family_, pages 241-259.
DEALEY: _The Family in Its Sociological Aspects_, pages 1-11.
BUTTERFIELD: "Rural Life and the Family," _American Journal of
Sociology_, vol. 14, pages 721-725.
HENDERSON: "Are Modern Industry and City Life Unfavorable to the
Family?" _American Journal of Sociology_, vol. 14, pages
668-675.
CHAPTER IV
THE HISTORY OF THE FAMILY
33. =How the Family Came to Be.=--The modern family among civilized
peoples is based almost universally on the union of one man and one
woman. There is good reason to believe that this practice of monogamy
was in vogue among primitive human beings, but marriage was unstable
and it was only through long experimentation that monogamy proved
itself best fitted to survive. At first conjugal affection, which has
become intelligent and moral, was merely a sexual desire that led the
man to seek a mate and the maid to choose among her suitors. Unbound
by long-continued custom or legal and ceremonial restriction, the
primitive couple were free to separate if they pleased, but the
instinctive feeling that they belonged to each other, the habits of
association, adaptation, and co-operation, and jealousy at any
attention shown by another tended to preserve the relationship. The
presence of offspring sealed the bond as long as the children were
dependent, and strengthened the sense of mutual responsibility. The
children were peculiarly the mother's children since she gave them
birth, but the father instinctively protected the family that was
growing up around him, and procured food and shelter for its members,
though it is doubtful if he had any realization of his part in giving
life to a new generation.
During this period of social development, when the mother's presence
constituted the home and the children were regarded as belonging
primarily to her, descent was reckoned in the female line, the
children were attached to the maternal clan of blood relatives, and
such relatives began to move in bands, for the same reason that
animals move in packs and herds. Some writers speak of it as a
matriarchal period, but it does not appear that women governed; it is
more proper to speak of the family as metronymic, for the children
bore the mother's name and maternity outweighed paternity in social
estimate.
34. =The Patriarchal Household.=--When population increased and food
consequently became more difficult to obtain, the domestication of
animals was achieved, and nomadic habits carried the family from
pasture to pasture; rival clans wanted the same regions, wars broke
out, and physical superiority asserted its claims. The man supplanted
the woman as the important member of the household, reduced the others
to submission, added to his wives and servants by capture or purchase,
and established the patriarchal system. Descent henceforth was
reckoned in the paternal line, and society had become patronymic
instead of metronymic. It must not be supposed that this change
occurred very suddenly. It may have taken many centuries to bring it
about, but as the man learned his part in procreation and his power in
society, he delighted in his self-importance to lord it over the woman
and her children. The marriage relation ceased to be free and
reciprocal. The wife no longer had a choice in marriage. Bought or
captured, she was no longer wooed for a companion, but was valued
according to her economic worth. As population pressed, the
domestication of plants followed the taming of animals, but the
agricultural settlement of the family only made the woman's lot
harder, for she was the burden bearer on the farm.
35. =Polygyny.=--a better term than polygamy--was the inevitable
result of the patriarchal system. Man made the law and the law
recognized no restraint upon his sexual and parental instincts.
Improvements in living added to the resources of the family and made
it possible to maintain large households of wives, children, and
slaves. Polygyny had some social utility, because it increased the
number of children, and this gave added prestige and power to the
family, as slavery had utility because it provided a labor force; but
both were weaknesses in ancient society, because they did not tend in
the long run to human welfare. Polygyny brutalized men, degraded
women, and destroyed that affection and comradeship between parents
and their offspring that are the proper heritage of children. Wherever
it has survived as a system, polygyny has hindered progress, and
wherever it exists in the midst of monogamy it tends to break down
civilization.
Another variety of marriage that has been less common than polygyny is
polyandry. It is a term that signifies the marriage of one woman to
several husbands, and seems to have occurred, as in the interior of
Asia, only where subsistence was especially difficult or women
comparatively few. Neither polygyny nor polyandry were universal, even
where they were a frequent practice. Only the few could afford the
indulgence, much the largest percentage of the people remained
monogamous.
36. =Conflict and Social Selection.=--The supreme business of the
social group is to adapt itself to the conditions that affect its
life. It must learn to get on with its physical environment and with
other social groups with which it comes into relation. The methods of
adaptation are conflict and co-operation. The primitive savage and his
wife learned to work together, and his family and hers very likely
kept the peace, until through the increase of population they felt the
pinch of hunger when the supply did not equal the demand. Then came
conflict. Conflict is an essential element in all progress. There is
conflict between the lower and higher impulses in the human mind,
conflict between selfish ambition and the welfare of the group,
conflict among individuals and races for a place in the sun. It is
conceivable that the baser impulses that provoke much social conflict
may give way to more rational and altruistic purpose, but it is
difficult to see how all friction can be avoided in social relations.
It is certainly to be reckoned with in the history of group life.
The story of human progress shows that in the social conflict those
groups survive which have become best adapted to life conditions and
so are fitted to cope with their enemies. In the story of the family
male leadership proved most useful and was perpetuated, but the
practice of polygyny and polyandry proved in the long run to be
hurtful to success in the sturdy struggle for existence.
37. =Ancestor-Worship.=--When a practice or institution is seen to
work well it soon becomes indorsed by social custom, law, or religion.
The patriarchal system became fortified by ancestor-worship, which
helped to keep the family subordinate to its male head. Even the dead
hand of the patriarch ruled. The paternal ancestors of the family were
believed to have the power to bless or curse their descendants, and
they were faithfully placated with gifts and veneration, as has
continued to be the custom in China. Among the Romans the household
gods were cherished at the hearth long before Jupiter became king of
heaven; Æneas must save his ancestral-images if he lost all else in
the fall of Troy. At Rome the worship of a common ancestor was the
strongest family bond. The marriage ceremony consisted of a solemn
transfer of the bride from her duties to her own ancestors over to the
adoption of her husband's gods. This transfer of allegiance helped to
perpetuate the patriarchal system, and the sanction of religion
greatly strengthened the wedded relation, so that divorce and polygyny
were unknown in the old Roman period. But the absolute patriarchal
control of wife and children made the man selfish and arbitrary and
weakened the bond of affection and mutual interests, while Roman
political conquest strengthened the pride and power of the imperial
masters. Religion lost its prestige and the family bond loosened,
until from being one of the purest of social institutions in the early
days of the republic, the Roman family became one of the most
degenerate. This boded ill for the future of the race and empire.
38. =The Mediæval Family.=--The Roman family seemed in danger of
disintegrating, for the matron claimed rights that ran counter to the
rights of the man, when two new forces entered Roman society and
checked this tendency toward disintegration. The first was
Christianity, the second was Teutonic conquest. Christianity taught
consideration for women and children, but it taught submission to the
man in the home, and so was a constructive force in the conservation
of the family. Teutonic custom was similar to the early Roman. When
Teutonic enterprise pushed a new race over the goal of race conflict
and took in charge the administration of affairs in Roman society,
there was a restoration of the rule of force and so of masculine
supremacy. In the lord's castle and the peasant's hut the authority of
the man continued unquestioned through the Middle Ages, and the church
made monogamous marriage a binding sacrament; but sexual infidelity
was common, especially of the husband, and divorce was not unknown. In
the civilized lands of Christendom monogamy was the only form of
marriage recognized by civil law, and with the slow growth toward
higher standards of civilization the harshness of patriarchal custom
has become softened and the rights of women and children have been
increased by law, though not without endangering the solidarity of the
family. Similarly, the standards of sex conduct have improved.
39. =Advantages of Monogamy.=--The advantages of monogamy are so many
that in spite of the present restiveness under restraint it seems
certain to become the permanent and universal type as reason asserts
its right and controls impulse. Nature seems to have predetermined it
by maintaining approximately an equal number of the sexes, and nature
frowns upon promiscuity by penalizing it with sterility and neglect of
the few children that are born, so that in the struggle for existence
the fittest survive by a process of natural selection. A study of
biology and anthropology gives added evidence that nature favors
monogamy, for in the highest grade of animals below man the monogamic
relation holds almost without exception, and low-grade human races
follow the same practice.
There are moral advantages in monogamy that alone are sufficient to
insure its permanence. It is to the advantage of society that
altruistic and kindly feelings should outweigh jealousy, anger, and
selfishness. Monogamy encourages affection and mutual consideration,
and in that atmosphere children learn the graces and virtues that make
social life wholesome and attractive. Welcomed in the home, they
receive the care and instruction of both parents and become socialized
for the larger and later responsibilities of the social order. In the
altruism thus developed lie the roots of morals and religion. It is
well agreed that the essence of each is the right motive to conduct.
Love to men and to God is an accepted definition of religion, and
ethics is grounded on that principle. Love is the ruling principle of
the monogamic family; from the narrower domestic circle it extends to
the community and to all mankind.
40. =Marriage Laws.=--In spite of the general practice of monogamy as
a form of marriage and the noble principles that underlie the
monogamic type of family, sex relations need the restraint of law.
Human desires are selfish and ideals too often give way before them
unless there is some kind of external control. There have been times
when the church had such control, and in certain countries individual
rulers have determined the law; but since the eighteenth century there
has been a steady trend in the direction of popular control of all
social relations. This tendency has been carried farthest in the
United States, where public opinion voices its convictions and compels
legislative action. It is natural that the people of certain States
should be more progressive or radical than others, and therefore in
the absence of a national law, there is considerable variety in the
marriage and divorce laws, but no other country has higher ideals of
the married relation and at the same time as large a measure of
freedom.
At present marriage laws in the United States agree generally on the
following provisions:
(1) Every marriage must be licensed by the State and the act of
marriage must be reported to the State and registered.
(2) Marriage is not legal below a certain age, and consent of parents
must be obtained usually until the man is twenty-one and the woman
eighteen.
(3) Certain persons are forbidden marriage because of near
relationship or personal defect. Such marriage if performed may be
annulled.
(4) Remarriage may take place after the death of husband or wife,
after disappearance for a period varying from three to seven years, or
a certain time after divorce.
In the twenty-year period between 1886 and 1906 covered by the United
States Census of Marriage and Divorce slow improvements were made in
legislation, but a number of States are far behind others in the
enactment of suitable laws, and most of the States do not make the
provisions that are desirable for law enforcement. Yet there is a
limit of strictness beyond which marriage laws cannot safely go,
because they hinder marriage and provoke illicit relations. That limit
is fixed by the sanction of public opinion. After all, there is less
need of better regulation than of the education of public opinion to
the sacredness of marriage and to its importance for human welfare.
Without the restraints put upon impulse by the education of the
understanding and the will, young people often assume family
obligations thoughtlessly and even flippantly, when they are ill-mated
and often unacquainted with each other's characteristic qualities.
Such marriages usually bring distress and divorce instead of growing
affection and unity. Without education in the obligation of marriage
many well-qualified persons delay it or avoid it altogether, because
they are unwilling to bear the burdens of family support,
childbearing, and housekeeping. Society suffers loss in both cases.
41. =Reforms and Ideals.=--Because of all these deficiencies several
remedies have been proposed and certain of them adopted. Because of
the economic difficulties, it is urged that as far as possible by
legislation, illegitimate ways of heaping up wealth for the few at the
expense of the many should be checked, and that by vocational training
boys should be fitted for a trade and girls prepared for housekeeping.
To meet other difficulties it is proposed that popular instruction be
given from press and pulpit, in order that the moral and spiritual
plane of married life may be uplifted. The marriage ideal is a
well-mated pair, physically and intellectually qualified, who through
affection are attracted to marriage and through mutual consideration
are ready unselfishly to seek each other's welfare, and who recognize
in marriage a divinely ordered provision for human happiness and for
the perpetuation of the race. Such a marriage does not plant the seeds
of discord and neighborly scandal or compel a speedy resort to the
divorce court.
READING REFERENCES
DEALEY: _The Family in Its Sociological Aspects_, pages 12-84.
HOWARD: _History of Matrimonial Institutions_, II, pages 388-497.
GOODSELL: _The Family as a Social and Educational Institution_,
pages 5-47.
BOSANQUET: _The Family_, part I. "Report on Marriage and Divorce,
1906," _Bureau of the Census_, I, pages 224-226.
BLISS: _Encyclopedia of Social Reform_, art. "Family."
CHAPTER V
THE MAKING OF THE HOME
42. =The Story of the Home.=--Marriage is the gateway of the home; the
home is the shelter of the family. It is the cradle of children, the
nursery of mutual affection, and the training-school for citizenship
in the community. The physical comfort of its inmates depends upon the
house and its furnishings, but fondness for the home develops only in
an atmosphere of good-will and kindness.
The home has a story of its own, as has the family. In primitive days
there was little necessity of a dwelling-place, except as a nest for
young or a cache for provisions. A cave or a rough shelter of boughs
was a makeshift for a home. Thither the hunter brought the game that
he had killed, and there slept the glutton's sleep or went supperless
to bed. When the hunter became a herdsman and shepherd and moved from
place to place in search of pasture, he found it convenient to fashion
a tent for his home, as the Hebrew patriarchs did when they roamed
over Canaan and as the Bedouin of the desert does still.
A settled life with a measure of civilization demanded a better and a
stationary home, the degree of comfort varying with the desire and
ambition of the householder and the amount of his wealth. To thousands
home was little more than a place to sleep. Even in imperial Rome the
proletariat occupied tall, ramshackle tenements, like the submerged
poor who exist in the slums of modern cities. In mediæval Europe the
peasant lived in a one-room hovel, clustered with others in a squalid
hamlet upon the estate of a great landowner. The hut was poorly built,
often of no better material than wattled sticks, cemented with mud,
covered over with turf or thatch, usually without chimneys or even
windows. The place was absolutely without conveniences. Summer and
winter the family huddled together in the single room of the hut,
faring forth to work in the morning, sleeping at night on bundles of
straw, each person in the single garment that he wore through the day,
and at convenient intervals breaking fast on black bread, salt meat,
and home-brewed beer. There was no inducement for a landless serf to
spend care or labor upon houses or surroundings; pigs and babies were
permitted to tumble about both indiscriminately.
Peasant homes in the Orient are little if any better now than European
homes in the Middle Ages. The houses are rude structures and ill-kept.
In the villages of India it is not unusual to occupy one house until
it becomes so unsanitary as to be uninhabitable, and then to move
elsewhere. Even royal courts in mediæval Europe moved from palace to
palace for the same reason. It is a mistake to suppose that the
squalid conditions found in the slums are peculiar to them; they are
survivals of a lower stage of human existence found in all parts of
the world, due to psychical, social, and economic conditions that are
not easily changed, but conspicuous in the midst of modern progress.
43. =The Ancestral Type.=--In ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome only the
higher classes enjoyed any degree of comfort. Accustomed to
inconveniences, few even among them knew such luxuries as are common
to middle-class Americans. The castle and manor-house of the mediæval
lord were still more comfortless. In America the colonial log cabin
and the sod house of the prairie pioneer were primitively incomplete.
The struggle for existence and the difficulty of manufacture and
transportation allowed few comforts. American homes, even a hundred
years ago, knew nothing of furnaces and safety-matches, refrigerators
and electric fans, bathtubs and sanitary accommodations,
carpet-sweepers and vacuum cleaners, screen doors and double windows,
hammocks and verandas. Neither law nor social custom required a good
water or drainage system. A healthful or attractive location for the
house received little thought; outbuildings were in close proximity to
the house, if not attached to it. The furnishings of the house lacked
comfort and beauty. Interior decorations of harmonious design were
absent. Instruments of music were rare; statuary and paintings were
beyond the reach of any but the richest purse.
44. =Social Values.=--On the other hand, there was in many a dwelling
a home atmosphere that made up for the lack of conveniences. There was
a bond of unity that was felt by every member of the family, and a
spirit of mutual affection and self-sacrifice that stood a hard strain
through poverty, sickness, and ill fortune of every sort. Father and
mother, boys and girls were not afraid to work, and when the time came
for relaxation there was little to attract away from the home circle.
People had less to enjoy, but they were better contented with what
they had. They had little money to spend, but their frugal tastes and
habits of thrift fortified them against want, and there was little
need of public or private charity.
The home was frequently a school of moral and religious education.
Selfishness in all its forms was discountenanced. There was no room
for the idler, no time for laziness. Social hygiene and domestic
science were not taught as such, but young people learned their
responsibilities and grew up equipped to establish homes of their own.
Parents were faithful instructors in the homely virtues of
truthfulness, honesty, faithfulness, kindness, and love. Religion in
the family was by no means universal, but in hundreds of homes
religion was recognized as having legitimate demands upon the
individual; religious exercises were observed at the mother's knee,
the table, and the family altar; all the family attended church
together, and were expected to take upon themselves the
responsibilities of church membership.
45. =Gains and Losses.=--In the making of a modern home there have
been both addition and subtraction. Life has gained immeasurably in
comfort and convenience for the well-to-do, but the comfortless
quarters of the poor drive the man to the saloon and the child to the
streets. For the fortunate the home has become enriched with music,
art, and literature, but it has lost much of the earlier simplicity,
economic thrift, moral sturdiness, and religious principle and
practice. For the poor life is so hard that the good qualities, if
they ever existed, have tended to disappear without any compensation
in culture.
It is well understood that the home environment has most to do with
shaping individual character. If the homely virtues are not cultivated
there, society will suffer; if cold and cheerlessness are
characteristic of its atmosphere, there will be little warmth in the
disposition of its inmates toward society. Every home of the right
sort is an asset to the community. It is an experiment station for
social progress. Every married couple that sets up housekeeping starts
a new centre of group life. If they diffuse a helpful atmosphere
social virtues will develop and social efficiency increase. On the
other hand, many homes are a menace to the community, because an
ill-mated pair, poorly equipped for the struggle of existence, create
a centre of group life in which the individual is handicapped
physically and morally and too often becomes a curse to society at
large. When it is remembered that the home is at the same time the
power-house that generates the forces that push society forward, and
the channel through which are transmitted the ideas and achievements
of all the past, it will seem to be the supremely important
institution that human experience has devised and sanctioned.
46. =The Ideal Home.=--The ideal home toward which the average home
will be gradually approximating will be housed in a well-built
dwelling of approved architecture; erected in a healthy location with
room enough around it to give air space, and a bit of out-of-doors to
enjoy; tastefully furnished and decorated inside, but without
ostentation or extravagance; occupied by a healthy, happy family of
parents and children who care more for each other and for their
neighbors than for selfish pleasure and display, and who are learning
how to play a worthy part in the folk life of their community and
nation, and how to appreciate the highest and finest qualities that
mind and spirit can develop in themselves or others. If for economic
or social reasons any of this is impossible, there is a weakness in
society that calls for prompt repair.
READING REFERENCES
STARR: _First Steps in Human Progress_, pages 149-158.
JESSOPP: _The Coming of the Friars_, pages 87-104.
GILLETTE: _Constructive Rural Sociology_, pages 170-178.
CARNEY: _Country Life and the Country School_, pages 18-38.
RICHARDS: "The Farm Home," art. in _Cyclopedia of Agriculture_,
IV, pages 280-284.
CHAPTER VI
CHILDREN IN THE HOME
47. =Children Complete the Home.=--If the legend of the Pied Piper of
Hameln should come true and all the children should run away from
home, or if by some strange stroke of fortune no children should be
born in a village or town for ten years or more, the tragedy of the
childless home would be realized. There are localities and even
nations where the birth-rate is so small that population is little
more than stationary. In the United States the native birth-rate tends
to decline, while the rate of immigrant foreigners greatly exceeds it.
The higher the degree of comfort and luxury in the home the smaller
the birth-rate seems to be a principle of social experience. There are
selfish people who shirk the responsibilities and troubles of
parenthood, and there are social diseases that tend to sterility, but
the childless home is always an incomplete home. Children are the
crown of marriage, the enrichment of the home, the hope of society in
the future. The needs of the children stimulate parents to unselfish
endeavor. Children are the comfort of the poor and distressed. The
wedded life of a human pair may be ideal in every other respect, but
one of the main functions of marriage is unaccomplished when the
family remains incomplete.
48. =The Right to be Well-Born.=--The child comes into the home in
obedience to the same primary instinct that draws the parents to each
other. He calls out the affections of the parents and their
intellectual resources, for he is dependent upon them, and often taxes
their best judgment in coping with the difficulties that beset child
life. But they often fail to realize that the child has certain
inalienable rights as an individual and a potential member of society
that demand their best gifts.
There is first the right to be well-born. There is so much to contend
with when once ushered into the world, that a child needs the best
possible bodily inheritance. He needs to be rid of every encumbrance
of physical unfitness if he is to live long and become a blessing and
not a burden to society. Handicapped at the start, he cannot hope to
achieve a high level of attainment. It is little short of criminal for
a child to be condemned to lifelong weakness or suffering, because his
parents were not fit to give him birth. Yet large numbers of parents
make the thought of child welfare subordinate to their own desires. A
man's primary concern in choosing a wife is his own personal
satisfaction, not the birth and mothering of his children. Many young
women regard the attractiveness, social position, or wealth of a young
man as of greater consequence than his physical or moral fitness to
become the father of her children. There are thousands of persons who
are mentally deficient or unmoral, who nevertheless are unrestrained
by society from association and even marriage. It is a social
misfortune that the unfit should be taken care of by the tender
mercies of philanthropists and even permitted to propagate their kind,
while no special encouragement is given to those who are supremely fit
to give their best to the upbuilding of the race. The principle of
brotherly kindness requires that the weak and unfortunate be taken
care of, but they should not be permitted to increase. It is a
principle of social welfare that those who are incapable of exercising
self-control should be placed under the control of the larger group.
49. =Eugenics in Legislation.=--It is the conviction that the right to
be well-born is a valid one, that has given rise to the science of
eugenics. As a science it was first discussed by Francis Gallon, and
it has interested writers, investigators, and legislators in all
progressive countries. Various specific proposals have been made in
the interest of posterity, and agitation has resulted in certain
experiments in legislation. It is not proposed that any should be
required to marry, but it is thought possible to encourage the well
qualified and to discourage and restrain the incapable. Some of these
proposals, such as the offering of a premium by the State for healthy
children, or endowing mothers as public functionaries, are not widely
approved, but Great Britain in a National Insurance Act in 1911
included the provision of maternity benefits in recognition of the
mother's contribution to the citizenship of the nation. Restrictive
laws have been passed by certain of the States in America, which are
eugenic experiments. Feeble-mindedness, in so many ways a social evil,
is readily reproduced, and the weak-minded are easily controlled by
the sex instinct. To prevent this certain State legislatures have
forbidden the marriage of any feeble-minded or epileptic woman under
the age of forty-five. It is well known that insanity is a family
trait, and that criminal insanity is liable to recur if those who are
afflicted are permitted to indulge in parenthood. Certain States
accordingly annul the marriage of insane persons. Venereal disease is
easily transmitted; there has been a beginning of legislation
prohibiting persons thus tainted to marry. It is well established that
very many persons, while not actually tainted with such diseases as
tuberculosis and alcoholism, are predisposed to yield to their attack.
For this reason the scope of eugenic legislation is likely to be
extended. Some States have gone so far as to sterilize the unfit, that
they may not by any chance exercise the powers of parenthood; it is
urged in many quarters that clergymen require a medical certificate of
good health before sanctioning marriage.
50. =Family Degeneracy.=--Several impressive illustrations have been
published of degenerate families that show the far-reaching effects of
heredity. In contrast to these pictures, has been set the life story
of families who have won renown in successive generations because of
unusual ability. Nothing so effective is presented by any argument as
that of concrete cases. Perhaps the best known of these stories is
that of the Jukes family. About the middle of the eighteenth century a
normal man with a coarse, lazy vein in his nature built himself a hut
in the woods of central New York. In five generations he had several
hundred descendants. A study of twelve hundred persons who belonged
to the family by kinship or marriage was made carefully, with the
following findings. Nearly all of the family were lazy, ignorant, and
coarse. Four hundred were physically diseased by their own fault. Two
hundred were criminals; seven of them murderers. Fifty of the women
were notoriously immoral. Three hundred of the children died from
inherited weakness or neglect. More than three hundred members of the
family were chronic paupers. It is estimated that they cost the State
a thousand dollars apiece for pauperism and crime.
Another family called the Kallikak family, which has been made the
subject of investigation, is a still better example of heredity. The
family was descended from a Revolutionary soldier, who had an
illegitimate feeble-minded son by an imbecile young woman. The line
continued by feeble-minded descent and marriage until four hundred and
eighty descendants have been traced. Of these one hundred and
forty-three were positively defective, thirty-six were illegitimate,
thirty-three sexually immoral, mostly prostitutes, eight kept houses
of ill repute, three were criminal, twenty-four were confirmed
drunkards, and eighty-two died in infancy.
On the other hand, there are striking examples of what good birth and
breeding can do. It happened that the ancestor of the Kallikak family,
after he had sown his wild oats, married well and had about five
hundred descendants. All of them were normal, only two were alcoholic,
and one sexually loose. The family has been prominent socially and in
every way creditable in its history. In contrast to the Jukes family,
the history of the Edwards family has been written. Its members
married well, were well-bred, and gave much attention to education.
Out of fourteen hundred individuals more than one hundred and twenty
were Yale graduates, and one hundred and sixty-five more completed
their education at other colleges; thirteen were college presidents,
and more than a hundred college professors; they were founders of
schools of all grades; more than one hundred were clergymen,
missionaries, and theological professors; seventy-five were officers
in the army and navy; more than eighty have been elected to public
office; more than one hundred were lawyers, thirty judges, sixty
physicians, and sixty prominent in literature. Not a few of them have
been active in philanthropy, and many have been successful in
business. It is impossible to escape from the conviction that whatever
may be the physical and social environment, heredity perpetuates
physical and mental worth or defectiveness and tends to produce social
good or evil, and that the right to a worthy parentage belongs with
the other rights to which individuals lay claim. It is as important as
the right to a living, to an education, to a good home, or to the
franchise. Without it society is incalculably poorer and the ultimate
effects of failure are startling to consider.
51. =Marriage and Education.=--Some enthusiasts have demanded that to
make sure of a good bodily inheritance, individuals be permitted to
produce children without the trammels of marriage if they are well
fitted for parenthood, but such persons seem ignorant or forgetful
that free love has never proved otherwise than disastrous in the
history of the race, and that physical perfection is not the sole good
with which the child needs to be endowed, but that it must be
supplemented with moral, mental, and spiritual endowment, and with the
permanent affection and care of both parents in the home. Galton
himself acknowledges marriage as a prerequisite in eugenics by saying:
"Marriage, as now sanctified by religion and safeguarded by law in the
more highly civilized nations, may not be ideally perfect, nor may it
be universally accepted in future times, but it is the best that has
hitherto been devised for the parties primarily concerned, for their
children, for home life, and for society."
The greatest hope of eugenics lies in social education. Sex hygiene
must in some way become a part of the child's stock of information,
but knowledge alone does not fortify action. More important is it to
deal with the springs of action, to teach the equal standard of purity
for men and women, and the moral responsibility of parenthood to
adolescent youth, and at the same time to impress upon the whole
community its responsibility of oversight of morals for the good of
the next generation. Conviction of personal and social responsibility
as superior to individual preferences is the only safety of society in
all its relations, from eugenics through economics to ethics and
religion.
52. =Euthenics.=--Euthenics is the science of controlled environment,
as eugenics is the science of controlled heredity. The health and good
fortune of the child depend on his surroundings as well as on his
inheritance, and the gift of a perfect physique may be vitiated by an
unwholesome environment. Environment acts directly upon the physical
system of the individual through climate, home conditions, and
occupation; it acts indirectly by affecting the personal desires,
idiosyncrasies, and possible conduct. When the child of an early
settler was carried away from home on an Indian raid, and brought up
in the wigwam of the savage, he forgot his civilized heritage, and
love for his foster-parents sometimes proved stronger than his natural
affections. The child of the Russian Jew in Europe has little ambition
and rises to no high level, but in America he gains distinction in
school and success in business. A natural environment of forest or
plain may determine the occupation of a whole community; a fickle
climate vitally affects its prosperity. Whole races have entered upon
a new future by migration.
It is necessary to be cautious and not to ascribe to environment, as
some do, the sole influence. Every individual is the creature of
heredity plus environment plus his own will. But it is not possible to
overlook environment as some do, and expect by a miracle to make or
preserve character in the midst of conditions of spiritual
asphyxiation. If social life is to be pure and strong, communities and
families, through the official care of overseers of health and
industry and through the loving care of parents in the homes, must see
that children grow up with the advantages of nourishing food, pure
air, proper clothing, and means for cleanliness; that at the proper
age they be given mental and moral instruction and fitted for a worthy
vocation; that wholesome social relations be established by means of
playgrounds, clubs, and societies; that industrial conditions be
properly supervised, and young people be able to earn not alone a
living but a marriageable wage; and that some means of social
insurance be provided sufficient to prevent suffering and want in
sickness and old age. In such an environment there is opportunity to
realize the value that will accrue from a good inheritance, and there
is incentive to make the most of life's possibilities as they come and
go.
Ever since the importance of environment was made plain in the
nineteenth century, social physicians have been trying all sorts of
experiments in community therapeutics. Many of the remedies will be
discussed in various connections. It is enough to remark here that
social education, social regulation, and social idealism are all
necessary, and that a social Utopia cannot be obtained in a day.
53. =The Right to Proper Care.=--Granted the right of the child to be
well-born and the right to a favorable environment, there follows the
right to be taken care of. This may be involved in the subject of a
proper environment, but it deserves consideration by itself. There is
more danger to the race from neglect than from race suicide. It is
better that a child should not be born at all, than that he should be
condemned to the hard knocks of a loveless home or a callous
neighborhood. There is first the case of the child born out of
wedlock, often a foundling with parentage unacknowledged. Then there
is the child who is legitimately born as far as the law is concerned,
but whose parents had no legitimate right to bring him into the world,
because they had no reasonable expectation that they could provide
properly for his wants. The wretched pauper recks nothing of the
future of his offspring. Since the family group can never remain
independent of the community, it may well be debated whether society
is not under obligation to interfere and either by prohibition of
excessive parenthood or by social provision for the care of such
children, to secure to the young this right of proper care.
Cruelty is a twin evil of neglect. The history of childhood deserves
careful study side by side with the history of womanhood. In primitive
times not even the right to existence was recognized. Abortion and
infanticide, especially in the case of females, were practices used at
will to dispose of unwelcome children, and these practices persisted
among the backward peoples of Asia and Africa, until they were
compelled to recognize the law of the white master when he extended
his dominion over them. In the patriarchal household of classic lands,
the child was under the absolute control of his father. Religious
regulations might demand that he be instructed in the history and
obligations of the race, as in the case of the Hebrew child, or the
interests of the state might require physical training for its own
defense, as in the case of Sparta, but there was no consideration of
child rights in the home. Until the eighteenth century European
children shared the hardships of poverty and discomfort common to the
age, and often the cruelty of brutal and degraded parents; they were
often condemned to long hours of industry in factories after the new
industrial order caught them in its toils. In the mine and the mill
and on the farm children have been bound down to labor for long and
weary hours, until modern legislation has interfered.
There are a number of reasons why child labor has been common.
Hereditary custom has decreed it. Children have been looked upon by
many races as a care and a burden rather than a responsibility and a
blessing. Their economic value was their one claim to be regarded as a
family asset. Even the religious teaching of Jews and Christians about
the value and responsibility of children has not been influential
enough to compel a recognition of their worth, though their innocence
and purity, their faith and optimism are qualities indispensable to
the race of mankind if social relations are to approach the ideal.
54. =The Value of Work.=--Labor is a social blessing rather than a
curse. There can be no doubt that habits of industry are desirable for
the child as well as for the adult. Idleness is the forerunner of
ignorance, laziness, and general incapacity. It is no kindness to a
child to permit him to spend all his time out of school in play. It
gives him skill, a new respect for labor, and a new conception of the
value of money, if he has a paper route, mows a lawn, shovels snow, or
hoes potatoes. Especially is it desirable that a boy should have some
sort of an occupation for a few hours a day during the long summer
vacation. The child on the farm has no lack of opportunity, but for
the boy of the city streets there is little that is practicable,
outside of selling papers or serving as messenger boy or bootblack;
for the girl there is little but housework or department-store
service. Both need steady employment out of doors, and he who devises
a method by which boys and girls can be taught such an occupation as
gardening on vacant lots or in the city outskirts, and at the same
time can be given a love for work and for the growing things of the
country, will help to solve the problem of child labor and,
incidentally, may contribute to the solution of poverty, incipient
crime, and even of the rural problem and the high cost of living.
READING REFERENCES
BOSANQUET: _The Family_, pages 299-314.
GODDARD: _The Kallikak Family._
EAMES: _Principles of Eugenics._
SALEEBY: _Parenthood and Race Culture_, pages 213-236.
MCKEEVER: _Farm Boys and Girls_, pages 171-196.
GALTON: _Inquiries into Human Faculty._
CHAPTER VII
WORK, PLAY AND EDUCATION.
55. =Child Labor and Its Effects.=--Excessive child labor away from
home is one of the evils that has called for reform more than the lack
of employment. The child has a right to the home life. It is injurious
for him to be kept at a monotonous task under physical or mental
strain for long hours in a manufacturing establishment, or to be
deprived of time to study and to play. Yet there are nearly two
million children in the United States under sixteen years of age who
are denied the rights of childhood through excessive labor.
This evil began with the adoption of the factory system in modern
industry. The introduction of light machinery into the textile mills
of England made it possible to employ children at low wages, and it
was profitable for the keepers of almshouses to apprentice pauper
children to the manufacturers. Some of them were not more than five or
six years old, but were kept in bondage more than twelve hours a day.
Children were compelled to hard labor in the coal-mines, and to the
dirty work of chimney sweeping. In the United States factory labor for
children did not begin so soon, but by 1880 children eight years old
were being employed in Massachusetts for more than twelve hours a day,
and in parts of the country children are still employed at long hours
in such occupations as the manufacture of cotton, glass, silk, and
candy, in coal-mines and canning factories. Besides these are the
newsboys, bootblacks, and messengers of the cities, children in
domestic and personal service, and the child laborers on the farms.
The causes of child labor lie in the poverty and greed of parents, the
demands of employers, and often the desire of the children to escape
from school and earn money. In spite of agitation and legislation, the
indifference of the public permits it to continue and in some
sections to increase.
The harmful effects of child employment are numerous. It is true that
two-thirds of the boys and nearly one-half of the girls employed in
the United States are occupied with agriculture, most of them with
their own parents, an occupation that is much healthier than indoor
labor, yet agriculture demands long hours and wearisome toil. In the
cities there is much night-work and employment in dangerous or
unhealthy occupations. The sweating system has carried its bad effects
into the homes of the very poor, for the younger members of the family
can help to manufacture clothing, paper boxes, embroidery, and
artificial flowers, and in spite of the law, such labor goes on far
into the night in congested, ill-ventilated tenements. Children cannot
work in this way day after day for long hours without serious physical
deterioration. Some of them drop by the way and die as victims of an
economic system and the social neglect that permits it. Others lose
the opportunity of an education, and so are mentally less trained than
the normal American child, and ultimately prove less efficient as
industrial units. For the time they may add to the family income, but
they react upon adult labor by lowering the wage of the head of the
family, and they make it impossible for the child when grown to earn a
high wage, because of inefficiency. The associations and influences of
the street are morally degrading, and in the associations of the
workroom and the factory yard the whole tone of the life of
individuals is frequently lowered.
56. =Child-Labor Legislation.=--Friends of the children have tried to
stop abuses. Trade-unions, consumers' leagues, and State bureaus have
taken the initiative. Voluntary organizations, like the National Child
Labor Committee, make the regulation of child labor their special
object. They have succeeded in the establishment of a Federal
Children's Bureau in Washington, and have encouraged State and
national legislation. Most of the States forbid the employment of
children under a certain age, usually twelve or fourteen years, and
require attention to healthful conditions and moderate hours. They
insist also that children shall not be deprived of education, but
there is often inadequate provision made for inspection and proper
enforcement of laws.
The friends of the children are desirous of a uniform child-labor law
which, if adopted and enforced by competent inspectors, would prevent
factory work for all under fourteen years of age, and for weak
children under sixteen would prescribe a limited number of hours and
allow no night-work, would require certain certificates of age and
health before employment is given, and would compel school attendance
and the attainment of a limited education before permission is granted
to go into the factory. Without doubt, it is a hardship to families in
poverty that strong, growing children should not be permitted to go to
work and help support those in need, but it is better for the social
body to take care of its weak members in some other way, and for its
own sake, as well as for the sake of the child, to make sure that he
is physically and mentally equipped before he takes a regular place in
the ranks of the wage-earners.
57. =The Right to Play.=--The play group is the first social
training-ground for the child outside of the home, and it continues to
be a desirable form of association, even into adult life, but it is
only in recent years that adults have recognized the legitimacy of
such a claim as the right to play. It was thought desirable that a boy
should work off his restlessness, but the wood-pile provided the usual
safety-valve for surplus energy. Play was a waste of time. Now it is
more clearly understood that play has a distinct value. It is
physically beneficial, expanding the lungs, strengthening muscle and
nerve, and giving poise and elasticity to the whole body. It is
mentally educational in developing qualities of quickness, skill, and
leadership. It is socially valuable, for it requires honesty, fair
play, mutual consideration, and self-control. Co-operation of effort
is developed as well in team-play as in team-work, and the child
becomes accustomed to act with thought of the group. The play group is
a temporary form of association, varying in size and content as the
whim of the child or the attraction of the moment moves its members.
It is an example of primitive groupings swayed by instinctive
impulses. Children turn quickly from one game to another, but for the
time are absorbed in the particular play that is going on. No
achievement results from the activity, no organization from the
association. The rapid shifting of the scenes and the frequent
disputes that arise indicate lack of control. Yet it is out of such
association that the social mind develops and organized action becomes
possible.
If these are the advantages of play, the right to play may properly
demand an opportunity for games and sports in the home and the yard,
and the necessary equipment of gymnasium and field. It may call for
freedom from the school and home occupations sufficient to give the
recreative impulse due scope. As its importance becomes universally
recognized, there will be no neighborhood, however congested, that
lacks its playground for the children, and no industry, however
insistent, that will deprive the boy or girl of its right to enjoy a
certain part of every day for play.
58. =The Right to Liberty.=--The present tendency is to give large
liberty to the child. Not only is there freedom on the playground; but
social control in the home also has been giving place during the last
generation to a recognition of the right of the individual child to
develop his own personality in his own way, without much interference
from authority. It is true that there is a nominal control in the
home, in the school, and in the State, but in an increasing degree
that control is held in abeyance while parent, teacher, and constable
leniently indulge the child. This is a natural reaction from the
discipline of an earlier time, and is a welcome indication that
children's rights are to find recognition. Like most reactions, there
is danger of its going too far. An inexperienced and headstrong child
needs wise counsel and occasional restraint, and within the limits of
kindness is helped rather than harmed by a deep respect for authority.
Lawlessness is one of the dangers of the current period. It appears in
countless minor misdemeanors, in the riotous acts of gangs and mobs,
in the recklessness of corporations and labor unions, and in national
disregard for international law; and its destructive tendency is
disastrous for the future of civilized society unless a new restraint
from earliest childhood keeps liberty from degenerating into license.
59. =The Right to Learn.=--There is one more right that belongs to
children--the right of an opportunity to learn. Approximately three
million children are born annually in the United States. Each one
deserves to be well-born and well-reared. He needs the affectionate
care of parents who will see that he learns how to live. This
instruction need not be long delayed, and should not be relegated
altogether to the school. There is first of all physical education. It
is the mother's task to teach the child the principles of health, to
inculcate proper habits of eating, drinking, and bathing. It is for
her to see that he learns how to play with pleasure and profit, and is
permitted to give expression to his natural energies. It is her
privilege to make him acquainted with nature, and in a natural way
with the illustration of flower and bird and squirrel she can give the
child first lessons in sex hygiene. It is the function of the mother
in the child's younger years and of the father in adolescent boyhood
to open the mind of the child to understand the life processes. The
lack of knowledge brings sorrow and sin to the family and injures
society. Seeking information elsewhere, the boy and girl fall into bad
habits and lay the foundation of permanent ills. The adolescent boy
should be taught to avoid self-abuse, to practise healthful habits,
and to keep from contact with physical and moral impurity; the
adolescent girl should be given ample instruction in taking care of
herself and in preparing for the responsibility of adult life.
60. =Mental and Moral Education.=--Mental education in the home is no
less important. It is there that the child's instinctive impulses
first find expression and he learns to imitate the words and actions
of other members of the home. The things he sees and handles make
their impressions upon him. He feels and thinks and wills a thousand
times a day. The channels of habit are being grooved in the brain. It
is the function of the home to protect him from that which is evil, to
stimulate in him that which is good. Mental and moral education are
inseparably interwoven. The first stories told by the mother's lips
not only produce answering thoughts in the child mind, but answering
modes of conduct also. The chief function of the intellect is to guide
to right choice.
Character building is the supreme object of life. It begins early.
Learning to obey the parent is the first step toward self-control.
Learning to know the beautiful from the ugly, the true from the false,
the good from the evil is the foundation of a whole system of ethics.
Learning to judge others according to character and attainment rather
than according to wealth or social position cultivates the naturally
democratic spirit of the child, and makes him a true American. Sharing
in the responsibility of the home begets self-reliance and
dependableness in later life.
The supreme lesson of life is to learn to be unselfish. The child in
the home is often obliged to yield his own wishes, and finds that he
gets greater satisfaction than if he had contended successfully for
his own claims. In the home the compelling motive of his life may be
consecrated to the highest ideals, long before childhood has merged
into manhood. Such consecration of motive is best secured through a
knowledge of the concrete lives of noble men and women. The noble
characters of history and literature are portraits of abstract
excellences. It is the task of moral education in the home to make the
ideal actual in life, to show that it is possible and worth while to
be noble-minded, and that the highest ambition that a person can
cherish is to be a social builder among his fellows.
61. =Child Dependents.=--Many children are not given the rights that
belong to them in the home. They come into the world sickly or
crippled, inheriting a weak constitution or a tendency toward that
which is ill. They have little help from environment. One of a
numerous family on a dilapidated farm or in an unhealthy tenement, the
child struggles for an existence. Poverty, drunkenness, crime,
illegitimacy stamp themselves upon the home life. Neglect and cruelty
take the place of care and education. The death of one or both parents
robs the children of home altogether. The child becomes dependent on
society. The number of such children in the United States approximates
one hundred and fifty thousand.
In the absence of proper home care and training, society for its own
protection and for the welfare of the child must assume charge. The
State becomes a foster-parent, and as far as possible provides a
substitute for the home. The earlier method was to place the
individual child, with many other similar unfortunates, in a public or
private philanthropic institution. In such an environment it was
possible to maintain discipline, to secure instruction and a wholesome
atmosphere for social development, and to have the advantage of
economical management. But experience proved that a large institution
of that kind can never be a true home or provide the proper
opportunity for the development of individuality. The placing-out
system, therefore, grew in favor. Results were better when a child was
adopted into a real home, and received a measure of family affection
and individual care. Even where a public institution must continue to
care for dependent children, it is plainly preferable to distribute
them in cottages instead of herding them in one large building. The
principle of child relief is that life shall be made as nearly normal
as possible.
It is an accepted principle, also, that children shall be kept in
their own home whenever possible, and if removal is necessary that
they be restored to home associations at the earliest possible moment.
In case of poverty, a charity organization society will help a needy
family rather than allow it to disintegrate; in case of cruelty or
neglect such an organization as the Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children will investigate, and if necessary find a better
guardian; but the case must be an aggravated one before the society
takes that last step, so important does the function of the home seem
to be.
62. =Special Institutions.=--It is, of course, inevitable that some
children should be misplaced and that some should be neglected by the
civil authorities, but public interest should not allow such
conditions to persist. Social sensitiveness to the hard lot of the
child is a product of the modern conscience. Time was when the State
remanded all chronic dependents to the doubtful care of the almshouse,
and children were herded indiscriminately with their elders, as child
delinquents were herded in the prisons with hardened criminals.
Idiots, epileptics, and deformed and crippled children were given no
special consideration. A kindlier public policy has provided special
institutions for those special cases where under State officials they
may receive adequate and permanent attention, and for normal dependent
children there is a variety of agencies. The most approved form is the
State school. This is virtually a temporary home where the needy child
is placed by investigation and order of the court, is given a training
in elementary subjects, manual arts, and domestic science, and after
three or four years is placed in a home, preferably on a farm, where
he can fill a worthy place in society.
63. =Children's Aid Societies.=--Another aid society is the private
aid society supervised and sometimes subsidized by the State. This is
a philanthropic organization supported by private gifts, making public
reports, managed by a board of directors, with a secretary or
superintendent as executive officer, and often with a temporary home
for the homeless. With these private agencies the placing-out
principle obtains, and children are soon removed to permanent homes.
The work of the aid societies is by no means confined to finding
homes. It aids parents to find truant children, it gives outings in
the summer season, it shelters homeless mothers with their children,
it administers aid in time of sickness. In industrial schools it
teaches children to help themselves by training them in such practical
arts as carpentry, caning chairs, printing, cooking, dressmaking, and
millinery.
Efficient oversight and management, together with co-operation among
child-saving agencies, is a present need. A national welfare bureau is
a decided step in advance. Prevention of neglect and cruelty in the
homes of the children themselves is the immediate goal of all
constructive effort. The education of public opinion to demand
universal consideration for child life is the ultimate aim.
READING REFERENCES
MANGOLD: _Problems of Child Welfare_, pages 166-184, 271-341.
CLOPPER: _Child Labor in the City Street._
MCKEEVER: _Training the Boy_, pages 203-213.
MCKEEVER: _Farm Boys and Girls_, pages 26-36.
LEE: _Constructive and Preventive Philanthropy_, pages 123-184.
FOLKS: _Care of Destitute and Neglected Children._
CHAPTER VIII
HOME ECONOMICS
64. =The Economic Function of the Home.=--Up to this point the
domestic function of the family has been under consideration. Marriage
and parenthood must hold first place, because they are fundamental to
the family and to the welfare of the race. But the family has an
economic as well as a domestic function. The primitive instinct of
hunger finds satisfaction in the home, and economic needs are supplied
in clothing, shelter, and bodily comforts. Production, distribution,
and consumption are all a part of the life of the farm. Domestic
economy is the foundation of all economics, and the family on the farm
presents the fundamental principles and phenomena that belong to the
science of economics as it presents the fundamentals of sociology. The
hunger for food demands satisfaction even more insistently than the
mating instinct. Birds must eat while they woo each other and build
their nests, and when the nest is full of helpless young both parents
find their time occupied in foraging for food. Similarly, when human
mating is over and the family hearth is built, and especially when
children have entered into the home life, the main occupation of man
and wife is to provide maintenance for the family. The need of food,
clothing, and shelter is common to the race. The requirements of the
family determine largely both the amount and the kind of work that is
done to meet them. However broad and elevated may be the interests of
the modern gentleman and his cultured wife, they cannot forget that
the physical needs of their family are as insistent as those of the
unrefined day laborer.
65. =Primitive Economics.=--In primitive times the family provided
everything for itself. In forest and field man and woman foraged for
food, cooked it at the camp-fire that they made, and rested under a
temporary shelter. If they required clothing they robbed the wild
beasts of their hide and fur or wove an apron of vegetable fibre.
Physical wants were few and required comparatively little labor. In
the pastoral stage the flocks and herds provided food and clothing.
Under the patriarchal system the woman was the economic slave. She was
goatherd and milkmaid, fire-tender and cook, tailor and tent-maker. It
was she who coaxed the grains to grow in the first cultivated field,
and experimented with the first kitchen garden. She was the dependable
field-hand for the sowing and reaping, when agriculture became the
principal means of subsistence. But woman's position has steadily
improved. She is no longer the slave but the helper. The peasant woman
of Europe still works in the fields, but American women long ago
confined themselves to indoor tasks, except in the gathering of
special crops like cotton and cranberries. Home economics have taught
the advantage of division of labor and co-operation.
66. =Division of Labor.=--Because of greater fitness for the heavy
labor of the field and barn, the man and his sons naturally became the
agriculturists and stock-breeders as civilization improved. It was
man's function to produce the raw material for home manufacture. He
ploughed and fertilized the soil, planted the various seeds,
cultivated the growing crops, and gathered in the harvest. It was his
task to perform the rougher part of preparing the raw material for
use. He threshed the wheat and barley on the threshing-floor and
ground the corn at the mill, and then turned over the product to his
wife. He bred animals for dairy or market, milked his cows, sheared
his sheep, and butchered his hogs and beeves; it was her task to turn
then to the household's use. She learned how to take the wheat and
corn, the beef and pork, and to prepare healthful and appetizing meals
for the household; she practised making butter and cheese for home use
and exchange. She took the flax and wool and spun and wove them into
cloth, and with her needle fashioned garments for every member of the
household and furnishings for the common home. She kept clean and tidy
the home and its manufacturing tools.
When field labor was slack the man improved the opportunity to fashion
the plough and the horseshoe at the forge, to build the boat or the
cart in the shop, to hew store or cut timber for building or firewood,
to erect a mill for sawing lumber or grinding grain. Similarly the
woman used her spare time in knitting and mending, and if time and
strength permitted added to her duties the care of the poultry-house.
67. =The Servant of the Household.=--Long before civilization had
advanced the household included servants. When wars broke out the
victor found himself possessed of human spoil. With passion
unrestrained, he killed the man or woman who had come under his power,
but when reason had a chance to modify emotion he decided that it was
more sensible to save his captives alive and to work them as his
slaves. The men could satisfy his economic interest, the women his sex
desire. The men were useful in the field, the women in the house.
Ancient material prosperity was built on the slave system of industry.
The remarkable culture of Athens was possible because the citizens,
free from the necessity of labor, enjoyed ample leisure. Lords and
ladies could live in their mediæval castles and practise chivalry with
each other, because peasants slaved for them in the fields without
pay. Slowly the servant class improved its status. Slaves became serfs
and serfs became free peasants, but the relation of master and servant
based on mutual service lasted for many centuries.
The time came when it was profitable for both parties to deal on a
money basis, and the workman began to know the meaning of
independence. The actual relation of master and servant remained about
the same, for the workman was still dependent upon his employer. It
took him a long time to learn to think much for himself, and he did
not know how to find employment outside of the community or even the
household where he had grown up. In the growing democracy of England,
and more fully in America, the workman learned to negotiate for
himself as a free man, and even to become himself a freeholder of
land.
68. =Hired Labor on the Farm.=--In the process of production in doors
and out it was impossible on a large farm for the independent farmer
and his wife to get on alone. There must be help in the cultivation of
many acres and in the care of cattle and sheep. There must be
assistance in the home when the birth and care of children brought an
added burden to the housewife. Later the growing boys and girls could
have their chores and thus add their contribution to the co-operative
household, but for a time at least success on the farm depended on the
hired laborer. Husband and wife became directors of industry as well
as laborers themselves. In the busy summer season it was necessary to
employ one or more assistants in the field, less often indoors, and
the employee became for a time a member of the family. Often a
neighbor performed the function of farm assistant, and as such stood
on the same level as his employer; there was no servant class or
servant problem, except the occasional shortage of laborers. Young men
and women were glad of an opportunity to earn a little money and to
save it in anticipation of the time when they would set up farming in
homes of their own. The spirit and practice of co-operation dignified
the employment in which all were engaged.
69. =Co-operation.=--The control of the manufacturing industry on a
large scale by corporations makes hearty co-operation between the
employing group and the employees difficult, but on the farm the
personal relations of the persons engaged made it easy and natural.
The art of working together as well as living together was an
achievement of the home, at first beginning unconsciously, but later
with a definite purpose. The practice of co-operation is a continual
object-lesson to the children, as they become conscious of the mutual
dependence of each and all. The farmer has no time to do the small
tasks, and so the boy must do the chores. There is a limit to the
strength of the mother, and so the daughter or housemaid must
supplement her labors. Without the grain and vegetables the housewife
cannot provide the meals, but the man is equally dependent upon the
woman for the preparation of the food. Without the care and industry
of the parents through the helpless years of childhood, the children
could not win in the struggle for existence. Nor is it merely an
economic matter, but health and happiness depend upon the mutual
consideration and helpfulness of every member of the household.
70. =Economic Independence of the Farm.=--Until well into the
nineteenth century the American farm household provided for most of
its own economic needs. A country store, helped out if necessary by an
occasional visit to town, supplied the few goods that were not
produced at home. Economic wants were simple and means of purchase
were not abundant. On the other hand, most of the products of the farm
were consumed there. In the prevailing extensive agriculture the
returns per acre were not great, methods of efficiency were not known
or were given little attention, families were large and children and
farm-hands enjoyed good appetites, and production and consumption
tended to equalize themselves. In the process of the home manufacture
of clothing it was difficult to keep the family provided with the
necessary comforts; there was no thought of laying by a surplus beyond
the anticipated needs of the family and provision for the wedding
store of marriageable daughters.
The distribution of any accumulated surplus was effected by the
simplest mechanism of exchange. If the supply of young cattle was
large or the wood-lot furnished more firewood than was needed, the
product was bartered for seed corn or hay. There was swapping of
horses by the men or of fruit or vegetable preserves by the women.
Eggs and butter disposed of at the store helped to pay for sugar,
salt, and spices. New incentives to larger production came with the
extension of markets. When wood and hay could be shipped to a distance
on the railroad, when a milk route in the neighborhood or a milk-train
to the city made dairy products more profitable, or when market
gardening became possible on an extensive scale, better methods of
distribution were provided to take care of the more numerous
products.
71. =Social and Economic Changes in the Family.=--The fundamental
principles that govern the economic activities of the family are the
same as they used to be. Industry, thrift, and co-operation are still
the watchwords of prosperity. But with the development of civilization
and the improvements in manufacture, communication, and
transportation, the economic function of the family has changed.
Instead of producing all the crops that he may need or the tools of
his occupation, the farmer tends to produce the particular crops that
he can best cultivate and that will bring him the largest returns.
Because of increasing facilities of exchange he can sell his surplus
and purchase the goods that will satisfy his other needs. The farmer's
wife no longer spins and weaves the family's supply of clothing; the
men buy their supply at the store and often even she turns over the
task of making up her own gowns to the village dressmaker. Where there
is a local creamery she is relieved of the manufacture of butter and
cheese, and the cannery lays down its preserves at her door. Household
manufacturing is confined almost entirely to the preparation of food,
with a varying amount of dressmaking and millinery. In the towns and
cities the needs of the family are even more completely supplied from
without. Children are relieved of all responsibility, women's care are
lightened by the stock of material in the shops, and the bakery and
restaurant help to supply the table. Family life loses thereby much of
its unity of effort and sympathy. The economic task falls mainly upon
the male producer. Even he lives on the land and in the house of
another man; he owns not the tools of his industry and does business
in another's name. He hires himself to a superior for wage or salary,
and thereby loses in a measure his own independence. But there is a
gain in social solidarity, for the chain of mutual dependence reached
farther and binds more firmly; there is gain in community
co-operation, for each family is no longer self-sufficient.
READING REFERENCES
BOSANQUET: _The Family_, pages 221-227, 324-333.
THOMAS: _Sex and Society_, pages 123-146.
SMALL AND VINCENT: _Introduction to the Study of Society_, pages
105-108.
MASON: _Woman's Share in Primitive Culture._
WEEDEN: _Economic and Social History of New England_, I, pages
324-326.
CHAPTER IX
CHANGES IN THE FAMILY
72. =Causes of Changes in the Family.=--The family at the present time
is in a transition era. Its machinery is not working smoothly. Its
environment is undergoing transformation. A hundred years ago the
family was strictly rural; not more than three per cent of the people
lived in large communities. Now nearly one-half are classified as
urban by the United States census of 1910, and those who remain rural
feel the influences of the town. There is far less economic
independence on the farm than formerly, and in the towns and cities
the home is little more than a place in which to sleep and eat for an
increasing number of workers, both men and women. The family on the
farm is no longer a perfectly representative type of the family in the
more populous centres.
These changes are due mainly to the requirements of industry, but
partly at least to the desire of all members of the family to share in
urban life. The increasing ease of communication and travel extends
the mutual acquaintance of city and country people and, as the city is
brought nearer, its pull upon the young people of the community
strengthens. There is also an increasing tendency of the women folk to
enter the various departments of industry outside of the home. It is
increasingly difficult for one person to satisfy the needs of a large
family. This tends to send the family to the city, where there are
wider opportunities, and to drive women and children into socialized
industry; at the same time, it tends to restrict the number of
children in families that have high ideals for women and children.
Family life everywhere is becoming increasingly difficult, and at the
same time every member of the family is growing more independent in
temper. The result is the breaking up of a large number of homes,
because of the departure of the children, the separation of husband
and wife, the desertion of parents, or the legal divorce of married
persons. The maintenance of the family as a social institution is
seriously threatened.
73. =Static vs. Dynamic Factors.=--There are factors entering into
family life that act as bonds to cement the individual members
together. Such are the material goods that they enjoy in common, like
the home with its comforts and the means of support upon which they
all rely. In addition to these there are psychical elements that enter
into their relations and strengthen these bonds. The inheritance of
the peculiar traits, manners, and customs that differentiate one
family from another; the reputation of the family name and pride in
its influence; an affection, understanding, and sympathy that come
from the intimacy of the home life and the appreciation of one
another's best qualities are ties that do not easily rend or loosen.
On the other hand, there are centrifugal forces that are pushing the
members of the family apart. At the bottom is selfish desire, which
frets at restriction, and which is stimulated by the current emphasis
upon personal pleasure and individual independence. The family
solidarity which made the sons Democrats because their father voted
that party ticket, or the daughters Methodists because their mother's
religious preferences were for that denomination, has ceased to be
effective. Every member of the family has his daily occupations in
diverse localities. The head of the household may find his business
duties in the city twenty miles away, or on the road that leads him
far afield across the continent. For long hours the children are in
school. The housewife is the only member of the family who remains at
home and her outside interests and occupations have multiplied so
rapidly as to make her, too, a comparative stranger to the home life.
Modern industrialism has laid its hand upon the women and children,
and thousands of them know the home only at morning and night.
74. =The Strain on the Urban Family.=--The rapid growth of cities,
with the increase of buildings for the joint occupancy of a number of
families, tends to disunity in each particular family and to a
reduction in the size of families. The privacy and sense of intimate
seclusion of the detached home is violated. The modern apartment-house
has a common hall and stairway for a dozen families and a common
dining-room and kitchen on the model of a hotel. The tenements are
human incubators from which children overflow upon the streets,
boarders invade the privacy of the family bedroom, and even sanitary
conveniences are public. Home life is violated in the tenement by the
pressure of an unfavorable environment; it perishes on the avenue
because of a compelling desire to gain as much freedom as possible
from household care.
The care of a modern household grows in difficulty. Although the
housekeeper has been relieved of performing certain economic functions
that added to the burden of her grandmother, her responsibilities have
been complicated by a number of conditions that are peculiar to the
modern life of the town. Social custom demands of the upper classes a
far more careful observance of fashion in dress and household
furnishings, and in the exchange of social courtesies. The increasing
cost of living due to these circumstances, and to a constantly rising
standard of living, reacts upon the mind and nerves of the housewife
with accelerating force. And not the least of her difficulties is the
growing seriousness of the servant problem. Custom, social
obligations, and nervous strain combine to make essential the help of
a servant in the home. But the American maid is too independent and
high-minded to make a household servant, and the American matron in
the main has not learned how to be a just and considerate mistress.
The result has been an influx of immigrant labor by servants who are
untrained and inefficient, yet soon learn to make successful demands
upon the employer for larger wages and more privileges because they
are so essential to the comfort and even the existence of the family.
Family life is increasingly at the mercy of the household employee. It
is not strange that many women prefer the comfort and relief of an
apartment or hotel, that many more hesitate to assume the
responsibility of marriage and children, preferring to undertake their
own self-support, and that not a few seek divorce.
75. =Family Desertion.=--While the burden of housekeeping rests upon
the wife, there are corresponding weights and annoyances that fall
upon the man. Business pressure and professional responsibility are
wearying; he, too, feels the strain upon his nerves. When he returns
home at evening he is easily disturbed by a worried wife, tired and
fretful children, and the unmistakable atmosphere of gloom and
friction that permeates many homes. He contrasts his unenviable
position with the freedom and good-fellowship of the club, and chafes
under the family bonds. In many cases he breaks them and sets himself
free by way of the divorce court. The course of men of the upper class
is paralleled by that of the working man or idler who meets similar
conditions in a home where the servant does not enter, but where there
is a surplus of children. He finds frequent relief in the saloon, and
eventually escapes by deserting his family altogether, instead of
having recourse to the law. This practice of desertion, which is the
poor man's method of divorce, is one of the continual perplexities of
organized charity, and constitutes one of the serious problems of
family life. There are gradations in the practice of desertion, and it
is not confined to men. The social butterfly who neglects her children
to flutter here and there is a temporary deserter, little less
culpable than the lazy husband who has an attack of _wanderlust_
before the birth of each child, and who returns to enjoy the comforts
of home as soon as his wife is again able to assume the function of
bread-winner for the growing family. From these it is but a step to
the mutual desertion of a man and a woman, who from incompatibility of
temper find it advisable to separate and go their own selfish ways, to
wait until the law allows a final severance of the marriage bond.
It is indisputable that this breaking up of the home is reacting
seriously upon the moral character of the present generation; there is
a carelessness in assuming the responsibility of marriage, and too
much shirking of responsibility when the burden weighs heavily. There
is a weakening of real affection and a consequent lack of mutual
forbearance; there is an increasing feeling that marriage is a lottery
and not worth while unless it promises increased satisfaction of
sexual, economic, or social desires and ambitions.
76. =Feminism.=--There can be no question that the growing
independence of woman has complicated the family situation. In
reaction against the long subjection that has fallen to her lot, the
modern woman in many cases rebels against the control of custom and
the expectations of society, refuses to regard herself as strictly a
home-keeper, and in some cases is unwilling to become a mother. She
seeks wider associations and a larger range of activities outside of
the home, she demands the same rights and privileges that belong to
man, and she dreams of the day when her power as well as her influence
will help to mould social institutions. The feminist movement is in
the large a wholesome reaction against an undeserved subserviency to
the masculine will. Undoubtedly it contains great social potencies. It
deserves kindly reception in the struggle to reform and reconstruct
society where society is weak.
The present situation deserves not abuse, but the most careful
consideration from every man. In countless cases woman has not only
been repressed from activities outside of the family group, but has
been oppressed in her own home also. America prides itself on its
consideration for woman in comparison with the general European
attitude toward her, but too often chivalry is not exercised in the
home. Often the wife has been a slave in the household where she
should have been queen. She has been subject to the passion of an hour
and the whim of a moment. She has been servant rather than helpmeet.
Upon her have fallen the reproaches of the unbridled temper of other
members of the family; upon her have rested the burdens that others
have shirked. Husband and children have been free to find diversion
elsewhere; family responsibilities or broken health have confined her
at home. Her husband might even find sex satisfaction away from home,
but public opinion would be more lenient with him than with her if
she offended. The time has come when it is right that these
inequalities and injustices should cease. Society owes to woman not
only her right to her own person and property, but the right to bear,
also, her fair share of social responsibility in this modern world.
Yet in the process of coming to her own, there is danger that the wife
will forget that marriage is the most precious of human relations;
that the home has the first claim upon her; that motherhood is the
greatest privilege to which any woman, however socially gifted, can
aspire; and that social institutions of tried worth are not lightly to
be cast upon the rubbish heap. It is by no means certain that society
can afford or that women ought to demand individualistic rights that
will put in jeopardy the welfare of the remainder of the family. The
average woman has not the strength to carry properly the burden of
home cares plus large political and social responsibilities, nor has
she the money to employ in the home all the modern improvements of
labor-saving devices and skilled service that might in a measure take
her place. Nor is it at all certain that the granting of individual
rights to women would tend to purify sex relations, but it is quite
conceivable that the old moral and religious sanctions of marriage may
disappear and the State assume the task of caring for all children. It
is clear that the rights and duties of women constitute a very serious
part of the problem of family life.
77. =Individual Rights vs. Social Duties.=--The greatest weakness to
be found in twentieth-century society is the disposition on the part
of almost all individuals to place personal rights ahead of social
duties. The modern spirit of individualism has grown strong since the
Renaissance and the Reformation. It has forced political changes until
absolutism has been yielding everywhere to democracy. It has extended
social privileges until it has become possible for any one with push
and ability to make his way to the top rung of the ladder of social
prestige. It has permitted freedom to profess and practise any
religion, and to advocate the most bizarre ideas in ethics and
philosophy. It has brought human individuals to the place where they
feel that nothing may be permitted to stand between them and the
satisfaction of personal desire. The disciples of Nietzsche do not
hesitate to stand boldly for the principle that might makes right,
that he who can crush his competitors in the race for pleasure and
profit has an indisputable claim on whatever he can grasp, and that
the principle of mutual consideration is antiquated and ridiculous.
Such principles and privileges may comport with the elemental
instincts and interests of unrestrained, primitive creatures, but they
do not harmonize with requirements of social solidarity and
efficiency. Social evolution in the past has come only as the struggle
for individual existence was modified by consideration for the needs
of another, and social welfare in the future can be realized only as
men and women both are willing to sacrifice age-long prejudice or
momentary pleasure and profit to the permanent good of the larger
group.
READING REFERENCES
COOLEY: _Social Organization_, pages 356-371.
BRANDT AND BALDWIN: _Family Desertion._
DEALEY: _The Family in Its Sociological Aspects_, pages 85-95,
109-118.
GOODSELL: _The Family as a Social and Educational Institution_,
pages 456-477.
HOWARD: _History of Matrimonial Institutions_, III, pages 239-250.
CHAPTER X
DIVORCE
78. =The Main Facts About Divorce.=--An indication of the emphasis on
individual rights is furnished by the increase of divorce, especially
in the United States, where the demands of individualism and
industrialism are most insistent. The divorce record is the
thermometer that measures the heat of domestic friction. Statistics of
marriage and divorce made by the National Government in 1886 and again
in 1906 make possible a comparison of conditions which reveal a rapid
increase in the number of divorces granted by the courts. Certain
outstanding facts are of great importance.
(1) The number of divorces in twenty years increased from 23,000 to
72,000, which is three times the rate of increase of the population of
the country. If this rate of progress continues, more than half the
marriages in the United States will terminate in divorce by the end of
the present century.
(2) In the first census it was discovered that the number of divorces
in the United States exceeded the total number of divorces in all the
European countries; in the second census it was shown that the United
States had increased its divorces three times, while Japan, with the
largest divorce rate in the world, had reduced its rate one-half.
(3) Divorces in the United States are least common among people of the
middle class; they are higher among native whites than among
immigrants, and they are highest in cities and among childless
couples.
(4) Two-thirds of the divorces are granted on the demands of the wife.
(5) Divorce laws are very variable in the different States, but most
divorces are obtained from the States where the applicants reside.
79. =Causes of Divorce.=--The causes recorded in divorce cases do not
represent accurately the real causes, for the reason that it is easier
to get an uncontested decision when the charges are not severe, and
also for the reason that State laws vary and that which best fits the
law will be put forward as the principal cause. Divorce laws in the
United States generally recognize adultery, desertion, cruelty,
drunkenness, lack of support, and crime as legitimate grounds for
divorce. In the five years from 1902 to 1906 desertion was given as
the ground for divorce in thirty-eight per cent of the cases, cruelty
in twenty-three per cent, and adultery in fifteen per cent.
Intemperance was given as the direct cause in only four per cent, and
neglect approximately the same. The assignment of marital
unfaithfulness in less than one-sixth of the cases, as compared with
one-fourth twenty years before does not mean, however, that there is
less unfaithfulness, but that minor offenses are considered sufficient
on which to base a claim; the small percentage of charges of
intemperance as the principal cause ought not to obscure the fact that
it was an indirect cause in one-fifth of the cases.
It is natural that the countries of Europe should present greater
variety of laws and of causes assigned. In England, where the law has
insisted on adultery as a necessary cause, divorces have been few. In
Ireland, where the church forbids it, divorce is rare, less than one
to thirty-five marriages. In Scotland fifty per cent of the cases
reported are due to adultery. Cruelty was the principal cause ascribed
in France, Austria, and Rumania; desertion in Russia and Sweden. The
tendency abroad is to ascribe more rather than less to adultery.
The real causes for divorce are more remote than the specific acts of
adultery, desertion, or cruelty that are mentioned as grounds for
divorce. The primary cause is undoubtedly the spirit of individual
independence that demands its rights at the expense of others. In the
case of women there is less hesitancy than formerly in seeking
freedom from the marriage bond because of the increasing opportunity
of self-support. The changing conditions of home life in the city,
with the increasing cost of living, coupled with the ease of divorce,
encourage resort to the courts. The unscrupulousness of some lawyers,
who fatten their purses at the expense of marital happiness, and the
meddlesomeness of relatives are also contributing causes. Finally the
restraint of religion has relaxed, and unhappy and ill-mated persons
do not shrink from taking a step which was formerly condemned by the
church.
80. =History of Divorce.=--The history of divorce presents various
opinions and practices. The Hebrews had high ideals, but frequently
fell into lax practices; the Greeks began well but degenerated sadly
to the point where marriage was a mere matter of convenience; the
Romans, noted for their sterling qualities in the early days of the
republic, practised divorce without restraint in the later days of the
empire.
The influence of Christianity was greatly to restrict divorce. The
teaching of the Bible was explicit that the basis of marriage was the
faithful love of the heart, and that impure desire was the essence of
adultery. Illicit intercourse was the only possible moral excuse for
divorce. True to this teaching, the Christian church tried hard to
abolish divorce, as it attempted to check all sexual evils, and the
Catholic Church threw about marriage the veil of sanctity by making it
one of the seven sacraments. As a sacrament wedlock was indissoluble,
except as money or influence induced the church to turn back the key
which it alone possessed. Separation was allowed by law, but not
divorce. Greater stability was infused into the marriage relation. Yet
it is not possible to purify sex relations by tying tightly the
marriage bond. Unfaithfulness has been so common in Europe among the
higher classes that it occasioned little remark, until the social
conscience became sensitive in recent decades, and among the lower
classes divorce was often unnecessary, because so many unions took
place without the sanction of the church. In Protestant countries
there has been a variable recession from the extreme Catholic ground.
The Episcopal Church in England and in colonial America recognized
only the one Biblical cause of unfaithfulness; the more radical
Protestants turned over the whole matter to the state. In New England
desertion and cruelty were accepted alongside adultery as sufficient
grounds for divorce, and the legislature sometimes granted it by
special enactment.
81. =Investigation and Legislation in the United States and
England.=--The divorce question provoked some discussion in this
country about the time of the Civil War, and some statistics were
gathered. Twenty years later the National Government was induced by
the National Divorce Reform League to take a careful census of
marriage and divorce. This was published in 1889, and revised and
reissued in 1909. These reports aroused the States which controlled
the regulation of marriage and divorce to attempt improved
legislation. Almost universally among them divorce was made more
difficult instead of easier. The term of residence before divorce
could be obtained was lengthened; certain changes were made in the
legal grounds for divorce; in less than twenty years fourteen States
limited the privilege of divorced persons to remarry until after a
specified time had elapsed, varying from three months to two years.
Congress passed a uniform marriage law for all the territories. It was
believed almost universally that the Constitution should be amended so
as to secure a federal divorce law, but experience proved that it was
better that individual States should adopt a uniform law. The later
tendency has been in this direction.
At the same time, the churches of the country interested themselves in
the subject. The Protestant Episcopal Church took strong ground
against its ministers remarrying a divorced person, and the National
Council of Congregational Churches appointed a special committee which
reported in 1907 in favor of strictness. Fourteen Protestant churches
combined in an Interchurch Committee to secure united action, and the
Federal Council of Churches recorded itself against the prevailing
laxness. The purpose of all this group action was to check abuses and
to create a more sensitive public opinion, especially among moral and
religious leaders.
In Great Britain, on the other hand, divorce had always been
difficult. There the strictness of the law led to a demand for a study
of the subject and a report to Parliament. The result was the
appointment of a Royal Commission on Divorce and Matrimonial Causes,
consisting of twelve members, which investigated for three years, and
in 1912 presented its report. It recognized the fact that severe
restrictions were in force, and a majority of the commission regarding
marriage as a legal rather than a sacramental bond, favored easier
divorce and a single standard of morality for both sexes. It was
proposed that the grounds for legal divorce should be adultery,
desertion extending over three years, cruelty, incurable insanity
after confinement for five years, habitual drunkenness found incurable
after three years, or imprisonment carrying with it a sentence of
death. A minority of the committee still regarding marriage as a
sacrament, favored no relaxation of the law as it stood.
82. =Proposed Remedies.=--Various remedies have been proposed to stem
the tide of excessive divorce. There are many who see in divorce
nothing more than a healthy symptom of individual independence, a
revolt against conditions of the home that are sometimes almost
intolerable. Many others are alarmed at the rapid increase of divorce,
especially in the United States, and believe that checks are necessary
for the continued existence of the family and the well-being of
society. The first reform proposed as a means of prevention of divorce
is the revision of the marriage laws on a higher model. The second is
a stricter divorce law, made as uniform as possible. The third is the
adoption of measures of reconciliation which will remove the causes
that provoke divorce.
The proposed laws include such provisions as the prohibition of
marriage for those who are criminal, degenerate, or unfitted to
perform the sex function; the requirement of six months' publication
of matrimonial banns and a physical certificate before marriage; a
strictly provisional decree of divorce; the establishment of a court
of domestic relations, and a prohibition of remarriage of the
defendant during the life of the plaintiff. These are reasonable
restrictions and seem likely to be adopted gradually, as practicable
improvements over the existing laws. It is also proposed that the
merits of every case shall be more carefully considered, and the
judicial procedure improved by the appointment of a divorce proctor in
connection with every court trying divorce cases, whose business it
shall be to make investigations and to assist in trying or settling
specific cases. Experiment has proved the value of such an officer.
83. =Court of Domestic Relations.=--One of the most significant
improvements that has taken place is the establishment of a court of
domestic relations, which already exists in several cities, and has
made an enviable record. In the early experiments it seemed
practicable in Kansas to make such a court a branch of the circuit and
juvenile courts, so arranged that it would be possible to deal with
the relations of the whole family; in Chicago the new tribunal was
made a part of the municipal court. By means of patient questioning,
first by a woman assistant and then by the judge himself, and by good
advice and explicit directions as to conduct, with a warning that
failure would be severely treated, it has been possible to unravel
hundreds of domestic entanglements.
84. =Tendencies.=--There can be no question that the present tendency
is in the direction of greater freedom in the marriage relation.
Society will not continue to sanction inhumanity and immorality in the
relations of man to woman. Marriage is ideally a sacred relation, but
when it is not so treated, when love is dead and repulsion has taken
its place, and especially when physical contact brings disease and
suffering, public opinion is likely to consider that marriage is
thereby virtually annulled, and to permit ratification of the fact by
a decree of divorce. On the other hand, it is probable that increasing
emphasis will be put on serious and well-prepared marriage, on the
inculcation of a spirit of mutual love and forbearance through the
agency of the church, and on the exhaustion of every effort to
restore right relations, if they have not been irreparably destroyed,
before any grant of divorce will be allowed. In this, as in all
problems of the family, the spirit of mutual consideration for the
interests of all concerned is that which must be invoked for a speedy
and permanent solution. Education of young people in the importance of
the family as a social institution and in the responsibility which
every individual member should feel to make and keep the family pure
and strong as a bulwark of social stability, is the surest means of
preventing altogether its dissolution.
READING REFERENCES
"Report on Marriage and Divorce," 1906, _Bureau of the Census_,
I, pages 272-274, 331-333.
"Reports of the National League for the Protection of the Family."
POST: _Ethics of Marriage and Divorce_, pages 62-84.
DEALEY: _The Family in Its Sociological Aspects_, pages 96-108.
HOWARD: _History of Matrimonial Institutions_, III, pages 3-160.
WILLCOX: _The Divorce Problem._
CHAPTER XI
THE SOCIAL EVIL
85. =Sexual Impurity.=--A prime factor in the breaking up of the home
is sexual impurity. The sex passion, an elemental instinct of
humanity, is sanctified by the marriage relation, but unbridled in
those who seek above all else their own pleasure, becomes a curse in
body and soul. It is not limited to either sex, but men have been more
self-indulgent, and have been treated more leniently than erring
women. Sexual impurity is wide-spread, but public opinion against it
is steadily strengthening, and the tendency is to hold men and women
equally responsible. For the sake of clearness it is advisable to
distinguish between various forms of impurity, and to observe the
proper terms. The sexual evil appears in aggravated form in commercial
prostitution, but is more prevalent as an irregularity among
non-professionals. Sexual intercourse before marriage, or fornication,
was not infrequent in colonial days, and in Europe is startlingly
common; very frequently among the lower classes there is no marriage
until a child is born. Sexual infidelity after marriage, or adultery,
is the cause of the ruin of many homes. In the cities and among the
well-to-do classes the keeping of mistresses is an occasional
practice, but it is far less common than was the case in former days,
when it was the regular custom at royal courts and imitated by those
lower in the social scale.
86. =Prostitution.=--Prostitution, softened in common speech to "the
social evil," is a term for promiscuity of sex relationship for pay or
its equivalent. It is a very old practice, and has existed in the East
as a part of religious worship in veneration of the power of
generation. In the West it is a frequent accompaniment of intemperance
and crime. Modern prostitutes are recruited almost entirely from the
lower middle class, both in Europe and America. Ignorant and helpless
immigrant girls are seduced on the journey, in the streets of American
cities, and in the tenements. Domestic servants and employees in
factories and department stores seem to be most subject to
exploitation, but no class or employment is immune. A great many
girls, while still in their teens, have begun their destructive
career. They are peculiarly susceptible in the evening, after the
strain of the day's labor, when they are hunting for fun and
excitement in theatres, dance-halls, and moving-picture shows. In
summer they are themselves hunted on excursion steamers, and at the
parks and recreation grounds. The seduction and exploitation of young
women has become a distinct occupation of certain worthless young men,
commonly known as cadets, who live upon the earnings of the women they
procure. Three-fourths of the prostitutes have such men dependent on
them, to whom they remain attached through fear or need of pecuniary
relief in case of arrest, or even through a species of affection,
though they receive nothing but abuse in return. Once secured, the
victim is not permitted to escape. Not many women enter the life of
prostitution from choice, but when they have once yielded to
temptation or force, they lose their self-respect and usually sink
into hopeless degradation, and then do not shrink from soliciting
business within doors or on the streets.
87. =Promotion and Regulation of Vice.=--The social evil is centred in
houses of ill fame managed by unprincipled women. The business is
financed and the profits enjoyed by men who constantly stimulate the
trade to make it more profitable. As a result of investigations in New
York, it is estimated that the number of prostitutes would be not more
than one-fourth of what it is were it not for the ruthless greed of
these men. The houses are usually located in the poorer parts of the
city, but they are also to be found scattered elsewhere. In cases
where public opinion does not warrant rigid enforcement of the law
against it, the illicit traffic is disregarded by the police, and
often they are willing to share in the gains as the price of their
leniency. As a rule the business is kept under cover and not
permitted to flaunt itself on the streets. Definite segregation in a
particular district has been attempted, and has sometimes been favored
as a means of checking vice, but this means is not practised or
favored after experiment has shown its uselessness as a check upon the
trade. Government regulation by a system of license, with registration
of prostitutes and regular though superficial examination of health,
is in vogue in parts of western and southern Europe, but it is not
favored by vice commissions that have examined into its workings.
88. =Extent of the Social Evil.=--It is probable that estimates as to
the number of prostitutes in the great urban centres has been much
exaggerated. In the nature of the case it is very difficult to get
accurate reports, but when it is remembered that the number of men who
frequent the resorts is not less than fifteen times the number of
women, and that in most cases the proportion is larger, it is not
difficult to conceive of the immense profits to the exploiters, but
also of the enormous economic waste, the widely prevalent physical
disease, and the untold misery of the women who sin, and of the
innocent women at home who are sinned against by those who should be
their protectors.
A "white-slave traffic" seems to have developed in recent years that
has not only increased the number of local prostitutes, but has united
far-distant urban centres. It is very difficult to prove an intercity
trade, but investigation has produced sufficient evidence to show that
there is an organized business of procuring victims and that they have
been exported to distant parts of the world, including South America,
South Africa, and the Far East.
89. =The Causes.=--The social evil has usually been blamed upon the
perversity of women and their pecuniary need, but investigation makes
it plain that the causes go deeper than that. The first cause is the
ignorance of girls who are permitted to grow up and go out into the
world innocently, unaware of the snares in which they are liable to
become enmeshed. Added to this ignorance is the lack of moral and
religious training, so that there is often no firm conviction of right
and wrong, an evil which is intensified in the city tenements by the
conditions of congested population. A third grave cause is the public
neglect of persons of defective mentality and morality. Women who are
not capable of taking care of themselves are allowed full liberty of
conduct, and frequently fall victims to the seducer. An investigation
of cases in the New York Reformatory for Women at Bedford in 1913
showed one-third very deficient mentally; the Massachusetts Vice
Commission in 1914 reported one-half to three-fourths of three hundred
cases to be of the same class. It seems clear that a large proportion
of prostitutes generally belong in this category. It has been
estimated that there are now (1915) as many defective women at large
in Massachusetts as there are in public institutions.
Poverty is an important factor in the extension of the sexual evil. It
is notorious that thousands of women workers are underpaid. In
factories, restaurants, and department stores they frequently receive
wages much less than the eight dollars a week required by women to
maintain themselves, if dependent on their own resources. The American
woman's pride in a good appearance, the natural human love of ease,
luxury, and excitement, the craving for relaxation and thrill, after
the exacting labor of a long day, all contribute to the welcome of an
opportunity for an indulgence that brings money in return. The agency
of the dance-hall and the saloon has also an important place in the
downfall of the tempted. Intemperance and prostitution go together,
and places where they can be enjoyed are factories of vice and crime.
Many so-called hotels with bar attachment are little more than houses
of evil resort. Especially notorious for a time were the Raines Law
hotels in New York City, designed to check intemperance, but proving
nurseries of prostitution. Commercial profit is large from both kinds
of traffic, and one stimulates the other.
Among minor causes of the social evil is the postponement or
abandonment of marriage by many young people, the celibate life
imposed upon students and soldiers, the declaration of some physicians
that continence is injurious, and lax opinion, especially in Europe.
90. =The Consequences.=--It is impossible to measure adequately the
consequences of sexual indulgence. It is destructive of physical
health among women and of morals among both sexes. It results in a
weakening of the will and a blunting of moral discernment. It is an
economic waste, as is intemperance, for even on the level of economic
values it is plain that money could be much better spent for that
which would benefit rather than curse. But the great evil that looms
large in public view is the legacy of physical disease that falls upon
self-indulgent men and their families. The presence of venereal
disease in Europe is almost unbelievable; so great has it been in
continental armies that governments have become alarmed as to its
effects upon the health and morale of the troops. College men have
been reckless in sowing wild oats, and have suffered serious physical
consequences. Most pathetic is the suffering that is caused to
innocent wives and children in blindness, sterility, and frequent
abdominal disease. This is a subject that demands the attention of
every person interested in human happiness and social welfare.
91. =History of Reform.=--Spasmodic efforts to suppress the social
evil have occurred from time to time. The result has been to scatter
rather than to suppress it, and after a little it has crept back to
its old haunts. Scattering it in tenements and residential districts
has been very unfortunate. The cure is not so simple a process.
Neither will segregation help. It is now generally agreed, especially
as a result of recent investigations by vice commissioners in the
large cities, that there must be a brave, sustained effort at
suppression, and then the patient task of reclaiming the fallen and
preventing the evil in future.
Organization and investigation are the two words that give the key to
the history of reform. International societies are agitating abroad;
other associations are directly engaged in checking vice in the United
States, most prominent of which is the American Vigilance Association.
Rescue organizations are scattered through the cities. Especially
active have been the commissions of investigation appointed privately
and by municipal, State, and Federal Governments, which have issued
illuminating reports. The United States in 1908 joined in an
international treaty to prevent the world-wide traffic in white
slaves, and in 1910 Congress passed the Mann White Slave Act to
prevent interstate traffic in America.
92. =Measures of Prevention and Cure.=--The social evil is one about
which there have been all sorts of wild opinions, but the facts are
becoming well substantiated by investigations, and these
investigations are the basis upon which all scientific conclusions
must rest, alike for public education and for constructive
legislation. No one remedy is adequate. There are those who believe
that the church has it in its power to stir a wave of indignation that
would sweep the whole traffic from the land, but it is not so simple a
process. It is generally agreed that both education and legislation
are necessary to check the evil. The first is necessary for the public
health, and to support repressive laws. As a helpful means of
repression it is proposed that the social evil, along with questions
of social morals, like gambling, excise, and amusements, shall be
taken out of the hands of the municipal police and the politicians,
and lodged with an unpaid morals commission, which shall have its own
special corps of expert officers and a morals court for the trial of
cases appropriate to its jurisdiction. This experiment actually has
been tried in Berlin. Measures of prevention as well as measures of
repression are needed. Restraint is needed for defectives; protection
for immigrants and young people, especially on shipboard, in the
tenements, and in the moving-picture houses; better housing, better
amusements, and better wages for all the people. Finally, the wrecks
must be taken care of. Rescue homes and other agencies manage to save
a few to reformed lives; homes are needed constantly for temporary
residence. Private philanthropy has provided them thus far, but the
United States Government has discussed the advisability of building
them in sufficient numbers to meet every local need. Many old and
hardened offenders need reformatories with farm and hospital where
they can be cared for during a long time; some of the States have
provided these already. The principles upon which a permanent cure of
the social evil must be based are similar to those that underlie all
family reform, namely, the rescue as far as possible of those already
fallen, the social and moral education of youth to nobler purpose and
will, the removal of unfavorable economic and social conditions, and
the improvement of family life until it can satisfy the human cravings
that legitimately belong to it.
READING REFERENCES
ADDAMS: _A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil._
WILLSON: _The American Boy and the Social Evil._
MORROW: _Social Diseases and Marriage_, pages 331-353.
KNEELAND: _Commercialized Prostitution in New York City_, pages
253-271.
CHAPTER XII
CHARACTERISTICS AND PRINCIPLES
93. =Social Characteristics Illustrated by the Family.=--A study of
the family such as has been made illustrates the characteristics of
social life that were noted in the introductory chapter. There is
activity in the performance of every domestic, economic, and social
function. There is association in various ways for various purposes
between all members of the family. Control is exercised by paternal
authority, family custom, and personal and family interest. The
history of the family shows gradual changes that have produced
varieties of organization, and the present situation discloses
weaknesses that are precipitating upon society very serious problems.
Present characteristics largely determine future processes; always in
planning for the future it is necessary to take into consideration the
forces that produce and alter social characteristics. Specific
measures meet with much scepticism, and enthusiastic reformers must
always reckon with inertia, frequent reactions, and slow social
development. In the face of sexualism, divorce, and selfish
individualism, it requires patience and optimism to believe that the
family will continue to exist and the home be maintained.
94. =Principles of Family Reform.=--It is probably impossible to
restore the home life of the past, as it is impossible to turn back
the tide of urban migration and growth. But it is possible on the
basis of certain fundamental principles to improve the conditions of
family life by means of methods that lie at hand. The first principle
is that the home must function properly. There must be domestic and
economic satisfactions. Without the satisfaction of the sexual and
parental instincts and an atmosphere of comfort and freedom from
anxiety, the home is emptied of its attractions. The second principle
is that social sympathy and service rather than individual
independence shall be the controlling motive in the home. As long as
every member of the family consults first his own pleasure and comfort
and contributes only half-heartedly to create a home atmosphere and to
perform his part of the home functions, there can be no real gain in
family life. The home is built on love; it can survive on nothing less
than mutual consideration.
95. =The Method of Economic Adjustment.=--The first method by which
these principles can be worked out is economic adjustment. It is
becoming imperative that the family income and the family requirements
shall be fitted together. Less extravagance and waste of expenditure
and a living wage to meet legitimate needs, are both demanded by
students of economic reform. It is not according to the principles of
social righteousness that any family should suffer from cold or
hunger, nor is it right that any social group should be wasteful of
the portion of economic goods that has come to it. There is great
need, also, that the expense of living should be reduced while the
standards of living shall not be lowered. The business world has been
trying to secure economies in production; there is even greater need
of economies in distribution. Millions are wasted in advertising and
in the profits of middlemen. Some method of co-operative buying and
selling will have to be devised to stop this economic leakage. It
would relieve the housewife from some of the worries of housekeeping
and lighten the heart of the man who pays the bills. A third
adjustment is that of the household employee to the remainder of the
household. The servant problem is first an economic problem, and
questions of wages, hours, and privileges must be based on economic
principles; but it is also a social problem. The servant bears a
social relation to the family. The family home is her home, and she
must have a certain share in home comforts and privileges. A fourth
reform is better housing and equipment. Attractive and comfortable
houses in a wholesome environment of light, air, and sunshine, built
for economical and easy housekeeping, are not only desirable but
essential for a permanent and happy family life.
96. =The Method of Social Education.=--A second general method by
which the principles of home life may be carried out is social
education. Given the material accessories, there must be the education
of the family in their use. Children in the home need to know the
fundamentals of personal and sex hygiene and the principles of
eugenics. In home and in school the emphasis in education should be
upon social rather than economic values, on the significance of social
relationships and the opportunities of social intercourse in the home
and the community, on the personal and social advantages of
intellectual culture, on the importance of moral progress in the
elimination of drunkenness, sexualism, poverty, crime, and war, if
there is to be future social development, and on the value of such
social institutions as the home, the school, the church, and the state
as agencies for individual happiness and group progress. Especially
should there be impressed upon the child mind the transcendent
importance of affectionate co-operation in the home circle, parents
sacrificing personal preferences and anticipations of personal
enjoyment for the good of children, and children having consideration
for the wishes and convictions of their elders, and recognizing their
own responsibility in rendering service for the common good.
Sanctioned by law, by the custom of long tradition, by economic and
social valuations, the home calls for personal devotion of will and
purpose from every individual for the welfare of the group of which he
is a privileged member. The family tie is the most sacred bond that
links individuals in human society; to strengthen it is one of the
noblest aspirations of human endeavor.
READING REFERENCES
DEALEY: _The Family in Its Sociological Aspects_, pages 119-134.
POST: _Ethics of Marriage and Divorce_, pages 105-127.
HOWARD: _History of Matrimonial Institutions_, III, pages 253-259.
THWING: _The Recovery of the Home._ A Pamphlet.
PART III--SOCIAL LIFE IN THE RURAL COMMUNITY
CHAPTER XIII
THE COMMUNITY AND ITS HISTORY
97. =Broadening the Horizon.=--Out of the kindergarten of the home the
child graduates into the larger school of the community. Thus far
through his early years the child's environment has been restricted
almost entirely to the four walls of the home or the limits of the
farm. His horizon has been bounded by garden, pasture, and orchard,
except as he has enjoyed an occasional visit to the village centre or
has found playmates on neighboring farms. He has shared in the
isolation of the farm. The home of the nearest neighbor is very likely
out of sight beyond the hill, or too far away for children's feet to
travel the intervening distance; on the prairie the next door may be
over the edge of the horizon. The home has been his social world. It
has supplied for him a social group, persons to talk with, to play
with, to work with. Inevitably he takes on their characteristics, and
his life will continue to be narrow and to grow conservative and hard,
unless he enlarges his experience, broadens his horizon, tries new
activities, enjoys new associations, tests new methods of social
control, and lets the forces that produce social change play upon his
own life.
Happy is he when he enters definitely into community life by taking
his place in the district school. The schoolhouse may be at the
village centre or it may stand aloof among the trees or stark on a
barren hillside along the country road; physical environment is of
small consequence as compared with the new social environment of the
schoolroom itself. The child has come into contact with others of his
kind in a permanent social institution outside the home, and this
social contact has become a daily experience. Every child that goes to
school is one of many representatives from the homes of the
neighborhood. He brings with him the habits and ideas that he has
gathered from his own home, and he finds that they do not agree or
fuse easily with the ideas and habits of the other children. In the
schoolroom and on the playground he repeats the process of social
adjustments which the race has passed through. Conflicts for
ascendancy are frequent. He must prove his physical prowess on the
playground and his intellectual ability in the schoolroom. He must
test his body of knowledge and the value of his mental processes by
the mind of his teacher. He must have strength of conviction to defend
his own opinions, but he must have an open mind to receive truths that
are new to him. One of the great achievements of the school is to fuse
dissimilar elements into common custom and opinion, and thus to
socialize the independent units of community life.
98. =Learning Social Values in the Community.=--The school is the door
to larger social opportunity than the home can provide, but it is not
the only door. The child in passing to and from school comes into touch
with other institutions and activities. He passes other homes than his
own. He sees each in the midst of its own peculiar surroundings, and he
makes comparisons of one with another and of each with his own. He
estimates more or less consciously the value of that which he sees, not
so much in terms of economic as of social worth, and congratulates or
pities himself or his schoolmates, according to the judgments that he
has made. He stops at the store, the mill, or the blacksmith shop,
through frequent contact becomes familiar with their functions, and
thinks in turn that he would like to be storekeeper, miller, and
blacksmith. He sees the farmer on other farms than his own gathering
his harvest in the fall, hauling wood in the winter, or ploughing his
field in the spring, and he becomes conscious of common habits and
occupations in this rural community. He gets acquainted with the
variety of activities that enter into life in the country district in
which his home is located, and he learns to appreciate the importance
of the instruments upon which such activity depends for travel from
place to place. By all these means the child is learning social values.
After a little he comes to understand that the community, with its
roads, its public buildings, and its established institutions, exists
to satisfy certain economic and social needs that the single family
cannot supply. By and by he learns that, like the family, it has grown
out of the experience of relationships, and can be traced far back in
history, and that as time passes it is slowly changing to adapt itself
to the changing wants and wishes of its inhabitants. He becomes aware
of a present tendency for the community to imitate the larger social
life outside, to make its village centre a reproduction in miniature of
the urban centres; later he realizes that the introduction of foreign
elements into the population is working for the destruction of the
simple, unified life of former days, and is introducing a certain
flavor of cosmopolitanism.
It is this growth of social consciousness in a single child,
multiplied by the number of children in the community, that
constitutes the process of social education. A community with no
dynamic influences impinging upon it reproduces itself in this way
generation after generation, and at best seems to maintain but a
static existence. In reality, few communities stand still. The
principle of change that is characteristic of social life is
continually working to build up or tear down the community structure
and to modify community functioning. The causes of change and their
methods of operation appear in the history of the rural community.
99. =Rural History.=--The history of the rural community falls into
two periods--first, when the village was necessary to the life of the
individual; second, when the individual pioneer pushed out into the
forest or prairie, and the village followed as a convenient social
institution. The community came into existence through the bond of
kinship. Every clan formed a village group with its own peculiar
customs. These were primitive, even among semi-civilized peoples.
Among the ancient Hebrews the village elders sat by the gate to
administer justice in the name of the clan; in China the old men still
bask on a log in the sun and pronounce judgment in neighborly gossip.
The village existed for sociability and safety. The mediæval Germans
left about each village a broad strip of waste land called the mark,
and over this no stranger could come as a friend without sounding a
trumpet. Later the village was surrounded by a wall called a tun, and
by a transfer of terms the village frequently came to be called a
mark, or tun, later changed to town. Place names even in the United
States are often survivals of such a custom, as Charlestown or
Chilmark. The Indian village in colonial America was similarly
protected with a palisade, and village dogs heralded the approach of a
stranger, as they do still in the East.
100. =The Mediæval Village.=--The peasant village of the Middle Ages
constitutes a distinct type of rural community. A consciousness of
mutual dependence between the owner of the land and the peasants who
were his serfs produced a feudal system in which the landlord
undertook to furnish protection and to permit the peasant to use
portions of his land in exchange for service. Strips of fertile soil
were allotted to the village families for cultivation, while
pasture-land, meadow, and forest were kept for community use. Even in
the heart of the city Boston Common remains as a relic of the old
custom. On the mediæval manor people lived and worked together, most
of them on the same social level, the lord in his manor-house and the
peasants in a hamlet or larger village on his land, huddling together
in rude huts and in crude fashion performing the social and economic
functions of a rural community. In the village church the miller or
the blacksmith held his head a little higher than his neighbors, and
sometimes the lord of the manor did not deign to worship in the common
parish church, but the mass of the people were fellow serfs, owning a
common master, working at the same tasks, by custom sowing and reaping
the same kind of grain on the same kind of land in the same week of
the year. They attended the court of the master, who exercised the
functions of government. They worshipped side by side in the church.
The same customs bound them and the same superstitions worried their
waking hours. There was thus a community solidarity that less commonly
exists under modern conditions.
There was no stimulus to progress on the manor itself. There were no
schools for the peasant's children, and there was little social
intelligence. The finer side of life was undeveloped, except as the
love of music was stirred by the travelling bard, or martial fervor or
the love of movement aroused the dance. There was no desire for
religious independence or understanding of religious experience. The
mass in the village church satisfied the religious instinct. There was
no dynamic factor in the community itself. Besides all this, the
community lived a self-centred life, because the people manufactured
their own cloth and leather garments and most of the necessary tools,
and, except for a few commodities like iron and salt, they were
independent of trade. The result was that every stimulus of social
exchange between villages was lacking.
The broadening influence of the Crusades with their stimulus to
thought, their creation of new economic wants, and their contact of
races and nationalities, set in motion great changes. Out of the
manorial villages went ambitious individuals, making their way as
industrial pioneers to the opportunity of the larger towns, as now
young people push out from the country to the city. New towns were
founded and new enterprises were begun. Trade routes were opened up.
The feudal principality grew into the modern state. Cultural interests
demanded their share of attention. Schools were founded, and art and
literature began again to develop. Even law and religion, most
conservative among social institutions, underwent change.
101. =The Village in American History.=--The spirit of enterprise and
the disturbed political and religious conditions impelled many groups
in western Europe to emigrate to new lands after the geographical
discoveries that ushered in the sixteenth century. They were free to
go, for serfdom was disappearing from most of the European countries.
The village life of Europe was transplanted to America. In the South
the mediæval feudal village became the agricultural plantation, where
the planter lived on his own estate surrounded by the rude cabins of
his dusky peasantry. The more democratic, homogeneous village life of
middle-class Englishmen reproduced itself in New England, where the
houses of the settlers clustered about the village meeting-house and
schoolhouse, and where habits of industry, frugality, and sobriety
characterized every local group. In this new village life there came
to be a stronger feeling of self-respect, and under the hard
conditions of life in a new continent there developed a self-reliance
that was destined to work wonders in days to come. The New World bred
a spirit of independence that suited well the individualistic
philosophy and religion of the modern Englishman. All these qualities
prophesied much of individual achievement. Yet this tendency toward
individualism threatened the former social solidarity, though there
was a recognition of mutual interests and a readiness to show
neighborly kindness in time of stress, and a perception of the social
value of democracy in church and state.
102. =Individual Pioneering.=--The pioneer American colonies were
group settlements, but they produced a new race of individual pioneers
for the West. Occasionally a whole community emigrated, but usually
hardy, venturesome individuals pushed out into the wilderness, opening
up the frontier continually farther toward the setting sun. By the
brookside the pioneer made a clearing and erected his log house; later
on the unbroken prairie he built a rude hut of sod. On the land that
was his by squatter's right or government claim he planted and reaped
his crops. About him grew up a brood of children, and as the years
passed, others like himself followed in the path that he had made,
single men to work for a time as hired laborers, families to break new
ground, until the countryside became sparsely settled and the nucleus
of a village was made.
Such pioneers were hard-working people, lonely and introspective.
They knew little of the comforts and none of the refinements of life.
They prescribed order and administered justice at the weapon's point.
They were emotional in religion. They required the stimulus of
abundant food and often of strong drink to goad them to their various
tasks. Frontier pioneering in America reproduced many of the features
of former ages of primitive life and compressed centuries into the
space of a generation. It was distinctly individualistic, and needed
socializing. The large farm or cattle-range kept men apart, the
freedom of the open country attracted an unruly population, and in
consequence frontier life tended to rough manners and lawlessness.
Isolation and loneliness produced despondency and inertia, and tended
to individual and group degeneration.
Even in a growing village men and women of this type had few social
institutions. There was little time for schooling or recreation. A
circuit-riding preacher held religious services once or twice a month,
and in certain regions at a certain season religious enthusiasm found
vent in a camp-meeting, but religion often had little effect on habits
and morals. Local government and industry were home-made. The settlers
brought with them customs and traditions which they cherished, but in
the mingling of pioneers from different districts there was continual
change and fusion, until the West became the most enterprising and
progressive part of the nation, continually open to new ideas and new
methods. There was a wholesome respect for church and school, and as
villages grew the settlers did not neglect the organization and
housing of such institutions; store, mill, and smithy found their
place as farther east, and later the lawyer and physician came, but
the pioneer could do without them for a time. Inventiveness and
individual initiative were characteristics of the rural people, made
necessary by their remoteness and isolation.
103. =The Development of the West.=--With increasing settlement the
rural pioneer gave place to the farmer. It was no longer necessary for
him to break new ground, for arable acres could be purchased; neither
was it necessary to turn from one occupation to another to satisfy
personal or household needs, for division of labor provided
specialists. Hardship gave way to comfort, for the land was fertile
and experience had taught its values for the cultivation of particular
crops. Loneliness and isolation were felt less severely as neighbors
became more frequent and travelled roads made communication easier.
Group life expanded and institutions became fixed. Every neighborhood
had its school-teacher, and even the academy and college began to dot
the land. Churches of various denominations found root in rural soil,
and a settled minister became more common. A general store and
post-office found place at the cross-roads, and the permanent
machinery of local government was set up. Out of the forest clearings
and prairie settlements evolved the prosperous farm life that has been
so characteristic of the Middle West.
But the prosperous life of these rural communities has not remained
unchanged. Speculation in land has been creating a class of
non-resident agricultural capitalists and tenant cultivators, and has
been transforming the type of agricultural population over large
sections of country. Soil exhaustion is leading to abandonment of the
poorest land and is compelling methods of scientific agriculture on
the remainder. These conditions are producing their own social
problems for the rural community.
READING REFERENCES
SMALL AND VINCENT: _Introduction to the Study of Society_, pages
112-126.
CHEYNEY: _Industrial and Social History of England_, pages 31-56.
CUBBERLEY: _Rural Life and Education_, pages 1-62.
WILSON: _Evolution of the Country Community_, pages 1-61.
CARVER: _Principles of Rural Economics_, pages 74-116.
ROSS: "The Agrarian Revolution in the Middle West," _North
American Review_, September, 1909.
GILLETTE: "The Drift to the City in Relation to the Rural
Problem," _American Journal of Sociology_, March, 1911.
CHAPTER XIV
THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE
104. =Physical Types.=--To understand the continually changing rural
life of the present, it is necessary to examine into the physical
characteristics of the country districts, the elements of the
population, the functions of the rural community, and its social
institutions.
The physical characteristics have a large part in determining
occupations and in fashioning social life. A natural harbor,
especially if it is at the mouth of a river, seems destined by nature
for a centre of commerce, as the falls of a swift-flowing stream
indicate the location of a manufacturing plant. A mineral-bearing
mountain invites to mining, and miles of forest land summon the
lumberman. Broad and well-watered plains seem designed for
agriculture, and on them acres of grain slowly mature through the
summer months to turn into golden harvests in the fall. The
Mississippi valley and the Western plain into which it blends have
become the granary of the American nation. The railroad-train that
rushes day and night from the Great Lakes toward the setting sun moves
hour after hour through the extensive rural districts that
characterize the great West. There are the mammoth farms that are
given to the one enormous crop of wheat or corn. Alongside the
railroad loom the immense elevators where the grain is stored to be
shipped to market. Here and there are the farm-buildings where the
owner or tenant lives, but villages are small and scattered and
community activity is slight.
Similarly, in the South before the Civil War there were large
plantations of cotton and tobacco, dotted only here and there with the
planter's mansion and clumps of negro cabins. Village life was not a
characteristic of Southern society. The old South had its picturesque
plantation life, and the aristocracy made its sociable visits from
family to family, but that rural type disappeared with the war. With
the breaking up of the old plantations there came a greater
diversification of agriculture, which is going on at an accelerated
pace, and social centres are increasing, but there is still much rural
isolation. Among the remoter mountains lingers the most conservative
American type of citizens in the arrested development of a century
ago, with antique tools and ancient methods, scratching a few acres
for a garden and corn-field, and living their backward, isolated life,
without comfort or even peace, and almost without social institutions.
In the East the country is more broken. Large farms are few, and
agriculture is carried on intensively as a business, or is united with
another occupation or as a diversion from the cares and tasks of the
town. Farms of a score to a few hundred acres, only part of which are
cultivated, form rural communities among the hills or along a river
valley. Here and there a few houses cluster in village or hamlet,
where each house yard has its garden patch, but the inhabitants of the
village depend on other means than agriculture for a living. On the
farms dairy and poultry products share with agriculture in rural
importance, and no one crop constitutes an agricultural staple. In New
England the villages are comparatively near together, and social life
needs only prodding to produce a healthy development.
105. =Characteristics of Population.=--Rural life feels in each region
the reactions of nature. The narrow life of the hills, the open life
of the plains, the peaceful life of the comfortable plantation with
its lazy river and its delightful climate, each has its peculiar
characteristics that are due in part at least to nature. But these
features are complicated by social elements of population. The
American rural community of to-day is composed of individuals who
differ in age and fortune and kinship, and who vary in qualities and
resemblances. There are old and young and middle-aged persons, men and
women, married and single, persons with many relatives and others with
few, native and foreign born, strong and weak, well and ill, good and
bad, educated and illiterate. Yet there are certain characteristics
that are typical.
In the first place, for example, there is a considerable uniformity of
age in the population of a certain type of community. In those
agricultural districts where individuals own their own homes, the
number of elderly people is larger than it is in the city, and the
young people are comparatively few, for the reason that their
ambitions carry them to the city for its larger opportunities, and in
the older States many a farm becomes abandoned on the death of the old
people. In districts where tenant-farming is largely in vogue, gray
hairs are much fewer. The tendency is for the original farmers who
have been successful to sell or rent their property and move to town
to enjoy its comforts and attractions, leaving the tenants and their
families of children.
In the second place, it is characteristic of long-settled rural
communities that there is an interlocking of family relationship, with
a number of prevailing family names and a great preponderance of
native Americans; but in portions of the West and in rural districts
not very remote from the large cities of the East there is a large
mixture, and in spots a predominance of the foreign element. In the
third place, small means rather than wealth and a sluggish contentment
rather than ambition is characteristic of the older rural sections; in
newer districts ambition to push ahead is more common, and prosperity
and an air of opulence are not unusual.
106. =The Composition of Rural Communities.=--In an analysis of
population it is proper to consider its composition and its manner of
growth. In making a survey or taking a census of a community there are
included at least statistics as to age, sex, number and size of
families, degree of kinship, race parentage, and occupations. Records
of age, sex, and size of family show the tendencies of a community as
to growth or race suicide; kinship and race parentage indicate whether
population is homogeneous; and occupations indicate the place that
agriculture holds in a particular section of country. By a comparative
study of statistics it is easy to determine whether a community is
advancing, retrograding, or standing still, and what its position is
relative to its neighbors; also to find out whether or not its
occupations and characteristics are changing.
107. =Manner of Growth.=--The manner of growth of a community is by
natural excess of births over deaths, and by immigration of persons
from outside. As long as the former condition obtains, population is
homogeneous, and the community is conservative in customs and beliefs;
when immigration is extensive, and more especially when it goes on at
the same time with a declining birth-rate and a considerable
emigration of the native element, the population is becoming
heterogeneous, and the customs and interests of the people are growing
continually more divergent. The immigration of an earlier day was from
one American community to another, or from northern Europe, but rural
communities East and West are feeling the effects of the large foreign
immigration of the last decade from southern and eastern Europe and
from Asia.
108. =Decline of the Rural Population.=--The rural exodus to the
cities is even more impressive and more serious in its consequences
than the foreign influx into the country, though both are dynamic in
their effects. This exodus is partly a matter of numbers and partly of
quality. A distinction must be made first between the relative loss
and the actual loss. The rural population in places of less than
twenty-five hundred persons is steadily falling behind in proportion
to the urban population in the country at large. There are many
localities where there is also an actual loss in population, and in
the North and Middle West the States generally are making no rural
gain. But the most disheartening element in the movement of population
from the point of view of rural communities is the loss of the most
substantial of the older citizens, who move to the city to enjoy the
reward of years of toil, and of the most ambitious of the young people
who hope to get on faster in the city. Loss of such as these means
loss of competent, progressive leaders. Added to this is the loss of
laborers needed to cultivate the farms to their capacity for urban as
well as rural supply. The loss of labor is not a serious economic
misfortune, for it can be remedied to a large extent by the
introduction of more machinery and new methods, but the loss of
population reproduces in a measure the isolation of earlier days, and
so tends to social degeneration. It is idle to expect that the
far-reaching causes that are contributing to city growth will stop
working for the sake of the rural community, but it is possible to
enrich community life so that there will be less relative attraction
in the city, and so that those who remain may enjoy many of the
advantages that hitherto have been associated with the city alone.
READING REFERENCES
HART: _Educational Resources of Village and Rural Communities_,
pages 11-37.
GILLETTE: _Rural Sociology_, pages 32-46, 281-292.
ANDERSON: _The Country Town_, pages 57-91.
SEMPLE: _Influences of Geographic Environment._
GALPIN: "Method of Making a Social Survey in a Rural Community,"
_University of Wisconsin Circular of Information_, No. 29.
CARROLL: _The Community Survey._
CHAPTER XV
OCCUPATIONS
109. =Rural Occupations.=--An important part of the study of the rural
community is its social functions. These do not differ greatly in name
from the functions of the family, but they have wider scope. The
domestic functions are confined almost entirely to the homes. The
village usually includes a boarding-house or a country inn for the
homeless few, and here and there an almshouse shelters the few
derelicts whom the public must support.
Economic activities in the main are associated with the farm home. The
common occupation in the country is agriculture. Individuals are born
into country homes, learn the common occupation, and of necessity in
most cases make it their means of livelihood. Rural people are
accustomed to hard labor for long hours. There are seasons when
comparative inactivity renders life dull; there are individuals who
enjoy pensions or the income of inherited or accumulated funds, and so
are not compelled to resort to manual labor, and there are directors
of agricultural industry; there are always a shiftless few who are
lazy and poor; but these are only exceptions to the general rule of
active toil. Not all rural districts are agricultural. Some are
frontier settlements where lumbering or mining are the chief
interests. Even where agriculture prevails there are varieties such as
corn-raising or fruit-growing regions; there are communities that are
progressively making use of the latest results of scientific
agriculture, and communities that are almost as antique in their
methods as the ancient Hebrews. Also, even in homogeneous districts,
like those devoted to cotton-growing or tobacco-culture, there are
always individuals who choose or inherit an occupation that supplies a
special want to the community, such as carpenters, blacksmiths, and
masters of other crafts. Occupations indicate an attempt to gear
personal energies to the opportunities or requirements of a physical
or social environment.
All these occupations have more than economic value; they are
fundamental to social prosperity. It is self-evident that the
physician and the school-teacher render community service, but it is
not so clear that the farmer who keeps his house well painted and his
grounds in order, and who is improving his cattle and increasing the
yield of his fields and woodland by scientific methods, and who
organizes his neighbors for co-operative endeavor, is doing more than
an economic service. Yet it is by means of inspiration, information,
and co-operation that the community moves forward, and he who supplies
these is a social benefactor.
110. =Differentiation of Occupation.=--If community life is to
continue there must be the producers who farm or mine or manufacture;
in rural districts they are farmers, hired laborers, woodcutters,
threshers, and herdsmen. In the co-operation of village life there
must be the craftsmen and tradesmen who finish and distribute the
products that the others have secured, such as the miller, the
carpenter, the teamster, and the storekeeper. For comfort and peace in
the neighborhood there must be added the physician, the minister, the
school-teacher, the justice of the peace, and such public
functionaries as postmaster, mail-carrier, stage-driver, constable or
sheriff, and other town or county officials. Without specific
allotment of lands as on the feudal estate, or distribution of tasks
as in a socialistic commonwealth, the community accomplishes a natural
division of labor and diversification of industry, supports its own
institutions by self-imposed taxes and voluntary contributions, and
supplies its quota to the larger State of which it forms a democratic
part. In spite of the constant exercise of individual independence and
competition, there is at the foundation of every rural community the
principle of co-operation and service as the only working formula for
human life.
111. =Co-operation.=--One great advantage of community life over the
home is the increased opportunity for co-operation. In new
communities families work together to erect buildings, make roads,
support schools, and organize and maintain a church. They aid each
other in sickness, accident, and distress. Farmers find it profitable
to unite for purposes of production, distribution, communication,
transportation, and insurance. It may not seem worth while for a
single farmer to buy an expensive piece of agricultural machinery for
his own use, but it is well worth while for four or five to club
together and buy it. The cost of an irrigation plant is much too high
for one man, but a community can afford it when it will add materially
to the production of all the farms in a district. In a region
interested mainly in dairying a co-operative creamery can be made very
profitable; in grain-producing sections co-operative elevator service
makes possible the storage of grain until the demand increases values;
in fruit-raising regions co-operation in selling has made the
difference between success and failure. A co-operative telephone
company has been the means of supplying several adjacent communities
with easy communication. Co-operative banks are a convenient means of
securing capital for agricultural use, and co-operative insurance
companies have proved serviceable in carrying mutual risks.
The advantages of such co-operation are by no means confined to
economic interests. The best result is the increasing realization of
mutual dependence and common concern. Co-operation is an antidote to
the evils of isolation and independence. A co-operative telephone
company may not pay large dividends, and may eventually sell out to a
larger corporation, but it has introduced people to one another,
brightened circumscribed lives, and taught the people social
understanding and sympathy. But aside from all such artificial forms
of co-operation, the very custom of providing such common institutions
as the school and the church is a valuable form of social service,
entirely apart from the specific results that come from the exercises
of the schoolroom and the meeting-house.
112. =Why Co-operation May Fail.=--Many co-operative enterprises fail,
and this is not strange. There is always the natural conservatism and
individualism of the American people to contend with; there is
jealousy of the men who have been elected to responsible offices, and
there is lack of experience and good judgment by those who undertake
to engineer the active organization. Sometimes the method of
organization or financing is faulty. Such enterprises work best among
foreigners who have a good opinion of them, and know how to conduct
them because they have seen them work well in Europe. Every successful
attempt at economic co-operation is a distinct gain for rural
community betterment, for upon co-operation depends the success of the
efforts being put forth for rural improvement generally.
113. =Competition Within the Group.=--Co-operation is of greatest
value when it includes within it a wholesome amount of individual
competition for the sake of general as well as individual gain. Boys'
agricultural clubs, organized in the South and West, have raised the
standards of corn and tomato production by stimulating a friendly
spirit of rivalry among boys, and as a result the fathers of the boys
have adopted new and more scientific methods to increase their own
production. Agricultural fairs may be made powerful agencies for a
similar stimulus. At State and county fairs agricultural colleges and
experiment stations find it worth while to exhibit their methods and
processes with the results obtained; wide-awake farmers get new ideas,
which they try out subsequently at home; young people are encouraged
to try for the premiums offered the next year, and steadily the
general level of excellence rises throughout the district.
READING REFERENCES
MCKEEVER: _Farm Boys and Girls_, pages 171-196, 275-305.
GILLETTE: _Rural Sociology_, pages 20-31.
"Country Life," _Annals of American Academy_, pages 58-68.
KERN: _Among Country Schools_, pages 129-157.
FORD: _Co-operation in New England_, pages 87-185.
COULTER: _Co-operation Among Farmers_, pages 3-23.
HERRICK: _Rural Credits_, pages 456-480.
CHAPTER XVI
RECREATION
114. =Recreation and Culture.=--Besides the economic function the
community has recreative and cultural functions to perform, and these
need recognition and improvement. As the child in the home has a right
to time and means for play, so the community, especially the young
people, may lay claim to an opportunity for recreation; as the child
has the right to learn in the home, so the people of the community
should have cultural privileges. These demands are the more
imperative, because the city has so much of this sort to offer, and
the country community cannot hold its young people unless it provides
a reasonable amount of attractions. It needs no particular institution
to bring this about, but it needs a new spirit to recognize and enjoy
the advantages that are possible even in thinly settled localities.
Every opportunity for sociability strengthens just so much a natural
instinct, increases the sense of social values, and enlarges the
sphere of relationships.
In the community, as in the home, children have the first claim to
consideration. The recreative impulse is strong in them. When they
graduate from the home into the school they find opportunity for the
expression of this impulse through their new associations. On the way
to and from school and at recess they have opportunity to indulge
their impulses and to use their powers of invention. Among the younger
children the desire for muscular activity makes running games of all
sorts popular; as boys grow older they imitate the primitive impulse
to hit and run, so well provided for in games of ball; girls enjoy
their recreation in a quieter way as they grow older, and show a
tendency to association in pairs. Associations formed in play are not
usually lasting ones, but the playground reveals individual
temperament and personal qualities that are likely to determine
popularity or unpopularity. These play associations develop qualities
of leadership, loyalty, honesty, and co-operation that tend to label a
child among his mates with a reputation that he carries into later
life.
115. =The Gang.=--Since play is a natural instinct it is to be
expected that children will seek a natural rather than an artificial
way of expressing the instinct. Organization at best can only direct
activities, giving recognition to the social inclinations of
childhood. For example, it is not easy for a school-teacher to
organize a boys' society and to direct it in such activities as appeal
to him. The boys prefer to choose their own mates and their own chief,
and the activities that appeal to them are not the same as those that
seem to their elders to be most suitable. Between the ages of ten and
sixteen the boy tends to gang life. He may work on the farm all day,
but evenings and Sundays, if he is permitted to amuse himself, he
joins a gang. Obviously the characteristics of the gang are seen best
in the city, but they are not materially different in the country.
Hunting and fishing may be enjoyed at odd times of leisure by the boy
without companions, but the delights of the swimming-hole can be
enjoyed thoroughly only as he has the companionship of other boys, and
skating gains in virtue as a sport with the possibility of hockey on
the ice. This liking for companionship exhibits itself in the habitual
association of boys of a certain district for mutual enjoyment. On
every possible opportunity they get together in the woods, pretend
they are Indians, hunt, fish, and fight in company, build their own
camps and plunder the camps of other gangs, and practise other
activities characteristic of the savage age through which they are
passing. Gangs exhibit a love of cruelty to those whom they may
plague, a fondness for appropriating property which does not belong to
them, and if possible provoking chase for the sake of the thrill that
comes from the attempt to get away. Group athletics of various sorts
are popular. Six out of seven gangs have physical activities as the
purpose of their organization. The boys do not necessarily adopt any
particular organization or choose a leader; on the contrary, they are
a natural group, tacitly acknowledging the leadership of the most
masterly and versatile individual, finding their own headquarters and
adopting the forms of activity that appeal most to the group,
according to the season and the opportunities of the region of country
where they belong.
116. =Leadership of Boys.=--The gang is but one expression of the
group instinct. It is often a nursery of bad habits that sometimes
lead to crime and degeneracy, but it is capable of being used for the
good of boyhood. The gang develops the virtues of loyalty to the group
and loyalty to the group principles. It stimulates self-sacrifice and
co-operation, honor and courage. These virtues can be cultivated by
the man who aspires to boy leadership and directed into channels of
usefulness as the boy passes on toward manhood. But there must be a
frank recognition of the place of the gang in boy life, and not only a
remembrance of one's own boyhood days, but also an appreciation of
them. One of the best ways that has been devised for securing adult
leadership without loss of the gang spirit and characteristics is the
Boy Scout movement. It transforms the unorganized gang into the
organized patrol, and affiliates it with other patrols in a wide
organization, adopts the natural activities of boys as a part of its
programme, and adds others of absorbing interest. Obedience is added
to the boy's other virtues, and social education is acquired rapidly.
117. =Varieties of Boys' Clubs.=--The gang is one of the few natural
groups of the community, and should be related to other institutions.
It should not be hampered by them, but should receive the
encouragement and assistance of home, school, and church. The Boy
Scout movement has been associated with the churches; other boys'
organizations have been connected with the Sunday-schools; the home
and the day-school may well provide resources or quarters for the
gang, and recognize its activities. But the gang is not the only
organization suited to the boys of a community. There are special
interests provided for in more artificial groups, such as athletic,
debating, agricultural, or natural history clubs. These attract
like-minded individuals from all parts of the community, and help to
balance the clan spirit developed by the gang. These clubs may centre
in school or meeting-house or have quarters of their own. One
provision that is needed for the satisfaction of boy life in the rural
community is the field or green where two rival gangs may contend
legitimately for supremacy in sport, or clubs from different
neighborhoods may test their prowess and arouse local pride and
enthusiasm. The green needs little or no equipment, but it gains
recognition as the boys' own training-field and serves as a safeguard
to the health and morals of the youth of the community. The gang and
the green are the proper social institutions of boy life in the rural
community.
118. =Girls' Clubs.=--The instinct of the girl is not the same as that
of the boy. She has other interests that require different
organization. Her disposition is less active, and she does not so
readily form a group organization. She associates with other girls in
a set that is less democratic than her brother's gang. It has its
rivalries and enmities, but hateful thoughts, angry words, and
slighting attitudes take the place of the active warfare of the boys.
Girls enjoy clubs that are adapted to their interests. Reading clubs,
cooking clubs, sewing clubs, musical organizations, and philanthropic
societies are useful forms of neighborhood association, and their
activities may be correlated with the work of the home, the school,
and the church more easily than those of their brothers.
In the country girls' organizations are very properly based on the
interests of the farm, with which they are so closely related. They
combine, as their brothers do, on the economic principle, organizing
their poultry clubs, preserving clubs, or knitting clubs, but the
social purpose is not lost sight of in the particular economic
concern. An hour of sociability properly follows an hour of economic
discussion or activity. Schoolgirls are very willing to accept the
leadership of their teacher in a nature or culture club which will
broaden their interests and stimulate their ambitions. One of the
organizations that has sprung into existence on the model of the Boy
Scout movement is the organization of Camp-Fire Girls. It is designed
to meet the demand for companionship in a wholesome, pleasant way, and
by its incentives to healthy activity and womanly virtue it helps to
build character.
119. =Recreation in the Country.=--The recreative instinct is not
confined to children. For the adult labor is lightened, worries
banished, and carking care is less corroding, if now and then an
evening of diversion interrupts the monotony of rural life, or a day
off is devoted to a picnic or neighborhood frolic. There is the same
interest in the country that there is in the city in methods of
entertainment that satisfy primitive instincts. The instinct for human
society enters into all of them. Other specific causes produce a
fondness for the various forms of diversion indulged in. Among
uncultured people especially an evening gathering soon proves dull
unless there is something to do. Cards occupy the mind and hands and
create a mild excitement that banishes troublesome thoughts and
anxieties. Dancing breaks up the stiffness of a party, brings the
sexes together, and provides the exhilaration of rhythmic motion. Barn
frolics at maple-sugar or harvest time accomplish the same end, only
less satisfactorily. Musicales and amateur theatricals provide an
exhibition of skill, cultivate the æsthetic nature, gratify the
dramatic instinct, and furnish opportunity for mutual acquaintance
among the people of the community, who meet all too seldom in social
gatherings, and at the same time they furnish wholesome entertainment
for the community at small expense. The proceeds are used for local
advantage, instead of being carried out of town. The passing show and
moving pictures are less desirable. They are often cheap and
degrading, though the kinetoscope can be made valuable for education.
The out-of-door gatherings that occur when the countryside is not too
busy to plan or enjoy them are a helpful means of cultivating a
community spirit. Athletic contests on the boys' own field readily
become a community affair, with a speech and refreshments afterward,
and the award of a prize or pennant to the victorious individual or
team. The old-fashioned picnic to lake or woods or hilltop is one of
the best means for forming and strengthening friendships and for
giving persons of all ages a good time. Friendly contests of various
sorts all come into play to add to the pleasure of the day. Fourth of
July, Arbor Day, Old Home Week, and other occasions, give opportunity
for recreation and the cultivation of neighborhood interests.
120. =A Community Centre.=--Aside from the natural isolation and lack
of energy and social interest among country people, the lack of
efficient leadership is the most serious handicap to organized
sociability. Added to these is the want of a neighborhood centre both
convenient and suitable. A community building, tasteful in
architecture and equipped for community use, is a great desideratum,
but is not often available. There seems to be no good reason why the
schoolhouse should not be such a social centre as the community needs,
but most school buildings are not adapted to such use. In the absence
of any other provision it is the privilege of the rural church to
furnish the opportunity for neighborhood gatherings, and there is a
growing conviction that this is one of the opportunities of the church
to ally itself to general community interests. The church represents,
or should represent, the whole community of men, women, young people,
and children. It has all their interests at heart. It makes provision
for them in Sunday-school, young people's societies, and other groups.
It recognizes the social interests in festivals and sociables. It may
usefully add to its functions that of raising the standards of
community recreation, if no other proper provision for it exists; it
is under obligation to find wholesome substitutes for the abuses that
exist in the field of amusement which it commonly condemns.
READING REFERENCES
CURTIS: _Play and Recreation for the Open Country._
PUFFER: _The Boy and His Gang._
_Boy Scout Handbook; Handbook for Scout Masters._
_The Book of the Campfire Girls._
STERN: _Neighborhood Entertainments._
CUBBERLEY: _Rural Life and Education_, pages 117-126.
CHAPTER XVII
RURAL INSTITUTIONS
121. =The Complexity of Social Life.=--Closely allied to the agencies
of recreation are the institutions that promote sociability and
incidentally provide means of culture. It is not possible to separate
social life into compartments and designate an institution as purely
recreational or cultural or religious. There is a blending of
interests and of functions in such an organization as the grange or
the church, as there is in one individual or group a variety of
interests and activities. The whole social system is complex,
interwoven with a multitude of separate strands of personal desires
and prejudices, group clannishness and conservatism, rival
institutions developing friction and continually compelled to find new
adjustments. Society in constantly in motion like the sea, its units
continually striking against one another in perpetual conflict, and as
continually melting into the harmony of a mighty wave breaking against
the shore and forming anew to repeat the process. The difference is
that social life is on an upward plane, its activities are not mere
repetitions of a process, but they result in definite achievement,
which in the process of centuries becomes an accumulated asset for the
race. The most lasting achievements are the social institutions.
122. =The Village and the Country Store.=--Of all the social
institutions of the rural community, the most important is the village
itself. There scattered homesteads find their common centre of
attraction; there houses are located nearer together and the spirit of
neighborliness develops; there tradesmen and professional persons make
their homes and at the same time diversify interests and provide for
the wants of the community. The school and the church are often
located in the open country, but the village forms the nucleus of
social intercourse and there are most of the institutions of the
community.
The most primitive among these institutions is the country store. It
has economic, social, and educational functions. It supplies goods
that cannot be produced in the community, it serves as a mercantile
exchange for local produce. It helps to remove the necessity of home
manufacture of many articles. On occasion it may include an agency for
insurance or real estate; it is frequently the village post-office; it
contains the public bulletin-board; often the proprietor undertakes to
perform the banking function to the extent of cashing checks. Socially
the store serves a useful purpose, for it is the centre to which all
the inhabitants come, and from which radiate lines of communication
all over the neighborhood. It is a clearing-house for news and gossip,
and takes the place of a local press. It was formerly, and to some
extent is still, the social club of the men of the community during
the long winter evenings. As such it performed in the past an
educational function. Boxes, firkins, bales of goods, superannuated
chairs, and the end of a counter constituted the sittings, and men of
all ages occupied them, as they listened to harangues and joined in
the discussions. The group constituted the forum of democracy, where
politics were frequently on debate, where public opinion was formed,
where conservatism and progressivism fought their battles before they
tested conclusions at the ballot-box, where science and religion
entered the lists, where local interests were threshed out in the
absence of more general excitement and crops and agricultural methods
filled in the pauses. In recent years the store circle has
degenerated. The better class of habitual members has organized its
lodges or found satisfaction in the grange, while the hangers-on at
the store, barber-shop, or other loafing-place indulge in small talk
on matters of no real concern.
123. =The Sewing Circle.=--What the country store has done for the men
as a means of communication and stimulus, the ladies' aid society or
church sewing circle has done for the women. Its opportunities are
less frequent, but it provides an outlet for ideas and opinions that
without it cannot easily find expression. At the same time it provides
active occupation for a good cause, which is more than can be said of
the men's forum. When it adds to its exercises a supper to which the
other sex is admitted, it performs a yet wider social service.
124. =The Grange.=--The grange is an institution that includes both
sexes and combines the interests of young people with those of their
elders. Its primary purpose was to consolidate the common interests of
a farming community and to stimulate economic prosperity, but it has
included several social features, and in many localities exists merely
for social purposes. It is an institution that is well adapted to
become a social and educational centre for the rural community. When
the child has advanced from the home to the school and, graduating
from school, has entered into the adult life of the community, the
grange serves as a training-school for civic service. In the
grange-room, in company with his like-minded parents and friends in
the community, he learns how to hold his own in debate in
parliamentary fashion, he discusses improved agriculture and listens
to lectures from masters of the science, he gains literary and
historical knowledge, and from time to time he participates in the
social diversions that take place under grange auspices. Music
enlivens the meetings, and occasionally a feast is spread or an
entertainment elaborated. The Farmers' Union is a similar
organization, originating in the South in 1902.
Such rural interests as these have come into existence spontaneously
and continue to provide social centres of community life because other
institutions do not satisfy. The home, the school, and the church are
often spoken of as the essential institutions of the American
community, but they do not at best perform all the functions of
neighborhood life. The boys' gang, the circle of men about the stove
at the corner grocery, the women's sewing circle or club, and the
grange, each in its own way performs a necessary part of the group
activities, and deserves recognition among the institutions that are
worth while. It is scarcely necessary to note that they have their
evils, but these are not of the nature of the institution. As the gang
can be guided to worthy ends, so the energies of the store club and
the sewing circle can be turned into channels of usefulness and low
talk and scandal-mongering abolished. As for the grange, it is capable
of becoming the most valuable social centre of the community, if it
maintains the ideals of its existence and co-operates heartily with
other social institutions of worth, like the church.
125. =Farmers' Institutes.=--Another type of organization exists which
can hardly be called institutional, but which performs a useful
community service. As illustrations may be mentioned the farmers'
club, the farmers' institute, and the Chautauqua movement. These are
organizations or movements for stimulating and broadening the
interests of farm regions. They bring together the farmers and their
families, sometimes from several neighborhoods and for several days,
for the consideration of agricultural problems and for entertainment
and mutual acquaintance. They are able to attract speakers from the
State agricultural college or board, and even from national halls, and
they become a valuable clearing-house of ideas and experience. They
serve much the same purpose as a church or teachers' convention, and
are restricted to a limited number of persons. Farmers' institutes
have become a regular part of the State system of agricultural
education throughout the country, and a large staff of lecturers and
demonstrators exists for local instruction. The particular interests
of women and young people are receiving recognition in institutes of
their own in connection with the larger gatherings. The expense of
such institutes is met by the government. Their success is, of course,
dependent on the attendance and intelligent interest of the farm
people, who gain greatly in inspiration and knowledge from contact
with one another and from the experts to whom they listen. The
institutes prove the value of association for the enrichment of
individual and family life by means of suggestion, communication, and
concerted activity.
READING REFERENCES
BUCK: _The Granger Movement._
BUTTERFIELD: _Chapters in Rural Progress_, pages 104-120, 136-161.
CARNEY: _Country Life and the Country School_, pages 90-107.
GILLETTE: _Rural Sociology_, pages 208-213.
CUBBERLEY: _Rural Life and Education_, pages 117-159.
CHAPTER XVIII
RURAL EDUCATION
126. =The School as a Social Institution.=--There is one institution
in every American community that stands as the gateway into the
promised land of a richer life. This is the school. It supplements
home training and prepares for the broader experiences of community
existence. Into it goes the raw material of the bodies and minds of
the children, and out of it comes the product of years of education
for the making or marring of the children of the community. The school
of the present is of two types. One is the relic of an earlier time,
with few changes in equipment, organization, or function; it has not
shared in the process of evolution enjoyed by certain other
institutions of society. The other type is progressive. It has been
continually finding adjustment to its environment, fitting itself to
meet local needs, and is therefore abreast of the times in educational
science. The demand of the age is that the progressive school keep
advancing, and as fast as possible the backward school work up to the
standard of efficiency.
It is a sociological principle that every social institution
approximates to the standards of the community as a whole. If
community life is static, school and church stay in the ruts; if it is
retrograding, they are losing ground; if it is progressive, they
gradually show improvement. On the other hand, the community
frequently feels external stimulus, first through one of its
institutions, so that the institution becomes a means of betterment.
Recent years furnish examples of a new impulse generated in the
neighborhood by a teacher or a minister who enters the locality with
new ideas and unquenchable zeal.
127. =Three Fundamental Principles of Education.=--There are three
fundamental principles that ought to have recognition in every
school. The first of these is the principle that education is to be
social. The pupil has to learn how to live in the community. In the
home he becomes socialized so far as to learn how to get along with
his own relatives and intimates, but the school teaches him how to
deal with all sorts of people. He gets acquainted with his
environment, both social and physical. What kind of people are living
in the homes of the neighborhood? What are their characteristics,
their ideals, their failings? What are their occupations, their race
or nationality, their measure of comfort, poverty, or wealth? How are
they hindered or helped by their natural surroundings, and have they
easy means of communication and transit with the outside world? What
are the principles that govern social intercourse, and how can the
pupil learn to put them into practice? How is he to reconcile his own
individual rights with his social obligations? These are fundamental
questions that deserve careful answer, and that must be made a part of
the school curriculum if the community is to enjoy social health. It
matters little how such subjects are named in any course of study, but
it is essential that the principles of social living should be taught
under some title.
A second principle of education is that it should be vocational. The
school children, after graduation, must make their own way in the
world. Every normal youth looks forward in anticipation to the time
when he will be earning his own support and the support of a family of
his own. Every normal girl hopes to be mistress of a home of her own.
There are certain things that they need to know if they are to make a
success and to build happy homes. Their first business is to know how
to make a home. Naturally they want to know the story of the family as
a social institution, how the home is purchased or rented, the
essentials of a good home, both in its equipment and in the spirit
that animates it, the duties and rights of every member of the family,
and the relations of the family to the community. The question arises:
How may the home-maker provide for the support of the family? What are
the available occupations, and how by manual and mental training may
he equip himself for usefulness? How may the home-keeper do her part
to make the home attractive and comfortable by a study of domestic
science and home-management? Obviously, the curriculum should have a
place for such studies as these that are so essential to peace and
happiness and comfort in the home.
A third principle is that education is to be cultural. Social and
vocational knowledge are essential, broad culture of the mind is
highly desirable. No citizen of the United States is expected to grow
to maturity ignorant of the simple arts of reading or spelling
correctly, writing a fair hand, and solving correctly the simple
problems of arithmetic. Beyond this many schools provide a smattering
of æsthetic training through music and drawing. These are subjects of
study in the elementary schools. But culture involves more than these.
An appreciation of literature, of the meaning and value of history, of
the importance of science in the modern world, of the life of nations
and races outside of our own country, of right thinking and right
conduct with reference to all our individual relations, constitutes
for all persons a mental training that is almost indispensable. To
acquire this cultural education requires time and the elimination of
the less valuable from the accepted course of study. It is a most
wholesome tendency that is prolonging the terms and the years of
compulsory education if that education is based on the right
principles, and that is discussing the possibility, first, of using
part of the long summer vacation to supplement the work of the present
school year, and, secondly, of giving to the young people of every
State a free university education. It is never to be forgotten that
culture may and should go on through life, but that will not occur
unless habits of study are formed in early years, and the school years
will always remain the golden opportunity for an education.
128. =Education as It Is.=--On these fundamental principles every
educational system should be built. Actual education falls far short
of the standard. This standard cannot be reached without proper
educational ideals, expert teaching, and adequate equipment. The
ideal has been narrow. Stress is put upon one type of education. In
the past it has been cultural above the lower grades, and, because it
has been almost exclusively so, more than half the pupils have dropped
out of school before entering high school. In recent years there has
been a new emphasis on practical training, and vocational courses have
tended to crowd out some of the cultural courses. The social education
which is most important of all has been incidental or omitted
altogether. Public opinion needs to be educated to the point of
understanding that all three types of training are imperatively
needed.
There is a serious difficulty, however, in the way of a supply of
teachers for this broad education. It is necessary to extend reform
among the normal schools, but this can take place only after they have
felt the demand from the grades. Another difficulty is the expense of
providing the necessary equipment for vocational education. This does
not prevent the introduction of social teaching or a proper attention
to culture, but courses in manual training and domestic science
usually cost more than most school boards are willing to meet. This is
not an insurmountable obstacle, for cheap appliances are in the market
and better school boards can be elected when the people want them.
129. =Wanted--a Better Rural Education.=--The school in the rural
community has its own peculiar weaknesses. First among these
weaknesses is the fact that education is not in terms of rural
experience. It is an accepted educational principle of instruction to
begin with that which is simple and familiar, and to work out to that
which is complex and more remote. On that principle the rural school
should make use of local geography, of rural material in arithmetic,
of literature and music with a rural flavor, of nature study with
drawings from nature. The opposite has been the case, with the result
that the child appreciates neither his surroundings nor his
opportunities, but looks upon them as something to be avoided for the
more important urban life, with whose activities he has become
familiar through his daily tasks.
A second weakness is that rural education omits so much of importance
to the child who must make his living in the country. To discuss rural
conditions in a natural and systematic way, beginning with the family
and working out into the social life of the community; to study the
economic side of life first on the farm and then in the neighborhood,
getting hold of the underlying principles of agriculture, becoming
familiar with the action of various soils and crops and the best
methods of cultivation and protection from harm, to prepare by a few
simple lessons in household science for the responsibility of the
home, is to provide the bases of success and happiness for the boys
and girls of the country. Rural education, therefore, needs
redirection.
130. =The Quality of Teaching.=--The child in the country has a right
to as good instruction as the city child, but because of the poverty
and penuriousness of school districts and the maintenance of too many
small schools, rural communities pay small salaries and cannot command
good teaching. There are thousands of schools scattered over the
country with less than ten pupils in attendance, housed in cheap,
unattractive buildings, with teachers who have had no normal-school
training, and who have no enthusiasm for the work they have to do.
They may hear twenty or more classes recite on numerous subjects in
the course of a day, but there is no stimulus to teacher or pupil, and
school hours provide little more than a conventional method for
passing the time. In such communities as these there is rarely any
efficient superintendence of teaching by a paid supervisor, and the
school board is unqualified to judge on any other basis than the cost
of schooling for a limited number of weeks.
The small district school has the effect of strengthening the
isolation that is the bane of the country regions. It continues to
exist because every farmer wants the school near by for the
convenience of his own family. The history of the "little red
schoolhouse" throws a glamour of romance about the district
headquarters, but in actual experience the district school has
outlived its usefulness. There is a strong movement to consolidate
district schools and at some conveniently central point, with
attractive and ample grounds, to build, equip, and man a school
adequate to the needs of the community. Experience shows that the
expense need be no greater, because better teachers can be secured for
a given expenditure when fewer are needed, and with a greater number
of scholars there may be a regular system of grading and classes large
enough to arouse enthusiasm and ambition. The district school operates
on the principle of division of labor in educational production, but
it does not enjoy the benefits of co-operation or combination for
efficiency, while the consolidated school secures these advantages and
at the same time a better division of labor through the grades. Rural
education needs reorganization.
131. =A Discouraging Environment.=--Too many a rural community, like
old China, has been facing the past. It has lacked courage and
ambition. The atmosphere has been one of gloom and discouragement.
This community temper appears in the social groups; it is felt in the
home, and it is present in the school. It has been typical of whole
sections of rural country. Dilapidated school buildings, plain and
unkempt in appearance and cheap in construction, have been set in the
midst of barren surroundings, unshaded by trees and unadorned with
shrubs, without walks or drives to the entrance, and without even a
flagpole as an evidence of patriotic enthusiasm. Inside the building
there is insufficient light and ventilation, and the old-fashioned
furniture is ill adapted to the needs of the pupils. The whole
structure is almost devoid of the conveniences and modern devices for
making school life either comfortable or worth while. In such an
environment there is none of the stimulus that the school should
furnish. The best pupil, who might respond quickly to stimulus, tends
to sink to the level of the meanest, the mental horizon, cramped at
home, is hardly broadened during school hours, and the main purpose
for the existence of the institution is not achieved.
READING REFERENCES
FISKE: _The Challenge of the Country_, pages 151-170.
FOGHT: _The American Rural School_, pages 154-253.
CARNEY: _Country Life and the Country School_, pages 133-301.
KERN: _Among Country Schools._
GILLETTE: _Rural Sociology_, pages 233-263.
BRYAN: _Poems of Country Life._
CHAPTER XIX
THE NEW RURAL SCHOOL
132. =Nature Study in the New Rural School.=--In striking contrast to
such a defective rural institution as has been presented is the new
rural school and the country-life movement of which it is a vital
part. The first step in the new education is a growing recognition of
the function of the school to relate its courses of study and its
activities to the daily experience of the pupil. The background of
country life is nature; therefore nature study is fundamental in the
new curriculum. Careful observation of natural objects comes first,
until the child is able to identify bird and bee and flower. To
knowledge is added appreciation. The beauty of fern and leaf, of
brookside and hillside, of star-dotted and cloud-dappled sky, is not
appreciated by mere observation, but waits on the education of the
mind. This is part of the task of the teacher. The economic use of
natural objects and natural forces is secondary, and should remain so,
but the new education takes the knowledge which has been gained by
observation and the enthusiasm which has been distilled through
appreciation, and applies them to the social need. Agriculture comes
to seem not only an occupation for economic ends, but a vocation for
social welfare also. With all the rest there is a moral and religious
value in nature study. Nature is pre-eminently under the reign of law;
obedience to that law, adjustment to the inexorable demands of nature,
are essential to nature's children. No more wholesome moral lesson
than this can be taught to the present generation of children. Nature
ministers also to the spiritual. Power, order, beauty, intelligence
speak through the language of the natural world to the human soul, and
the thoughtful child can be led to see through nature to nature's
God. Such a God is not a theory; in nature the divine presence is
self-evident.
All theory in the new rural school is based on experimentation.
Together the new teacher and the pupils beautify the grounds and the
interior of the school building; they plan and make gardens and try
all sorts of gardening experiments; they grow the plants that they
study, and, best of all, they see the process of growth; from the use
of soil and seed and proper care they learn lessons in practical
agriculture that give satisfaction to all employed as book studies
alone never could, and they make possible a far better type of
agriculture when the pupils have fields of their own. Nor is it
necessary for pupils to wait for their maturity, for many a lesson
learned at school and demonstrated in the neighborhood is promptly
applied on the neighboring farms.
133. =The Study of the Individual.=--A second subject of study in the
new rural schools is the individual. Nature study is essential to a
rural school, but "the noblest study of mankind is man." Though it is
highly important that the individual should regard social
responsibility as out-weighing his own rights, it would be unfortunate
if the importance of the individual were ever overlooked. The nature
of the physical self, the requirement of diet and hygiene, the moral
virtues that belong to noble manhood and womanhood, the possible
self-development in the midst of the rural environment that is the
pupil's natural habitat are among the worthy subjects of patient and
serious study through the grades. Neither physiology, psychology, nor
ethics need be taught as such, but the elementary principles that
enter into all of them belong among the mental assets of every
individual.
134. =Rural Social Science.=--In the same way it is not necessary and
perhaps may not be advisable to teach rural sociology or economics by
name, even in the high school. With the extension of the curriculum to
include agriculture, there is need of some consideration of the
principles of the ownership and use of land, farm management, and
marketing. Practical instruction in accounts, manual training, and
domestic science find place in the new school. Fully as important as
these is it to explain the social relations that properly exist in the
home, the school, and the neighborhood, to show the mutual dependence
of all upon one another, and to point out the advantages of
co-operation over a prideful individualism and frequent social
friction. Along with these relationships, or supplementary to them,
belong the larger relations of country and town and the reciprocal
service that each can render to the other, the characteristics and
tendencies of social life in both types of community, and the effects
of the changes that are taking place in methods of doing business and
in the nature and characteristics of the people of either community.
Following these topics come the problems of rural socialization
through such agencies as the school, the grange, and the church, and
the application of the principles already learned in a study of social
relations.
135. =Improvement in Economy and Efficiency.=--While the curriculum of
the schools is being fitted to the needs of the community, it is
desirable that there should be improvement of economy and efficiency
in the whole system of education. This is being accomplished partly by
better supervision and teaching, but also by a consolidation of
schools which makes possible better grading, an enlarged curriculum,
improved teaching, and a deeper interest among the pupils. But one of
the best results that come from school consolidation is to the
community itself. A consolidated school means a larger and
better-equipped building. It often has a large assembly hall, a
library, and an agricultural laboratory. The new school has within it
tremendous potencies. It may become under proper direction an
educational centre for people of all ages and degrees of attainment.
Continuation schools for adults, especially the young and middle-aged
people, who were born too soon to enjoy the advantages of the new
education, are possible in the late autumn and winter. Popular
lectures and demonstrations on subjects of common concern and
entertainments based on rural interests find place at this centre.
Mixed occasionally with a rural programme belongs instruction in wider
social relations and world affairs.
136. =The Teacher a Community Leader.=--With the consolidated school
comes the well-trained teacher, and such a teacher deserves new
recognition as a community leader. In Europe and in some parts of
rural America the teacher has a permanent home near the schoolhouse,
as a minister has a parsonage near the meeting-house. Such a teacher
has an interest in community welfare, and a willingness to aid in
community betterment. Whether man or woman, he becomes naturally a
community leader, and with the backing of public sentiment and
adequate support a distinct community asset. Such a teacher is more
than a school instructor. He becomes a social educator of the people
by interpreting to them their community life; he becomes a social
inspirer to hope, ambition, and courage as he unfolds possible social
ideals; he becomes a guide to a new prosperity as he defines the
methods and principles on which other communities have worked out
their own local successes. Through the medium of the teacher the
neighborhood may be brought into vital contact with other communities
in a district or whole county, and may be brought together to consider
their common interests and to try experiments in co-operation, first
for educational purposes and then for general community prosperity.
At first the rural teacher in many localities will have enough to do
with securing proper accommodations for the children in school, for
good buildings frequently wait for a teacher who has the courage to
demand and persist in getting them; but the larger work for the
community is only second in importance and adds greatly to the
responsiveness of the older people to the suggestions of the teacher.
One great weakness in the past has been the short term of service of
the average teacher. It takes time to accomplish changes in a
conservative community, and the new education will be successful only
as the new teacher becomes a comparative fixture. To build oneself
into the life of a rural community as does the physician, and to
ennoble it with new ideas and higher ideals, is a missionary service
that can hardly be surpassed at the present time in America.
137. =Higher Education.=--The normal school, the rural academy or
county high school, and the college have their part in rural
education. It rests with the normal school to supply the trained
teacher and the normal schools rapidly are meeting the demands of the
present situation. Training classes for rural teachers have been
established in high schools or academies in twelve or more States.
More and more these higher schools are relating their courses of study
to the rural life in which so many of them are placed.
138. =What the University Can Do.=--An increasing number of young
people from the country are going to college. The college was founded
on the principle of educating American youth in a higher culture than
local elementary schools could provide. It is the function of the
college and the university to open wider vistas for the individual
mind than is otherwise possible, to do on an infinitely larger scale
what the teacher is attempting in the elementary grades. These higher
schools are passing through a humanizing process; they are making more
of the social sciences and the art of living well; and they are
allying themselves with practical life. In the case of established
institutions with traditions, and often with trustees and alumni of
conservative tastes and tendencies, there are difficulties in the way
of their rapid adaptation to vocational needs. It is probably best
that a certain class of them should stand primarily for intellectual
culture, as technical and agricultural schools stand for their
specialties, but the true university should be representative of all
the social interests of all the people in the State.
An illustration of what the university can do in social service for a
whole State occurs in the recent history of the University of
Wisconsin. It conceived its function to be not solely to educate
students who came for the full university course. It considered the
needs of the people of the State, and it planned to provide
information and intellectual stimulus for as wide a circle as
possible. It provided correspondence courses. It sent out a corps of
instructors to carry on extension courses. It made affiliations with
other State institutions. It reached all classes of the people and
touched all their social interests. It became especially useful to the
farmers. In spite of scepticism on the part of the people and some of
the university officers, those who had faith in the wider usefulness
of the university pushed their plan until they succeeded in organizing
a short winter course in agriculture for farmers' sons and then for
the older farmers, branched out into domestic courses for the women,
and even made provision for the interests of the boys and girls.
Reaching out still further, the university organized farmers' courses
in connection with the county agricultural schools, established
experiment stations, and encouraged the boys to enter local contests
for agricultural prizes. By these means the university has become
widely popular and has been exceedingly beneficial to the people of
the State.
139. =The Public Library.=--While the school stands out as the leading
educational institution of the rural community, it is by no means the
sole agency of culture. Alongside it is the library. Home libraries in
the country rarely contain books of value, either culturally or for
practical purposes. Circulating libraries of fiction are little
better. School libraries and village libraries that contain
well-selected literature are to be included among the desiderata of
every countryside. A few of the great books of all time belong there,
a small collection of current literature, including periodicals, and
an abundant literature on country life in all its phases. It is the
function of the library to instruct the people what to read and how to
read by supplying book lists and book exhibits, and by demonstrating
occasionally through the school or the church how books may be read to
get the most out of them. In the days before public libraries were
common in this country, library associations were formed to secure
good literature. Such associations are still useful in small
communities that find it impossible to sustain a public library, and
they serve as a medium for securing from the State a travelling
library, which has the special advantage of frequent substitution of
books. Or the school library may be the nucleus of a literary
collection for the whole community--advantageously so if the school
building is kept open as a community centre.
140. =Reading Circles and Musical Clubs.=--The value of the library
to the public consists, of course, not in the presence of books on the
shelves, but in their use. Such use is encouraged by the existence of
literary or art clubs and reading circles. They supply the twofold
want of companionship and culture. The proper basis of association is
similarity of interests. Local history or geology, nature study,
current public events in State or nation, art in some of its phases,
or the literature of a particular country or period, may be the
special consideration of a club or reading circle; in every case the
library is the laboratory of investigation. One of the conspicuously
successful organizations of the last thirty years, showing how
organization grows out of social need, is the Chautauqua movement.
Starting as an undertaking in Sunday-school extension by means of a
summer assembly and local reading circles, in which the study of
history, literature, and science was added to Bible study, the
movement has grown, until it is represented by a thousand summer
institutes, with numerous popular lectures and entertainments, and it
is one of the most useful educational agencies anywhere in the United
States.
Every community is interested in music. Music has a place on every
programme, whether of church, school, or public assembly. A musical
club is one of the effective types of organization for those who are
like-minded in country or town. There are two varieties of
organization, the first of persons who join for the pleasure that
comes from agreeable society, the second of those who enter the
organization for the musical culture to be obtained. Whether for
diversion or study, a musical club is well worth while. Under the
influence of music antagonisms soften, moroseness disappears, and
sociability and good cheer take their place. The old-fashioned
singing-school was one of the most popular of local social
institutions; something is needed to fill its place. A club or band
for the serious study of instrumental music not only gives culture to
individuals, but is also an asset of increasing value to a church or
community.
141. =Woman's Clubs.=--These have become so common that they need no
special description, but as a social phenomenon they have their
significance. They mark a new era in the emancipation of ideas; they
are indicative of a new interest and ambition, and they are
training-schools for future citizenship. They are of special value
because of the wide areas of human interest that are brought within
scope of discussion. For rural women they are a great boon, and while
they have been most numerous in the larger centres, they may easily
become a universal stimulus and guide to higher culture everywhere. In
the absence of a grange they may serve as a centre of farm interests,
and discussion may be made practical by the application of acquired
knowledge to local problems, but their great value is in broadening
the women's horizon of thought and interest beyond their own affairs.
If rural men would organize local associations or brotherhoods for
similar assembly and discussion of State and national interests they
could multiply many times the benefits that come from the associations
and discussions that occur on special days of political rally and
voting. The rural mind needs frequent stimulus, and it needs frequent
association with many minds. For this reason the cultural function is
to be provided for by a method of congregation and organization
approved by experience, leadership is to be provided and occasional
stimulus applied, and life is to be enriched at many points. It is for
the people themselves to carry on such enterprises, but the initiation
of them often comes from outside. Usually, perhaps, the number of
people locally who have a real desire for culture are few, but it is
through the training of these few that judicious, capable leaders of
the community are to be obtained.
READING REFERENCES
HART: _Educational Resources of Village and Rural Communities_,
pages 197-277.
CUBBERLEY: _Rural Life and Education_, pages 161-347.
CARNEY: _Country Life and the Country School_, pages 336-340.
DAVIS: _Agricultural Education in the Public Schools._
EGGLESTON AND BRUÉRE: _The Work of the Rural School_, pages
193-223.
HOWE: _Wisconsin: an Experiment in Democracy_, pages 140-182.
_Country Life_, pages 200-210.
FOGHT: _The American Rural School_, pages 254-281.
CHAPTER XX
RURAL GOVERNMENT
142. =The Necessity of Government.=--Institutions of recreation and
culture are in most cases the voluntary creation of local groups of
individuals, except as the state has adopted a system of compulsory
education. Government may be self-imposed or fixed by external
authority, in any case it cannot be escaped. It can be changed in form
and efficiency; it depends for its worth upon standards of public
opinion; but it cannot cease to exist. As the activity of the child
needs to be regulated by parental control in the home and by the
discipline of the teacher in the school, so the activity of the people
in the community needs to be regulated by the authority of government.
Self-control on the part of each individual or the existence of custom
or public opinion without an executive agency for the enforcement of
the social will, is not sufficient to safeguard and promote the
interests of all. Government has everywhere been necessary.
143. =The Reign of Law.=--The existence of regulation in the community
is continually evident. The child comes into relation to law when he
is sent to school to conform to the law of compulsory education. He
goes to school along a road built and maintained by law, takes his
place in a school building provided by a board of education or school
committee that executes the law, and accepts the instruction of a
teacher who is employed and paid according to the law. His hours of
schooling and the length of terms and vacations are determined by the
same authority. During his periods of recreation he is still under the
reign of law, for game laws regulate the times when he may or may not
hunt and fish. When he grows older and assumes the rights of
citizenship he must bear his part of the burdens of society. He has
the right to vote as one of the lawmakers of the land, but he is not
thereby free to cast off the restraints of law. He must pay his
proportion of the taxes that sustain the government that binds him,
local, State, and federal taxes. He must perform the public duty of
sitting on a jury or administering civic office if he is summoned
thereto. Even in his own domicile, though he be householder and head
of a family, he may not injure the public health or morals by
nuisances on his own premises, his financial obligations to creditors
are secured against him by law, even the possession of his acres is
made certain only by public record. It makes no difference whether the
legal restrictions under which he lives are local or national, they
are all a part of the system for which he and his neighbors are
responsible, and which as citizens they are under obligation to
maintain.
144. =Political Terms.=--It is important to understand and use
correctly certain terms which occur in this connection. The state is
the people organized for the purpose of exercising the authority of
social control. In its sociological sense it is not restricted to a
large or small area, but in political parlance it is used with
reference to a large district which possesses a certain degree of
authority over all the people, as the State of New York, or the
sovereign state of Great Britain. Government is the institution that
functions for social control in accordance with the will of the people
or of an individual to whose authority they submit. Politics is the
science and art of government, and includes statesmanship as its
highest type and the manipulation of party machinery as its lowest
type. Law is the body of social regulations administered by government
ostensibly for the public good. Each of these may be and in the past
has been prostituted for private advantage. In the state one man or a
small group has seized and held the sovereign power through the force
of personal ascendancy or the prestige of birth or wealth, and has
used it for himself, as history testifies by numerous examples. The
forms of government in many cases have not been well adapted to the
functions that they were designed to perform. The despotic
administrative agencies that were overthrown by the French Revolution
were ill-adapted to the governmental needs of the lower classes. Much
of the governmental machinery of the American republic has not matched
the constitutional forms that were originally provided, and the
Constitution has had to be stretched or amended if the government of
the founders of the republic was not to be revolutionized. So law and
politics have had to be reorganized, revised, and reinterpreted to fit
into the social need. Law is a conservative factor in progress, but it
adapts itself of necessity to the demands of equity.
145. =The Will of the People.=--On the continent of Europe rural
government is arranged usually by the central authority of the nation;
in America it is more independent of national control. On this side of
the water the colonial governments often interfered little with local
freedom, and after the Revolution the people fashioned their own
national organization, and in giving it certain powers jealously
guarded their own local privileges. They were willing to sacrifice a
general lawmaking power and grudgingly to permit the nation to have
executive and judicial authority, but they retained the management of
local affairs, including the raising and expenditure of direct taxes.
Local government, therefore, has continued to reflect the mind of the
community, a mind occasionally swayed by emotional impulse, but
usually controlled by a love of order, and by an Anglo-Saxon pride in
self-restraint. The will of the people has made the government and
sanctions its actions. It may be that the will is not fixed or united
enough to force itself effectually upon a set of public officials, and
may await reform or revolution to become forceful, yet in the last
resort and in the long run the will of the people prevails. By the
provisions of a democratic constitution judgment is frequently passed
by the people upon the administration of government, and it is within
their power to change the administrative policy or to reject the
agents of government whom they have previously elected. Locally they
have the advantage of knowing all candidates for office. The
efficiency of rural government depends much on its revenue, and
farmers are reluctant to increase the tax rate; slowly they are
learning the value of good roads and good schools.
146. =The Ancient History of the Community.=--The government of the
rural community has a history of its own, as has the community itself.
This government gradually fits itself to meet local needs, but it is
slow to put away the survivals of earlier forms and customs that have
outlived their usefulness. The history of the community goes back to
primitive times, when the clan group recognized common interests and
acknowledged the leadership of the chief or head man. Custom was the
law of the clan, and its older members assisted the chief in
interpreting custom. Government in the community developed in two
ways, one along the path of centralization of authority, the other in
the growth of democracy. One tendency was to attach an undue
importance to ancient custom, and to throw about it a veil of sanctity
by connecting it with religion. Such a community in its conservatism
came to possess in time a static civilization, but it lacked virility
and commonly fell under the control of a neighboring energetic
community or prince. This is the usual history of the Oriental
community. The other tendency was to adapt local law and organization
to changing circumstances, and to make use of the abilities of all the
members of the community, to give them a voice in the local assembly,
and a right to hold public office. Such progressive communities were
the city states of Greece, the republic of Rome, and the rural
communities of the barbarian Germans before they settled in the Roman
Empire. When the Greek communities became decadent they fell under
foreign dominion; Rome imperialized the republic, but never forgot how
to rule well in her municipalities; the Germans passed on their
democratic ways to the English, and from that source they were brought
to America.
147. =Two Types of Rural Government.=--In America there have been two
types of rural government growing out of the manner of original
settlement. In New England the colonists settled near together in
villages grouped about the meeting-house. One or more villages
constituted a town for purposes of government. In these small
districts it was possible for all the citizens to meet frequently, and
in an annual assembly the voters of the community elected their
officers and adopted the necessary local regulations. Long custom
transplanted oversea had kept a close connection between church and
state, and until the new American principle of separation was
universally adopted, the annual town meeting in Massachusetts was a
parish meeting, in which the community voted with reference to the
needs of the church as well as of the state. In the South community
life was less closely knit, and town meetings were not in vogue. The
parish held its vestry meetings for the transaction of ecclesiastical
business, for episcopacy was the established church; overseers of the
poor were elected at the same meetings. There were county assemblies
for social and judicial purposes, but in each a few prominent people
in the neighborhood managed affairs and perpetuated their privileges,
as among the landed gentry of England. It was in these ways that
popular government continued along the path of material and social
progress in the North, while in the South a plantation aristocracy
conservatively maintained its colonial ideas and institutions,
including slavery.
With wider settlement there was an extension of these sectional
differences, except near the border of both, where a blending of the
two took place to some extent. County organization was necessary for a
time, while the country was thinly settled, but neighborhoods
organized as school districts, and by a natural process the school
district became the nucleus of a township government, at first for
school purposes and later for the self-government of the whole
community. In some cases, as in Illinois, it was made optional with
the people of a county whether they would organize a township
government or not, but wherever the two systems entered into
comparison and competition the township government proved the more
popular. As long as pure democracy remains there must be a small local
unit of government, and the New England town meeting seems wonderfully
well adapted to the purpose of self-government. The recent tendency
to extend democracy in the form of political primaries and the
referendum is a stimulus to such organization, and it may be expected
that the town system will continue to extend, even in the South.
148. =Town and County Officials.=--The town meeting is held in a
public building. In colonial days the close connection between church
and state made it proper that the meeting should be in the
meeting-house; in the West, where the school was the nucleus of local
organization, the schoolhouse was the natural voting place. In
present-day New England even a small village has its town house,
containing a large hall, which serves for town meetings and for
community assemblies for various social purposes. In the town meeting
the administrative officers, called selectmen, are chosen annually,
and minor officers, including clerk, treasurer, constables, and school
committee; there the community taxes itself for the salaries of its
officials, for the support of the town poor, for the maintenance of
highways, and for such modern improvements as street lights and a
public library. Personal ability counts for more than party
allegiance, though each political party usually puts its candidates in
the field. An important function of the local voters is the decision
under the local-option system that prevails in the East, as to whether
the sale of intoxicating liquors shall be licensed for the ensuing
year; under an increasing referendum policy the acts of the State
legislature are frequently submitted for review to the local voters.
Where the town system does not exist or is part of a larger county,
officers are elected for more extended responsibility. The functions
of county officers are mainly judicial. Among the county officers are
the sheriff elected by the people to preserve order and justice
throughout the region, the coroner whose duty has been to investigate
sudden death or disaster, and to hold an inquest to determine the
origin of crime if it existed. The county commissioners or supervisors
are executive officers, corresponding to the selectmen of the town;
the clerk and treasurer of the county have duties similar to the town
officers with those titles.
149. =Political Relations and Responsibilities.=--The local
community, alike under township and county government, is a part of a
larger political unit, and so has relations with and responsibilities
to the greater State. The town meeting may legislate on such matters
as the erection of a new schoolhouse or the building of a town
highway, but it cannot locate the post-office or change the location
of a State or county road. It may make its local taxes large or small,
but it cannot increase or diminish the amount of the State tax or
regulate the national tariff. The townsman lives under the
jurisdiction of a law that is made by his representatives in the State
legislature or the national Congress, and he is tried and punished for
the infraction of law in a county, State, or national court. As a
citizen of these larger political units he may vote for county, State,
and national officials, and may himself aspire to the highest office
in the gift of his countrymen.
150. =Political Standards.=--To a foreigner such a system of
government may seem exceedingly complex, but by it self-government is
preserved to the people of the nation, and a good degree of efficiency
is maintained. There are problems of social control that need study
and that produce various experiments in one State or another before
they are widely adopted; there is corruption of party politics with
unscrupulous methods and machinery that is too well oiled with
"tainted" money; but local government averages up to the level of the
intelligence and morals of the community. If the schoolhouse is an
efficient centre for the proper training of boys and girls to
understand their social relations and civic responsibilities, and if
the meeting-house is an efficient centre for the discussion of social
ethics and a religion that moves on the plane of earth as well as
heaven, then the town house will give a good account of itself in
intelligent voting and clean political methods. If the school-teacher
and the minister have won for themselves positions of community
leadership, and are educators of a forceful public opinion, and if the
community is sufficiently in touch with the best constructive forces
in the national political arena to feel their stimulus, the political
type locally is not likely to be very low. A self-governing people
will always have as good a government as it wants, and if the
government is not what it should be, the will of the people has not
been well educated.
READING REFERENCES
FAIRLIE: _Local Government in Counties, Towns, and Villages._
FISKE: _Civil Government in the United States_, pages 34-95.
HENDERSON: _Social Elements_, pages 292-317.
HART: _Educational Resources of Village and Rural Communities_,
pages 92-105.
COOLEY: _Social Organization_, pages 402-410.
CHAPTER XXI
HEALTH AND BEAUTY
151. =Health and Beauty in the Community.=--Rural government formerly
limited its range of activity to political and economic concerns. The
individualism of Americans resented the interference of government in
other matters. If property was made secure and taxed judiciously for
the maintenance of public institutions, the duty of government was
accomplished. The individual man was prepared to assume all further
responsibility for himself and family. Such matters as the health of a
rural community and its æsthetic appearance were left to individual
initiative and generally were neglected. On many occasions the
housewife showed her sympathy and kindliness by nursing a sick
neighbor, but the members of the community had little appreciation of
the seriousness of contagion and infection, no knowledge of germs, and
small thought of preventive measures. The appearance of their
buildings and grounds was nobody's business but their own. They had no
conception of the social obligation of each for all and of all for
each. The result was an unnecessary amount of illness, especially of
tuberculosis and typhoid fever, because of insanitary buildings and
grounds, and a general air of shabbiness and neglect that pervaded
many communities. It was not that the people lacked the æsthetic
sense, but it had not been trained, and in the struggle for the
subjugation of a new continent all such minor considerations must give
way to the satisfaction of elemental wants.
Slowly it is becoming understood that health and beauty are matters
that demand public attention and regulation. Good fortune and
happiness are not purely economic and political concerns. Well-kept
roads, clean and well-planned public buildings, sanitary farm
structures, properly drained farm lands, and pure drinking water may
not add to the number of bushels an acre, but they prolong life and
add to its comfort and satisfaction.
When it seems no longer strange to bother about health conditions, it
will be relatively easy to give attention to rural æsthetics. If a
schoolhouse or a meeting-house is to be erected, it will give greater
satisfaction to the community if the principles of good architecture
are observed and the building is set in the midst of trees and
shrubbery and well-kept lawn. With such an object-lesson, the people
of the community will presently contrast their own property with that
of the public, the imitative impulse will begin to work, and
individuals will begin to make improvements as leisure permits. There
are villages that are ugly scars on a landscape which nature intended
should be beautiful. With misdirected energy, farmers have destroyed
the wild beauty of the fence corners and roadsides, mowing down the
weeds and clearing out the brush and vines in an effort to make
practical improvements, while with curious oversight they have
permitted the weeds to grow in the paths and the grass to lengthen in
the yard. Many a farm in rural communities has untidy refuse heaps,
tottering outbuildings, rusting machinery, and general litter that
reveal the absence of all sense of beauty or even neatness, yet the
farmer and his wife may be thrifty, hard-working people, and
scrupulously particular indoors. Their minds have not been sensitized
to outdoor beauty and hideousness. They forget that nature is
æsthetic; they live in the midst of her beauty, but their eyes are dim
and their ears are dull, and it is difficult to instruct them.
Happily, recent years have brought with them a new sense of the
possibilities of rural beauty. Children are learning to appreciate it
in the surroundings of the schoolhouse and the tasteful decorations of
its interior; their elders are buying lawn-mowers and painting their
fences, and America may yet rival in attractiveness the fair
countryside of old England.
152. =Is the Town Healthier than the Country?=--It has been commonly
believed that country people are healthier than townspeople. Their
life in the open, with plenty of exercise and hard work, toughens
fibre and strengthens the body to resist disease. It has also been
supposed that the city, with its crowded quarters, vitiated air, and
communicable diseases, has a much larger death-rate. It is true that
city life is more dangerous to health than a country existence if no
health precautions are taken, but city ordinances commonly regulate
community health, while in the country there is greater license.
Exposure gives birth to colds and coughs in the country; these are
treated with inadequate home remedies, because physicians are
inconveniently distant or expensive, and chronic diseases fasten
themselves upon the individual. Ignorance of hygienic principles,
absence of bathrooms, poor ventilation, unscreened doors and windows,
and impure water and milk are among the causes of disease.
There is as much need of pure air, pure water, and pure food in the
country as in the city, and the danger from disease is no less
menacing. The farmer loses vitality through long hours of labor, and
is susceptible to disease scarcely less than is the working man in
town. And he is more at fault if he suffers, for there is room to
build the home in a healthful location, where drainage is easy and
pure air and sunshine are abundant; there is water without price for
cleansing purposes, and sanitation is possible without excessive cost.
In most cases it is lack of information that prevents a realization of
perils that lurk, and every rural community should have instruction in
hygiene from school-teacher, physician, or resident nurse.
153. =Rural Health Preservers.=--Three health preservers are needed in
every rural community. These are the health official, the physician,
and the nurse. There is need first of one whose business it shall be
to inspect the sanitary conditions of public and private buildings,
and to watch the health of the people, old and young. It matters
little whether the official is under State or local authority, if he
efficiently and fearlessly performs his duty. Constant vigilance alone
can give security, and it is a small price to pay if the community is
compelled to bear even the whole expense of such a health official.
Community health is often intrusted to the town fathers or a district
board with little interest in the matter; on the other hand, the agent
of a State board is not always a local resident, and is liable to
overlook local conditions. It is desirable that the health official be
an individual of good training, familiar with the locality, and with
ample authority, for in this way only can safety be reasonably secure.
It is by no means impracticable to give a local physician the
necessary official authority. He is equipped with information and
skilled by experience to know bad conditions when he sees them and to
appreciate their seriousness. Whether or not a physician is the
official health protector of the community, a physician there should
be who can be reached readily by those who need him, and who should be
required to produce a certificate of thorough training in both
medicine and surgery. If such a medical practitioner does not
establish himself in the district voluntarily, the community might
well afford to employ such a physician on a salary and make him
responsible for the health of all. As civilization advances it will
become increasingly the custom in the country as well as in the city
to employ a physician to keep one's general health good, as now one
employs a dentist to examine and preserve the teeth. Medical practice
must continually become more preventive and less remedial. It may seem
as if it were an unwarranted expansion of the social functions of a
community that it should care for the health of individuals, but as
the interdependence of individuals becomes increasingly understood,
the community may be expected to extend its care for its own welfare.
154. =The Village Nurse.=--Alongside the physician belongs the village
or rural nurse. Already there are many communities that are becoming
accustomed to such a functionary, who visits the schools, examines the
children, prescribes for their small ailments or recommends a visit to
the physician, and who stands ready to perform the duties of a trained
nurse at the bedside of any sufferer. The support of such a nurse is
usually maintained by voluntary subscription, but there seems to be no
good reason why she should not be appointed and paid by the organized
community as a local official. She is as much needed as a
road-surveyor, surely as valuable as hog-reeve or pound-keeper. It is
a valid social principle, though rural observation does not always
justify it, that human life is not only intrinsically more valuable to
the individual or family than the life of an animal of the herd, but
it is actually worth more to the community.
155. =The Village Improvement Society.=--To secure good health
conditions, interested persons in the community may organize a health
club. Its feasibility is well proved by the history of the village
improvement society. There are two hundred such societies in
Massachusetts alone, and the whole movement is organized nationally in
the American Civic Federation. Their object is the toning up of the
community by various methods that have proved practicable. They owe
their organization to a few public-spirited individuals, to a woman's
club, or sometimes to a church. Their membership is entirely
voluntary, but local government may properly co-operate to accomplish
a desired end. Expenses are met by voluntary contribution or by means
of public entertainments, and its efforts are limited, of course, by
the fatness of its purse. Examples of the useful public service that
they perform are the demolition of unsightly buildings and the
cleaning up of unkempt premises, the beautification of public
structures and the building of better roads, the erection of drinking
troughs or fountains, and the improvement of cemeteries. Besides such
outdoor interests village improvement societies create public spirit,
educate the community by means of high-class entertainments, art and
nature exhibits, and public discussion of current questions of local
interest. They stand back of community enterprises for recreation,
fire protection, and other forms of social service, including such
economic interests as co-operative buying and marketing and the
extension of telephone or transportation service.
The initial impulse that sets in motion various forms of village
improvement frequently comes from the summer visitor or from a teacher
or minister who brings new ideas and a will to carry them into
action. In certain sections of country, like the mountain region of
northern New England, summer people are very numerous, through the
weeks from June to October, and not a few of them revisit their
favorite rural haunts for a briefer time in the winter. It is not to
be expected that they are always a force for good. Sometimes they make
country residents envious and dissatisfied. But it is not unusual that
they give an intellectual stimulus to the young people and the women,
compel the men to observe the proprieties of social intercourse, and
encourage downcast leaders of church and neighborhood to renewed
industry and hope. They demand multiplied comforts and conveniences,
and expect attractive and healthful accommodations. Where they
purchase and improve lands and buildings of their own they provide
useful models to their less particular neighbors, and thus the leaven
of a better type of living does its work in the neighborhood.
156. =Principles of Organization.=--The principles that lie at the
basis of every organization for improvement are simple and practicable
everywhere. They have been enumerated as a democratic spirit and
organization, a wide interest in community affairs, and a perennial
care for the well-being of all the people. Public spirit is the reason
for its existence, and the same public spirit is the only force that
can keep the organization alive. Every community in this democratic
country has its fortunes in its own hands. If it is so permeated with
individualism or inertia that it cannot awake to its duties and its
privileges, it will perish in accordance with the law of the survival
of the fittest; if, on the contrary, it adopts as its controlling
principles those just mentioned, it will find increasing strength and
profit for itself, because it keeps alive the spirit of co-operation
and mutual help.
READING REFERENCES
HART: _Educational Resources of Village and Rural Communities_,
pages 66-82, 106-130.
GILLETTE: _Rural Sociology_, pages 147-167.
HARRIS: _Health on the Farm._
FARWELL: _Village Improvement_, pages 47-53, Appendix.
WATERS: _Village Nursing in the United States._
CHAPTER XXII
MORALS IN THE RURAL COMMUNITY
157. =Social Disease and Its Causes.=--Rural morals are a phase of the
public health of the community. Immorality is a kind of social
disease, for which the community needs to find a remedy. The amount of
moral ill varies widely, but it can be increased by neglect or
lessened by effort, as surely as can the amount of physical disease.
Moral ill is due to the individual and to the community. The judgment
of the individual may be warped, his moral consciousness defective, or
his will weak. He may have low standards and ill-adjusted
relationships. Selfishness may have blunted his sympathy. All these
conditions contribute to the common vices of community life. But the
individual is sometimes less to blame than the community. Much moral
ill is a consequence of the imperfect functioning of the community. A
man steals because he is hungry or cold, and the motive to escape pain
is stronger than the motive to deal lawfully with his neighbor; but if
the community saw to it that adequate provision was made for all
economic need, and if moral instruction was not lacking, it would be
unlikely to happen. Similar reasons may be found for other evils. It
is as much the business of the community to keep the social atmosphere
wholesome as it is to keep the air and water of its farms pure. It
should provide moral training and moral exercise.
158. =How Morals Develop.=--Without attempting a thoroughly scientific
definition of morals, we may call good morals those habitual acts
which are in harmony with the best individual and social interests of
the people of the community, and bad morals the absence of such
habits. Of course the acts are the consequence of motives, and in the
last analysis the question of morals is rooted in the field of
psychology or religion; but the inner motive is revealed in the
outward act, and it is customary to speak of the act as moral or
immoral. Moral standards are not unvarying. One race differs from
another and one period of history differs from another. Primitive
custom was the first standard, and was determined by what was good for
the group, and the individual conformed to it from force of
circumstances. If he was to remain a member of the group and enjoy its
benefits he must be willing to sacrifice his selfish desires. His
consciousness of the solidarity of the group deepens with experience,
and his feelings of sympathy grow stronger, until impulsive altruism
becomes a habit and eventually a fixed and purposeful patriotism. By
and by religion throws about conduct its sanctions and interprets the
meaning of morality. However imperfect may be the relations between
good morals and pagan religions, Judaism and Christianity have
combined religion with high moral ideals. The Hebrew prophets declared
that God demanded justice, kindness, and mercy in human relations
rather than acts of ceremony and sacrifice to himself, and Jesus made
love to neighbor as fundamental to holiness as love to God. Such a
religion becomes dynamic in producing moral deeds.
159. =The Social Stimulus to Morality.=--It is customary to think of
the homely virtues of truthfulness, sobriety, thrift, and kindliness
as individual obligations, but they are not wrought out in isolation.
Isolation is never complete, and virtue is a social product. The
farmer makes occasional visits to the country store, where he
experiences social contacts; there is habitual association with
individual workers on the farm or traders with whom the farmer carries
on a business transaction. His personal contacts may not be helpful,
and his wife may lack them almost altogether outside of the home; the
result is often a tendency toward vice or degeneration, sometimes to
insanity or suicide, but it is seldom that there are not helpful
influences and relations available if the individual will put himself
in the way of enjoying them. Good morals are dependent on right
associations. Human beings need the stimulus of good society,
otherwise the mind vegetates or broods upon real or fancied wrongs
until the moral nature is in danger of atrophy or warping. Family
feuds develop, as among the Scotch highlanders or the mountain people
in certain parts of the South. Lack of social sympathy increases as
the interests become self-centred; out of this characteristic grow
directly such evils as petty lawlessness, rowdyism, and crime. The
country districts need the help of high-grade schools and proper
places of recreation, of the Young Men's Christian Association or an
association of like principles, and most of all of a virile church
that will interpret moral obligation and furnish the power that is
needed to move the will to right action.
160. =Rural Vices.=--The moral problems of the rural community do not
differ greatly from those of the town. The most common rural vices are
profanity, drunkenness, and sexual immorality. Profanity is often a
habit rather than a defect in moral character, and is due sometimes to
a narrow vocabulary. It is a mark of ignorance and boorishness. In
many localities it is less common than it used to be. The average
community life is wholesome. Not more than twenty per cent of American
rural communities have really bad conditions in any way, according to
the investigations made by the United States Rural Life Commission in
1908. Considering the monotony and hardships of rural life, it is much
to the credit of the people that most communities are temperate and
law-abiding. Intemperance is one of the most common evils; there is a
longing for the stimulant of liquor, which appears in some cases in
moderate drinking and in other cases in the habit of an occasional
spree in a near-by town, when reason abdicates to appetite. Lumbermen
and miners, whose work is especially hard and isolation from good
society complete, have been notorious for their lapses into
intemperance, but it is not a serious problem in three out of four
communities the country over, and a wave of temperance sentiment has
swept strongly over rural districts. Gambling is a diversion that
appeals to those who have few mental and pecuniary resources as an
offset to the daily monotony, but this habit is not typical of rural
communities.
Investigations of the Rural Life Commission showed that sexual
immorality prevails in ten to fifteen per cent of the rural
communities, and they trace much of it to late evening drives and
dances and unchaperoned calls, but on the whole the perversion of the
sex instinct is less common than in the cities. The young are
generally trained in moral principles, the religious sanctions are
more strongly operative, and the conduct and character of every
individual is constantly under the public eye. Young people in the
country marry at an earlier age than in the city, and husband and wife
are normally faithful. Crime in the country is peculiar to degenerate
communities, elsewhere it is rare. Juvenile delinquency occurs, and
there are not such helpful influences as the juvenile court of the
city; on the other hand, most boys are in touch with home influences,
feel the restraint of a law-abiding community, and know that
lawbreaking is almost certain to be found out and punished.
161. =Community Obligation.=--Moral delinquency in the rural community
lies in the failure to provide social stimulus to individual members.
The farmer has as good reason to be ambitious for success and to feel
pride in it as has the city merchant, but he has small local
encouragement to develop better agriculture on his own farm. He has as
much right to the benefits of association in toil and co-operation in
effecting economies and disposing of his products as the employer or
working man in town. He is equally entitled to good government, to
wholesome recreation, to a suitable and efficient education, and to
the spiritual leadership of a progressive church. Without the spur of
community fellowship his life narrows and his abilities are not
developed. With the help of community stimulus the individual may
develop capacity for individual achievement and social leadership of
as fine a quality as any urban centre can supply. It is well known
that the strong men of the cities in business and the professions have
come in large proportion from the country. If such qualities developed
in the comparative isolation and discomfort of the past, it is a moral
obligation of rural communities of the future to do even more to
produce the brawn and brain of city leaders in days to come.
READING REFERENCES
WILSON: _The Evolution of the Country Community_, pages 171-188.
ANDERSON: _The Country Town_, pages 95-106.
DEALEY: _Sociology_, pages 146-165.
HART: _Educational Resources of Village and Rural Communities_,
pages 166-175.
HOBHOUSE: _Morals in Evolution_, I, pages 364-375.
SPENCER: _Data of Ethics_, chapter 8.
_Report of Committee on Morals and Rural Conditions of the General
Association of Congregational Churches of Massachusetts_,
1908.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE RURAL CHURCH
162. =The Value of the Rural Church.=--Of all the local institutions
of the rural community, none is so discouraging and at the same time
so potential for usefulness as the country church. It has had a noble
past; it is passing through a dubious present; it should emerge into a
great future. The church is the conserver of the highest ideals. Like
every long-established institution, it is conservative in methods as
well as in principles. It regards itself as the censor of conduct and
the mentor of conscience, and it fills the rôle of critic as often as
it holds out an encouraging hand to the weary and hard pressed in the
struggle for existence and moral victory. It is the guide-post to
another world, which it esteems more highly than this. Sometimes it
puts more emphasis on creed than on conduct, on Sunday scrupulousness
than on Monday scruple. But in spite of its failings and its frequent
local decline, the church is the hope of rural America. It is
notorious that the absence of a church means a distinctly lower type
of community life, both morally and socially. Vice and crime flourish
there. Property values tumble when the church dies and the minister
moves away. Many residents rarely if ever enter the precincts of the
meeting-house or contribute to the expense of its maintenance, yet
they share in the benefits that it gives and would not willingly see
it disappear when they realize the consequences. In the westward march
of settlement the missionary kept pace with the pioneer, and the
church on the frontier became the centre of every good influence. It
is impossible to estimate the value of the rural church in the onrush
of civilization. Religion has been the saving salt of humanity when it
was in danger of spoiling. In the lumber and the mining camp, on the
cattle-ranch and the prairie, the missionary has sweetened life with
his ministry and given a tone to the life of the open and the wild
that in value is past calculation.
163. =The Church in Decline.=--In the days when it seems declining,
the strength of the rural church is worth preserving. There are
hundreds of rural communities where the young people have gone to the
town and population has steadily fallen behind. There are hundreds
more where the people of a community have drawn wealth from the soil,
and with a succession of good crops and high prices have accumulated
enough to keep them comfortable, and then have sold or leased their
property and moved into town. The purchasers or tenants who replaced
them have been less able to contribute to church support or have been
of a different faith or race, and the churches have found it difficult
to survive. Doubtless some of these churches could be spared without
great loss, for in the rush of real or expected settlement, certain
localities became over-churched, but the spectacle of scores of
abandoned churches in the Middle West has as doleful an appearance as
abandoned farms in New England.
164. =Is It Worth Preserving?=--It would be a misfortune for the
church to perish out of the rural districts, for it performs a
religious function that no other institution performs. It cherishes
the beliefs that have strengthened man through the ages and given him
the upward look that betokens faith in his destiny and power in his
life. It calls out the best that is in him to meet the tasks of every
day. It ministers to him in times of greatest need. It teaches him how
to relate himself to an Unseen Power and to the fellowship of human
kind. The meeting-house is a community centre drawing to itself like a
magnet family groups and individuals from miles around, overcoming
their isolation and breaking into the daily monotony of their lives,
and with its worship and its sermon awakening new thoughts and
impulses for the enrichment of life. Nor does its ministry confine
itself to things of the spirit. The weekly Sunday assembly provides
opportunity for social intercourse, if no more than an exchange of
greetings, and now and then a sociable evening gathering or
anniversary occasion brings an added social opportunity.
165. =The Country Minister.=--The faithful rural minister also carries
the church to the people. His parish is broad, but he finds his way
into the homes of his parishioners, acquaints himself with their
characteristics and their needs, and fits his ministrations to them.
Especially does he carry comfort to the sick and soothe the suffering
and the dying. No other can quite fill his place; no other so builds
himself into the hearts of the people. He may not be a great thinker
or preach polished sermons; his hands may be rough and his clothes
ill-fitting; but if he is a loyal friend and ministers to real
spiritual need, he is saint and prophet to those whom he has
brothered.
In the rural economy each public functionary is worthy or unworthy,
according to his personal fidelity to his particular task. A poorly
equipped board of government is not worth half the salary of the
school-teacher. That official may not hold his place or gain the
respect of his pupils unless he meets their needs of instruction with
a degree of efficiency. But a public servant who fills full the
channels of his usefulness is worth twice what he is likely to get as
his stipulated wage. The community can well afford to look kindly upon
a minister of that type, to encourage him in his efforts for the
upbuilding of the community, and to contribute to an honorable stipend
for his support.
166. =The Problems.=--The rural church has its problems and so has the
rural minister. There are the indifferent people who are irreligious
themselves and have no share in the activities of the religious
institution. There are the insincere people who belong to the church
but are not sympathetic in spirit or conduct. There are the
cold-blooded people who gather weekly in the meeting-house but do not
respond to intellectual or spiritual stimulus, and who chill the heart
of the minister and soon quench his enthusiasm. It is not surprising
if he is restless and changes location frequently, or if he becomes
listless and apparently indifferent to the welfare of his flock, when
he meets no response and himself enjoys no stimulus from his own kind.
All these conditions constitute the spiritual problem. Beyond this
there is the institutional problem. The church finds maintenance
difficult, often impossible without outside assistance. Failing to
minister to any purely community need except on special occasions, or
to assume any responsibility of leadership in civic or social affairs,
it does not receive the cordial support of the community to which as a
social institution, conserving the highest interests, it is reasonably
entitled. It must be remembered that in America there can be no
established church supported by the State, as in England. The church
is on a different footing in every community from that of the public
school. It is therefore dependent on the good-will of the community
and must cultivate that good-will if it is to succeed. Most rural
churches have yet to become a vital force, not only energizing their
own members, but reaching out also to the whole community, seeking not
their own growth as their chief end, but by ministering to the
community's needs, realizing a fuller, richer life of their own.
167. =The Needs of the Church.=--The rural church needs reorganization
for efficiency, but changes must be gradual. A local church that is
democratic in its form of organization, with no external oversight, is
likely to need strengthening in administration; a church that intrusts
control to a small board or is governed from the outside probably
needs to get closer to the people, but differences in church
government are of small practical consequence. It does not appear that
it makes much difference in the success of a rural church whether its
organization is Episcopal, Presbyterian, or Congregational. The
machinery needs modernizing, whatever the pattern. It is a part of the
task to be undertaken by every up-to-date country minister to consider
possible improvements in the various departments of the church. It is
as likely that the children are being as inefficiently taught in the
Sunday-school as in the every-day school, that organizations and
opportunities for the young people are as lacking as in the community
at large, that discussions in the Bible class are as pointless as
those in any local forum. It is more than likely that the church is
failing to make good in a given locality because it is depending on a
few persons to carry on its activities, and these few do not
co-operate well with one another or with other Christian people. The
functions of the church are neither well understood nor properly
performed. It has small assets in community good-will, and it is in no
real sense a going concern.
168. =The New Rural Church.=--Here and there a church of a new type is
meeting manfully these various needs. It has set itself first to
answer the question whether the church is a real religious force in
the community, and what method may best be used to energize the
countryside more effectually for moral and religious ends. Old forms
or times of worship have needed changing, or an innovating individual
has taken a hand temporarily. Then it has faced the practical problem
of religious education. Most churches maintain a Sunday-school and a
Woman's Missionary or Aid Society. Certain of them have young people's
organizations, and a few have organized men's classes or clubs. Each
of these groups goes on its own independent course. There is no
attempt to correlate the studies with which each concerns itself, and
there is much waste of effort in holding group sessions that
accomplish nothing. The new church directors simplify, correlate, and
systematize all the educational work that is being attempted, improve
courses of study and methods of teaching, and propose to all concerned
the attainment of certain definite standards. In the third place, the
new rural church adopts for itself a well-considered programme of
community service. Its opportunity is unlimited, but its efforts are
not worth much unless it approaches the subject intelligently, with a
knowledge of local conditions, of its own resources, and of the
methods that have been used successfully in other similar localities.
Nothing less than these three tasks of investigation, education, and
service belong to every church; toward this ideal is moving an
increasing number of churches in the country.
READING REFERENCES
BUTTERFIELD: _The Country Church and the Rural Problem._
FISKE: _The Challenge of the Country._
WILSON: _The Church of the Open Country._
NESMITH: Chapter on "The Rural Church" in _Social Ministry._
HART: _Educational Resources of Village and Rural Communities_,
pages 176-196.
_Report of Country Life Commission_, 1908.
CHAPTER XXIV
A NEW TYPE OF RURAL INSTITUTION
169. =A New Type of Institution.=--The rural community everywhere is
in need of a new social institution. Those which exist have been
individualistic in purpose and method and only incidentally have been
socially constructive. The school has existed to make individuals
efficient intellectually, that they might be able to struggle
successfully for existence. The church has existed as a means to
individual salvation from future ill. Social good has resulted from
these institutions, but it has not been fundamental in their purpose.
The new rural institution that is needed is a centre for community
reconstruction. If the school or the church can adapt itself to the
need, either may become such an institution; if not, there must be a
new type.
It has often been said that the characteristic evil of rural life is
the isolation of the people, but this must be understood to mean not
merely an isolated location of farm dwellings but a lack of human
fellowship. In the city the majority of people might as well live in
isolated houses as far as acquaintance with neighbors is concerned,
but they do not lack human fellowship because they have group
connections elsewhere. In the country it is hardly possible to choose
associates or institutional connections. There is one school prepared
to receive the children of a certain age, and no other, unless they
are conveyed to a distance at great inconvenience; the variety of
suitable churches is not large. It is necessary to cultivate neighbors
or to go without friendships. But rural social relations are not well
lubricated. There are few common topics of conversation, except the
weather, the crops, or a bit of gossip. There are few common interests
about which discussion may centre. There is need of an institution
that shall create and conserve such common interests.
170. =A Community House.=--The first task is to bring people together
to a common gathering place, where perfect democracy will prevail, and
where there may be unrestricted discussion. There is no objection to
using the schoolhouse for the purpose, but ordinarily it is not
adapted to the purposes of an assembly-room. The meeting-house may
serve the purpose, but to many persons it seems a desecration of a
sacred building, and except in the case of a single community church
there is too much of the denominational flavor about it to make it an
unrestricted forum. Ideally there should be a community house erected
at a convenient location, and large enough to accommodate as many as
might desire to assemble. It should be equipped for all the social
uses to which it might be put. It should be paid for by the voluntary
contributions of all the people, but title to the property should be
in the hands of a board of trustees or associates who would be
responsible for its maintenance and for the uses to which it would be
put. These persons must be men and women of the town in whose judgment
the people have full confidence. Regular expenses should be met by
annual payments, as the Young Men's Christian Association is sustained
in cities all over the country, and by occasional entertainments. A
limited endowment fund would be helpful, but too large endowment tends
to pauperize a local institution.
171. =Intellectual Stimulus.=--The second task is to put the community
house to use. There are numerous ways by which this can be done, but
the best are those that fit local need. Of all the needs the greatest
is stimulus to thought. Ideally this should come from the pulpit of
the rural church, but its stimulus is usually not strong, it is
commonly confined to religious exhortation, and it reaches only a few.
All the people of the community need to think seriously about their
economic and social interests, and to be drawn out to express
themselves on such subjects. The old-fashioned town meeting provided a
channel for such discussion once a year. What is needed is a
town-meeting extension through eight or nine months of the year. The
community house offers an opportunity for such an extension. Under
the initiative and guidance of one or two energetic local leaders,
inspired by an occasional outside lecturer, such as can be obtained at
small expense from agricultural colleges and other public agencies,
almost any American community ought to carry on a forum of public
discussion for weeks, taking up first the most urgent questions of
community interest and passing on gradually to matters of broader
concern.
172. =Social Satisfaction.=--As the adults of the community need
intellectual stimulus, so the young people need social satisfactions.
The salvation of the American rural community lies largely in the
contentment of the young people, for without that quality of mind they
leave the country for the town, or settle back in an unprogressive,
unsocial state of sullen resignation. There must be opportunity for
recreation. The community house should function for the entertainment
of its constituency in ways that approve themselves to the associates
in charge. But it is not so much entertainment that is wanted as an
opportunity for sociability, occasions when all the youth of the
community can meet for mutual acquaintance and the beginnings of
courtship, and for the stimulus that comes from human association. If
association and activity are characteristic of normal social life, it
is unreasonable to suppose that rural young people will be contented
to vegetate. If they cannot have legitimate opportunities to realize
their impulse to associated activity, they will provide less
satisfactory unconventional opportunities. One of the best means for
promoting sociability and providing an outlet for youthful energy in
concert has been found in the use of music. The old-fashioned
singing-school filled a real need and its passing has left a distinct
gap. Where musical gatherings have been revived experience has shown
that they are a most effective stimulus to a new community
consciousness. The country church choir has long been regarded as a
useful social as well as religious institution, but the community
chorus is far more effective. It is possible to uncover latent talent
and to cultivate it so that it will furnish more attractive
entertainment for the people than that which is imported at far
greater expense from outside. Among the foreigners who are finding
their way into rural localities, there is sometimes discovered a
musical ability that outranks the native, and no other method of
approach to the immigrant is so easy as by giving his young people a
place in the social activities of the community.
173. =Continuation Schooling.=--A further use for the community house
is educational. The older education of the district school was
defective, and the new education is not enjoyed by many a farmer's boy
or girl, because they cannot be spared in the later years of youth for
long schooling. An adaptation of the idea of continuation schools for
rural young people so that they may apply the new sciences to country
life is greatly to be desired. The local school principal or county
superintendent or an extension teacher from a State institution may be
found available as director, and it belongs to the community to
provide the necessary funds. For older people some of the same courses
are suitable, but they should be supplemented with lectures of all
sorts. It has been demonstrated many times that popular lecturers can
be secured at small expense in different parts of the country,
especially in these days when there are so many agencies to push the
new agricultural science, and other subjects over a wide range of
interests will not fail to find exponents if a demand for them can be
created.
174. =Community Leadership.=--In the last analysis the prime factor in
the rural situation is the community leader. Institutions can do
little for the enrichment of rural life if personality is wanting. It
is the leader's energy that keeps the wheels of the machinery turning,
his wisdom that gears their action to the needs of the community. It
is desirable that the leader should spring from the community itself,
acquainted with its needs and voicing its aspirations. But more
communities get their leaders from outside and are often more willing
to accept such a leader than if he came up out of their midst, for the
proverb is often true that a prophet is without honor in his own
country.
175. =Qualities of Leadership.=--Social leadership is dependent upon
certain qualities in the person who leads and in those who are led.
The attitude of the people of the community is fundamental. The
stimulus that the leader applies must find response in their inner
natures if his energy is to become socially effective. If there is not
a latent capacity to action, no amount of stimulus will avail. It is
safe to assume that there are few local communities in America that
will fail to respond to the right kind of leadership, but certain
qualities in the leader are essential for inspiration. It is not
necessary that he should be country born, but it is essential that he
love the country, appreciate its opportunities, and be conscious of
its needs. He cannot hope to call out these qualities in the people if
he does not himself possess them. And it must be a genuine love and
appreciation that is in him, for only sincerity and perfect honesty
can win men for long. It is essential that he have breadth of sympathy
for all the interests of the people that he seeks for his own; he may
not think lightly of farming or storekeeping, of education or
recreation, of morals or religion. He must be devoted to the
community, its servant as well as its leader, content to build himself
into its life. It is not necessary that the leader should be a trained
expert, a finished product of the schools, desirable as such equipment
is, but it is essential that he know how to call out the best that is
in others, to play upon their emotions, to appeal to their intellects,
to energize their wills. He must not only understand their present
mental processes, but he must have a vision of them when they have
become transformed with new impulses and ambitions, and converted to
new and nobler purposes. He needs an unquenchable enthusiasm, a gentle
patience, an invincible, aggressive persistency, a contagious optimism
that will carry him over every obstacle to ultimate victory. It is
essential that he possess fertility of resource to adapt himself to
circumstances, that he have power to call out action and executive
ability to direct it. Most important of all is a magnetic personality
such as belonged to the great chieftains of history who in war or
peace have been able to attract followers and to mould them in
obedience to their own will.
176. =Broad Opportunities.=--A leader such as that described has an
almost unlimited field of opportunity to mould social life. In the
city the opportunity for leadership may seem to be larger, but few can
dominate more than a small group. In the country the start may be
slower and more discouraging, but the goal reaches out ahead. From
better agriculture the leader may draw on the people to better social
ideals, to a new appreciation of education and broad culture, to a
truer understanding of ethics and religion. He may refashion
institutions that may express the new in modern terms. But when this
is accomplished his work is not done. He may reach out over the
countryside and make his village a nucleus for wider progress through
a whole county. Even then his influence is not spent. The rural
communities in America are feeders of the cities; in them is the
nursery of the men and women who are to become leaders in the larger
circles of business and professional life, in journalism and
literature, in religion and social reform. Many a rural teacher or
pastor has built himself into the affections of a boy or a girl,
incarnating for them the noblest ideals and stimulating them to
achievement and service in an environment that he himself could never
hope to fill and with a power of influence that he could never expect
to wield. The avenues of opportunity are becoming more numerous. The
teacher and the minister have advantages of leadership over the county
Young Men's Christian Association secretary and the village nurse, but
since personal qualities are the determining factors, no man or woman,
whatever their position, can make good the claim without proving
ability by actual achievement. Any man or woman who enters a
particular community for the first time, or returns to it from
college, may become a dynamo of blessing to it. There waits for such a
leader the loyalty of the boys who may be won for noble manhood, of
the girls who may become worthy mothers of a better generation of
future citizens, of men and women for whom the glamour of youth has
passed into the sober reality of maturer years, but who are still
capable of seeing visions of a richer life that they and their
children may yet enjoy. There are ready to his hand the institutions
that have played an important part, however inefficiently in rural
life, the heritage of social custom and community character that have
come down from the past, and the material environment that helps or
hinders but does not control human relations and human deeds. These
constitute the measure of his world; these are clay for the potter and
instruments for his working; upon him is laid the responsibility of
the product.
READING REFERENCES
CURTIS: _Play and Recreation for the Open Country_, pages
195-259.
FISKE: _The Challenge of the Country_, pages 225-266.
COOLEY: _Human Nature and the Social Order_, pages 283-325.
MCNUTT: "Ten Years in a Country Church," _World's Work_, December,
1910.
MCKEEVER: _Farm Boys and Girls_, pages 129-145.
CARNEY: _Country Life and the Country School_, pages 1-17,
302-327.
PART IV--SOCIAL LIFE IN THE CITY