these pages aright. Economic matters are not those of mere money. The
word has a greater meaning than has the word finance. It connotes
poverty as truly as wealth, and is greater than both. The economic
motive animates men in the quest of those vital satisfactions which the
individual craves, and the social group requires. Professor John Bates
Clark has somewhere described this motive as the desire to preserve the
present status, with slight improvement, for oneself and one's children
after him; the desire to live on the same economic standard in one's own
generation; and to be reasonably assured of the same security for one's
children. This is not the desire to get rich, though in individual cases
it is changed into a desire for wealth. But it is a far more general,
indeed a universal aspiration, which inspires most of the work of the
world. Industry is based on it. Civilization is propelled by it. It is
the desire to get a living and the quest of a living.
I believe that this economic motive is religious. It is the quest of
what a man has not, but feels to be his. It engages his utmost efforts.
It is labor for his wife and children and for all his group fellows, and
therefore is involved in his holiest, most self-forgetting feelings. It
takes him back to his parents and reminds him constantly of his
ancestors. He forms his ideas of justice in his economic experiences.
His ultimate conviction as to the goodness or the badness of the world
are the outgrowth of his experience in getting a living. Therefore his
economic life is his wrestle with nature and with society. It generates
in him all the religion he has.
I suppose it was for this reason that Jesus said "I am come that they
may have life, and that they may have it abundantly." Probably his
meaning was economic, in part, in the saying, "Man shall not live by
bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God."
The quest of a living is a satisfaction of successive economic wants, of
which bread is but the first. Every truth that mankind knows involves
men in an economic want. Education is one of the most general wants. It
comes in the series somewhat later than bread. The love of music is an
economic want, which comes generally later than education. But both are
a part of a living. I believe that the quest of education and the love
of music are religious, just as much as the desire for daily bread. One
might enumerate the whole series of economic wants, to satisfy which is
to live, but religion is the total of the reflections, and the complex
of customs which result from the lifelong quest for a living among
common folk. At its highest it is expressed by St. Augustine, "O God,
thou hast made us for thyself, and our souls are not at rest until we
find ourselves in thee." Bread is the first economic want, and God is
the greatest and the last.
Economic wants among common folk are usually the source of religious
feeling. Few people desire to be rich; a lesser number strive to get
wealth; and very few attain a fortune. The most of men seek and get a
living. The best of men, and the most religious, are those whose
economic experience brings them a series of satisfactions, beginning
with bread, clothing, shelter, education in the essentials, music and a
little aesthetic culture, and gradually extending into higher forms of
human enjoyment. The simplest religious craving is for economic
assurance of supply. "The Lord is my Shepherd: I shall not want," is on
the most thumbed page of the Bible. The play of these economic
aspirations among poor people results in all the simpler and most
general religious feelings. With the rise of the aspirations of the
individual, and the ideals of the group, toward higher satisfactions,
the religious experiences should become nobler, more refined. The
penniless college student who prays for an education should be a nobler
worshipper than the fisherman who asks his mud-divinity for a good
catch. The group of Oberammergau players who present the Passion Play, a
highly complex satisfaction of wants, should be nobler believers and
worshippers than herdsmen who out on the hills pray for the increase of
their flocks and for a better price for wool.
Communities differ from one another according to the living which they
supply, or the wants which they satisfy. Modern men will not live in a
community that does not satisfy a pretty long series of wants. For
instance, a graduate of the American common schools will desire bread,
clothing, shelter--all of comfortable quality--and education for his
children better than his own, musical enjoyment, aesthetic culture, the
possession of some books, access to many magazines and the reading of a
daily paper; and varied opportunities for the exercise of the play
spirit. The country community satisfies, in most of the United States,
only the first of these. It is a place for securing food, clothing and
shelter of a comfortable sort. Country people have in the past ten years
secured also a better supply of reading matter. Almost all the rest of
the series is lacking. The reason for the rural exodus is in the most of
cases the quest of education and of music, the craving for aesthetic
culture, and the desire for recreation. Country towns and small cities
therefore have come to be centers of education, of amusement and of
"culture." They are the first step upward on the series of economic
satisfaction. Men who have made some money on the farm "move into town,"
for the satisfaction of the later wants in the series.
None of these wants is itself sinful, for all of them make up life. They
are the steps on the way from bread to God. The business of the teacher
and preacher of religion is to know the wants of his people: study those
which are satisfied in his community, and so to build the community that
for most of its people and for the most desirable people, all the vital
necessities of life shall be satisfied, in the community in which the
desire for bread is satisfied. The problem of amusement exhibits these
principles clearly. Farming is austere, and few farming communities have
recreation adequate to the demand of the young people and the working
people who live on the farms. Agriculture is becoming more systematic
and more exacting in its demands: and systematic work creates a demand
for organized play. As this demand is not satisfied in the
country--indeed it is less generally satisfied now than in former
times--the youth and workingman from farming communities go to the towns
and larger villages for amusement. These centers of population have a
disproportionate burden therefore of cheap vaudeville shows, saloons,
professional baseball games, and moving-pictures.
These amusements are, to a degree, abnormal in character because those
who enjoy them are away from their home community, and are suffering a
reaction from pent-up desires. Just as the lumberman or cowboy or sailor
when he comes to town "tears loose and paints the town red," so, in a
milder degree, the farmer's son or hired man, because he has at home no
recreations supplied by his church or school, patronizes in the town or
small city a cheaper and nastier theatre than one would expect to find
either in that town, or in his home community. The remedy is to make the
country community adequate to the wants of those who live there. The
church should promote recreation. The public school should supply
entertainment of a high standard, both to satisfy the play instinct and
to elevate the youth's ideals of amusement. The community which works
should be dependent on no other community for play.
Common-school education is a function which country communities have
surrendered to the centers of population. The one-room country school
has long been inadequate; but the farmer has not improved it, preferring
to rely upon the town schools to which he will remove his family after
he has made enough money on the farm. I am told that about Crete,
Nebraska, a recent census revealed that half the normal child population
is missing from the country districts; and double the normal child
population is found in Crete. The quest of adequate schooling explains
the condition, which speaks ill for the country community of Nebraska.
In all these cases religious service consists in completing the
community. The supply of wants, which are widely and keenly felt, is a
religious act. This has been the reason for the success of the Du Page
Presbyterian Church in Illinois.[22] The minister, Mr. McNutt, in a
religious spirit so well supplied the recreative life needed in the
community, that the community has been made whole. Just as Jesus made
sick or maimed men whole, as a religious act, so the community builder
who supplies to working farmers something besides labor on the land, is
making the community whole.
The perfecting of the common school system in McNabb, by Mr. John Swaney
and other Friends, and in Rock Creek by Mr. R. E. Bone and other
Presbyterians, was a religious act for their communities in Illinois.
The farmers who have money can move to the town, but to complete the
country community is to satisfy the economic wants of the poor. The
wants of the poor are always of religious value.
Moreover, the satisfaction of all wants in the community itself is a
moral gain. If individuals live this life in the bounds to which their
group and family associations are confined, the steadying influence of
society is at its greatest. Jacob Riis[23] noted among immigrants the
working of a lower sense of obligation due to absence from accustomed
home associations. Communities are compacted of the strongest moral
bonds. If churches would make men righteous they cannot do better than
to complete the community, especially in the country, as a place to live
in: making it a place for education as well as profit: of play as well
as work, of worship as well as of material comfort.
Unfortunately churches in the country are too often recruiting stations
for the cities and colleges. The ministers are respectable pullers-in
for the city show. Nothing rejoices them so much as to help their young
men and women find a position in the city; unless it be to have a bright
lad or girl go off to college. When a country minister was reminded that
all these departures weakened the country community, and that very few
of them benefitted the lad or girl who goes to the city, he replied "you
cannot blame them; there is nothing here to keep them."
"The rural exodus" has had its Moses in the rural college student, its
Aaron in the country minister, and its Miriam in the country school
teacher. These three have led a generation out of the country to perish
in the wilderness. For only a pitiful few of those who leave the country
come to prominence in the city. The most gain but a poor living there,
and very many go to ruin. The church should be the savior of the
community, as her Master is of the soul.
It seems to me that this is done in a church in Ottumwa, Iowa, of which
Dr. W. H. Hormell is minister. It is in a stock-yards district, and the
daily occupation of many of the members is unclean, of some revolting.
But the church is a dynamo of spiritual forces. It supplies the
experiences most opposite to those of the slaughter-house. A half-dozen
chapels in surrounding neighborhoods, most of them in the country, are
outposts of the church, for each of which a superintendent is
responsible: and thus a man who is an underling at the slaughter-house
is a leader in the quest of eternal life. The whole company of workers
with the pastor, constitute a spiritual cabinet of the district. It is
not surprising that this church fascinates men. The minister cannot be
persuaded away, and a like devotion pervades his group of workers. The
intensity of the industrial labor is matched by the intensity of Bible
study, prayer and evangelism. The degradation and repulsion of the
leading industry of the place are equalled by the unworldly nobility and
optimism of the leading church. This church does not attempt to mend the
community--which might be found impossible--but only to serve the
community by supplying the satisfaction for spiritual wants.
According to the law of diminishing returns, the first satisfactions of
any want have infinite value. What does this mean but that they have
religious value? The first drink of water to a famished man calls forth
a fervent "Thank, God." The first book printed is a Bible. The first
landing on American soil was a solemn religious occasion--and still is
for the immigrant. So the first gains of money are of religious value to
the poor. The first hundred dollars to a mechanic's family is invested
in a dozen benefits. The first thousand dollars which a working farmer
saves go into a home, a piano or books, or an education for a child. It
is all moral and spiritual good. Later thousands have diminishing moral
and spiritual values. Most of the churches and homes in America were
paid for out of the tithes of men and women who owned at the time a
margin of less than a thousand dollars.
This is the reason for the religious character of economic life. The
most of people spend their lives with less than a thousand dollars. They
are poor, and money does them good, not harm. They need to know how to
use it. But the getting of their living is a process prolific in
religious feeling, because economic matters have to them the infinite
value of first satisfactions of all the simplest wants of life.
The salvation of the community will be accomplished in satisfying the
higher wants of those whose lower wants are satisfied. For those who
"have made money" supply schools; for those who work supply recreation;
for the sick hospitals; for the invalid build sanitariums; and for all
men supply social life, the greatest need of human life on earth. For
those who are thus united to the community, and to one another in the
intricate network of associations, the opportunity of worship together,
and of sharing common spiritual interests becomes the highest economic
want.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 21: "I come that they may have life, and may have it
abundantly."--Jesus, in John 10:10.]
[Footnote 22: "Modern Methods in the Country Church," by Matthew Brown
McNutt.]
[Footnote 23: "The Making of an American," by Jacob Riis.]
VII
THE COMMUNITY
The country community is defined by the team haul. People in the country
think of the community as that territory, with its people, which lies
within the team haul of a given center. Very often at this center is a
church, a school and a store, though not always, but always the country
community has a character of its own.[24] Social customs do not proceed
farther than the team haul. Imitation, which is an accepted mode of
social organization, does not go any farther in the country than the
customary drive with a horse and wagon. The influence of leading rural
personalities does not extend indefinitely in the country, but
disappears at the boundary of the next community. Intimate knowledge of
personalities is confined to the community and does not pass beyond the
team haul radius. Within this radius all the affairs or any individual
are known in minute detail; nobody hopes to live a life apart from the
knowledge of his neighbors; but beyond the community, so defined, this
knowledge quickly disappears.
Men's lives are housed and their reputations are encircled by the
boundary of the team haul.
The reason for this is economic and social. The life of the countryman
is lived within the round of barter and of marketing his products. The
team haul which defines the community is the radius within which men buy
and sell. It is also the radius within which a young man becomes
acquainted with the woman he is to marry. It is the radius of social
intercourse. Within this radius of the team haul families are accustomed
to visit with ten times the frequency with which they pass outside this
radius. Indeed, for most of them, one might say that social intercourse
is a hundred times as frequent within the team haul as without it.
The average man would define the community as "the place where we live."
This definition contains every essential element, locality, personal and
social relations, and vital experiences. The community is that complex
of economic and social processes in which individuals find the
satisfactions not supplied in their homes. The community is the larger
social whole outside the household; a population complete in itself for
the needs of its residents from birth to death. It is a man's home town.
This conception of the community as a vital common possession explains
the relation of religious, educational, ethical, economic institutions
to one another. The community is the clearing-house of all these
influences. It is the medium by which they exchange with one another,
in the interest of human life. The perfection of this exchange and the
abundance of communal influences makes the community good and desirable,
or poor and undesirable.
Sometimes one says that the community is "a good place to live in." When
it is ample for the needs of individual lives men move into it, and the
average man finds there a contented and satisfied life. The decay of the
community is indicated by the departure of individuals and of families
in quest of a better centre for the supply of vital human needs. Some go
to make more money elsewhere, some depart for educational advantages and
some move away because social life is lacking or religious privileges
are not suitable. But these four vital essentials, economic, ethical,
educational and religious, make up the elements in the community's
service to the individual.
The community is sometimes corrupted by vicious principles in its
construction; and then its members are in proportion defective. It
produces in excessive degree idiots, blind, deformed, neurotic, insane
or criminal individuals.
The community, thus defined, is normally furnished with certain
institutions essential to the life of the people. In earlier days the
community was sufficient unto itself. Very little was imported.
Everything for use in the community was raised therein and manufactured
in the households. A system of exchange gradually was effected through
the country store. The country store of 1770 in Duchess County, New
York, had an amazing relation to a wide population. The radius of the
life dependent upon it was the same as the radius around the Quaker
Meeting, beside which this store was placed, and all the goods used in
the community with few exceptions were produced and manufactured in this
radius of the team haul of ten miles.[25]
Nowadays the country community has normally a store, a blacksmith shop,
a church and a school. In the recent past certain classes of peddlers
regularly visited the country community, though their place in the rural
economy is diminishing. The country store in many communities is already
closed and its maintenance is surrounded with increasing difficulty. So
long, however, as the horse drawn vehicle is the type of transportation
in the country, the elements of the country community must remain
substantially the same.[26]
The economic life of the community is necessarily a part of the general
economic life of the population as a whole. The world economy has in the
past hundred years, with the perfection of the means of transportation,
taken the place of the communal economy. In 1810 every country community
was obliged to manufacture its own raw products so far as possible
within its own limits. In 1910 it was no longer profitable for even a
country community to do so. The result is that the economic life of the
community is usually expressed in a specified industry to which the
whole community is primarily devoted. If it be a rural community this
organization takes the form of a "money crop." In the corn belt there
are other products raised from the soil besides corn, but the world
economy assigns to that fertile section the producing of corn as the
most profitable and the simplest task. In the coal region it tends to
the highest efficiency for the labor of the region to be concentrated
upon the supply of this fuel, although in addition the surface of the
soil may be cultivated and in the larger population centers other
industries are coming in to exploit the superfluous labor. None of these
competes with the primacy of the coal industry, which the world economy
assigns to that community.
It is essential that in every community there should be one or more
industries by which men may live. It tends to the highest well-being of
the community, that is, to its possession of a maximum of vital
attraction for individuals, that this industry should supply a variety
of sources of income; that is, wages, profits and interest. If the
community can retain in its own bounds the owners of its industries, at
least in some numbers, and the capitalists whose wealth is invested in
these industries, it is of great service. If it can make life
attractive for wage-earners in these industries, the completeness of
that community has its testimonial in this variety and wealth of
attraction. The weakness of many American communities is shown in their
inability to retain within their bounds the owners of the businesses and
the employers of labor. The ideal character of some communities in
Massachusetts is due to the fact that in the same streets there daily
meet capitalists, superintendents, foremen and wage-earners who are
alike interested in the local industries.
This power of the community to attract and hold individual lives,
supplying them with the vital necessities for which the individual
craves, is dependent in America upon educational institutions more than
upon any other factor. The French philosopher Desmoulin has said that
the Anglo-Saxon supremacy is due to the Anglo-Saxon love of the land and
of education. The American represents these two passions, and of the two
the love of education is at present, the stronger. The community which
is weak in its schools will not hold its people. The generation who at
present are the largest owners of American wealth are eager for
educational advantage: and the incoming stream of immigration promises
that in the days to come this craving for education will not diminish,
but will increase.
The country community has been peculiarly weak in its educational
facilities, by a strange dullness and inertia due to the economic
prostration of the farming industry. For the two decades following 1880
the country schools have failed to keep pace with the city schools.
Prof. Foght says, "While the public attention has been centered on work
and plans for the improvement of the city schools a great factor for or
against the public weal has been sadly neglected. This is the rural
school. One-half of our entire school population attend the rural
schools, which are still in the formative stage. The country youth is
entitled to just as thorough a preparation for thoughtful and
intelligent membership in the body politic as is the city youth. The
State, if it is wise, will not discriminate in favor of the one as
against the other, but will adjust its bounties in a manner equitable to
the needs of both. Heretofore the rural schools have received very
little attention from organized educational authority."[27]
The effect of this neglect of the country school in the face of the
constructive statesmanship which has led in perfecting the city school
is seen in the exodus from the country community of very large numbers
of the most successful farmers. Evidences are abundant that this exodus
from the country community is primarily a quest of educational
advantage. Not in every case would the departing family confess that
they were seeking better schools: but it is probable that the majority
of them while giving a variety of primary reasons for moving would
assign the desire for education as the uniform secondary reason for
departing from the country community.
It is impossible for the country church to retain its best ministers.
Many reasons enter into this, but always at the top of the list is the
desire for better educational opportunities for the ministers' children.
The advice has become proverbial in theological seminaries, "Go to the
country for five years." It is said that in New England there are three
classes of country ministers and the first of them is the bright young
man who will not long be in the country.