day school in the community has any progressive features, the Sunday
school should use these and improve them. Between the two there should
exist the closest sympathy, not formal or definitely organized, but
actual and expressed in parallel lines of work. Where the day school is
graded, the Sunday school should accept the same grading, strongly
organizing all its classes. The pupils in the Sunday school should pass
by successive promotions from teacher to teacher and from grade to
grade.
If the day school in the country is unprogressive and is taught by a
succession of indifferent persons, the Sunday school should practise
under the guidance of religious leaders those principles of modern
pedagogy which should be used in the common schools. Graded lessons,
the organization of material and progressive development of religious
truth from the simpler to the more complex, should find their place in
every Sunday school. The opportunity for service to the whole community
thus offered through the Sunday school is excelled by none in the
country community.
The upper classes of the Sunday school should be organized. Young men
and women especially, who are in danger of finding the Sunday school
irksome because their intelligence has passed beyond its control, should
be organized in classes which on week days have a club or society
character. The Sunday school should use as an ally their tendency to
organization and should satisfy their social needs by giving them
regular and approved opportunities for meeting and for pleasure.
Another principle which the Sunday school can practise for the benefit
of the community is the centralization of religious teaching. Even if
the common schools are not centralized, the children for the Sunday
school should be brought to the church from outlying regions in hired
wagons every week. It is better that a large Sunday school be maintained
under efficient leadership than that a number of small schools with
indifferent teachers should be maintained in various school districts.
The larger body can have better leadership. It is more closely under the
supervision of the minister, who is generally the superior in education
of the laymen, and the social value of the meetings of the Sunday
school will be greater in the larger body. All the arguments which make
for the centralization of the day school have force for the
consolidation of Sunday schools in one large school.
The Sunday school offers a basis for church federation. In the community
it is frequently possible for Sunday schools to be united and for the
advantages of this common teaching to be made even greater because all
the children of the various churches are in one body. The best
leadership and the best teachers are thus secured and the community
spirit is cultivated through the young people and more loosely attached
members of the community.
The older classes of the Sunday school on a basis of study of the Bible
should be organized for practical ends. The adult Bible class can be
made to have all the influence of the grange in the country community.
The fathers and mothers of the community may meet throughout the week
socially. They may undertake together the study of the economic life of
the community. Lecturers from the agricultural college, representatives
of the Play Ground Movement, of the county work of the Y. M. C. A., of
historical societies interested in the community's past and other
representatives of national movements, may be welcomed and heard by this
organized class, the basis of which is religious education.
What I am urging may be accomplished by any church in some measure,
however divided the community may be. It is the business of the
individual church which has a vision of the community as a whole to act
as if it were a federation of churches. Frequently ministers are in
favor of church federation, as if that process were an end in itself.
The writer believes that the individual church can accomplish the ends
of federation if the union of churches can do so. The best means for
effecting federation of churches is to practise the program of
federation until it shall come about.
The community made up in a degree of new families and the community in
which the newcomers are young men and women, children of the residents,
are bound to educate these invaders of the community, whether they come
from without or whether they come by "birthright membership," in the
spirit of benevolence. The giving of money to public uses is one of the
cherished social forces of our time. The country community is just
entering into the day of cash. The period of barter is over. The farmer
therefore needs in his ethical and his religious training, to have
definite culture as a philanthropist. The future of the farm-hand in
America is still very hopeful. The tenant farmer expects to be an owner.
The farmer's son believes himself to have a future. These hopes from
earliest years should be disciplined by the practise of giving. For this
end the church is a rarely well fitted means. The financial system of
the church must be made democratic. The custom of renting pews belonged
in the land-farmer period. The writer does not suggest that it be
abolished because it can often serve a more democratic purpose in its
mature forms under careful supervision than any substitute, but it is
all important that the country church be a training-school in the
consecration of money to the uses of the community and of the kingdom of
God.
For the average countryman the kingdom of God should be embodied in the
country community. This is not to say that his vision should be narrow.
On the contrary his vision is often of the spread-eagle sort. He
overlooks the opportunities for benevolence which are near at hand. He
believes in foreign missions sometimes, and contributes impulsively to
the support of men in China who are paid a better salary than the pastor
in his own community. He applauds the gifts of millionaires and of city
people generally to hospitals, but he ignores the ravages of disease in
his own community. The divine imperative is that the country community
be first organized, by those who live there, for local well-being. For
this, contributions of money are necessary and they must be made by all
in the community.
The question has been raised frequently whether an endowment is not
necessary for the country church. The writer began his ministry in a
country church which was generously endowed. He still believes in the
value of endowment for some country communities. Ex-President Eliot of
Harvard recently commended the principle of endowment to the New England
Country Church Association, as a solution of the rural problem.
President Butterfield of Massachusetts Agricultural College has
emphasized the same principle. It is quite likely that in the Eastern
States where the country community has been depleted by the departure of
an extraordinary number of families and individuals, an endowment would
be of value for the country church. One must not hold to a theoretic
opposition to such a method. The important thing is to provide a trained
pastor for the country community. In these Eastern communities a larger
proportion of the former members of the community have prospered than in
Western communities. Many of them are very rich. In these cases it is
but natural that an endowed church in the country community express the
ministry of the more prosperous citizen to his poorer brethren, but
everybody knows that these depleted communities--I will not say these
excessive fortunes--are among the most lamentable factors in American
life.
The endowment of the church, however, is a very poor apology for a bad
situation. It has but limited use, and the creation of a large fund to
be used in the country community necessitates careful supervision by men
of such business ability as are not usually found in a country
community. To remedy such conditions as those with which President
Eliot and President Butterfield are most familiar is a specific
problem. It is not the general situation throughout the United States.
The purpose of these chapters is to make plain the way by which the
average American community may escape depletion, may retain the
leadership of its best minds and may prosper in a democratic way. I am
interested more in training the country population for the future than
in mending the mistakes of the past. But I believe that for depleted
country communities in New England, New York and Pennsylvania an
endowment of the country church would in many instances be effective:
and for them alone.
Let the country church undertake its financial problem in a
business-like way. At the beginning of the year make a budget of all the
monies needed for the year's work. Face the issues of the year frankly.
Pay to the minister and to other employees of the church a sufficient
amount to provide them with needful things throughout the year. A living
wage is not enough. The minister especially needs a working salary. With
little variation throughout the country as a whole the minister in the
rural community should have in order to minister to his people, to
educate his children and to look forward without fear to old age, twelve
to fourteen hundred dollars a year and a house. Many country communities
have a more expensive standard, and there are a few in which less is
required. But in Southern States and in Western communities I have found
the conditions, created by the prices which prevail throughout the
country as a whole, at this standard.
When the budget of the year is prepared, including missionary and
benevolent gifts, it should be distributed by the officers through
consultation with all the members of the church, young and old, rich and
poor, in such way as to secure a gift from every one and to meet the
obligations of the church as a whole. For the moral values of the
situation the small gift of the poor and of the child are even more
important than the large gift of the well-to-do. For the securing of
these gifts the envelope system, especially the so-called duplex
envelope, is the best means which can be generally used by churches. It
is a method flexible enough to reach every member and it represents in
its duplex form the double motive of giving to the community itself and
to those larger national and missionary enterprises to which the country
should contribute.
The third method of developing the country community is recreative. I
mention it here for completeness of statement. Another chapter is
devoted to recreation in the country community. The amusements and
recreations of the country community are immersed in moral issues. The
ethical life of the community is the atmosphere in which social pleasure
is taken. Therefore the recreations of the community are to be provided
and supervised by those who would undertake to create a wholesome
community life. A maximum of provision and a minimum of supervision are
required. Country life is devoid of means for recreation. Some one must
provide it. Usually it is either neglected altogether, and the result is
dullness and monotony; or it is provided for a price, and the result is
an organized center of immorality. Recreation requires but little
supervision. The presence of older persons, and those of a humane
friendly spirit, is usually necessary to the games. These are based on
honor and with a few simple principles the young people and working
people of the community will organize their own play and find therein a
great benefit.
To summarize this chapter, the acute problem in many communities today
is the merging of the life of newcomers in the community into the
organized social life which is older and more settled. This task belongs
above all to the country church. Many of the detailed applications are
for the school to follow out, but the business of the church is to see
and to inspire. If the church is not democratic, the community will be
hopelessly divided. If the church welcomes the newcomer and finds him a
place, the community will be inspired with a democratic spirit. The task
of the church is indicated in the new prosperity of the country which
tends from the first to remove from the community those who prosper. The
church's business is to win to the community all who come into it and to
release from its hold as few as possible.
In a discussion of country life in a Tennessee college town the question
was asked of a professor of agriculture who was speaking about farm
tenantry, "What should the church do for the tenant farmer?" "Borrow
money for him and help him to buy land," said the professor.
Such a solution might be the church's task, but the example of England's
policy for Ireland shows that the professor commended a governmental
rather than a religious service. For it is found that the Irish
farmer--a tenant on land whereon his ancestors have for centuries been
tenants--when he secures the land in fee through the new policies of the
British Government, frequently deserts the country community, selling
his land to a neighbor. Some sections of Ireland are said to have a new
kind of small tenantry and a new sort of small landlord. The task of the
country community begins where the task of government leaves off. It is
to inspire the resident in the country with a vision, and to lay upon
him the imperative, of building up the country community out of the
newcomers, who enter it by birth or by migration.
FOOTNOTE:
[Footnote 31: "The Agrarian Changes in the Middle West," by J. B. Ross.]
X
CO-OPERATION
In contrast to other classes of the population country people have a
marked preference for individual action and an aversion to co-operative
effort. The causes of this are historical. In general these causes are
of the past and they are not a matter of persuasion. The American farmer
has not co-operated in the past because: first, the necessities of his
life made him independent and impatient of the sacrifices necessary in
co-operating with his fellows. We have still many influences of the
pioneer in modern life. So long as agriculture is solitary work and its
processes take a man away from his fellows, co-operation will be
retarded. So long as the countryman has to practise a variety of trades,
he will be emotional, and the social life of the country will be broken
up by feuds, divisions, separations and continued misunderstandings. No
mere education as to alleged right and wrong can plaster over the old
economy with new ethical standards. Until the loneliness and the emotion
are taken out of farming country people cannot co-operate.
A good part of the United States is still in the land farmer period. The
characteristic of the land farmer is his cultivation of group life. The
historical process by which this group life is broken up is
exploitation. Farmers whose lands have not been exploited and whose
group life has not suffered the undermining influence of exploitation
will not normally co-operate. I am convinced that in most farming
territories the loyalty of the countryman to his group is the second
reason for his refusal to co-operate. Again, this refusal of his is not
subject to persuasion. He is obeying an economic condition which shapes
his life and controls his action. Striking instances are furnished in
many regions of the amazing disloyalty of farmers to one another, and to
their own pledged word. These are to be explained by the type to which
the farmer in these sections conforms. We must not expect the land
farmer to obey the ethical standards of the husbandman.
A good instance of this conformity to type was furnished in the case of
meetings held in Louisiana and Western Mississippi among the farmers who
raise cotton. The occasion of the meetings was the approach of the boll
weevil to their districts. The attendance upon the meetings was large,
indeed universal. The situation was clearly understood and the speakers
secured from the farmers present a promise quite unanimous to refrain
from cultivating cotton for a year. The purpose of this was to meet the
boll weevil with a territory in which he would find no food. Thus his
march eastward across the cotton field would be arrested.
The farmers having made their promise and agreed heartily in the
proposal, adjourned. Weeks and months passed and the time approached for
planting cotton. Farmer after farmer, who had attended these meetings
and given his promise, privately decided that he would plant a cotton
crop and secretly expected that he would secure a larger price that year
because so many of his neighbors were to raise other crops. When the
full season for planting cotton had come it was discovered that so many
farmers had planted cotton that the plan of co-operation was a failure,
and the whole district went back to cotton, with full prospect of
assisting the boll weevil in his course toward the East. The reasons for
this action lie in the type of farmer who thus found it impossible to
co-operate. Each of these farmers regarded above all other things the
success of his own farm and his own family group. In contrast to this
interest no other claim, no exhortation and not even his word given in
public had any lasting influence upon his action.
The third element in the inability of country people to co-operate is
the ideal of level democratic equality which prevails in the country.
Where universal land-ownership has been the rule every countryman thinks
himself "as good as anybody else." So long as this ideal prevails, that
subjection of himself to another, and the controlling of his action by
the interests of the community, are impossible. The farmer cannot
co-operate when he thinks of social life in terms of pure democracy.
There must be a large sense of team work, a loyal and instinctive
obedience to leaders, a devoted spirit which looks for honest
leadership, before there can be co-operation. These things come not by
persuasion, but by experience. Co-operation is the act of a mature
people. Not until country people have passed through earlier stages and
discarded earlier ideals can the preacher and the organizer and the
teacher successfully inculcate a spirit of co-operation.
Country churches are highly representative in their present divided
condition. This multiplication of churches in the country is lamentable
chiefly because it registers the divided state of country life. It is
true that divided churches are religiously inefficient, but it is vastly
more important that divided churches are embodiments of what one country
minister calls "the tuberculosis of the American farmer, individualism."
It was natural for the pioneer to desire a religion in terms of a
message of personal salvation. Personality in his lonely life was the
noblest, indeed the only form of humanity known to him, therefore the
herald was his minister and emotion was his religion. It is very natural
for the land farmer to organize religion in terms of group life. His
churches were only handmaids of his household. They had but the
beginnings of social organization. They taught the ethics of home life,
of the separate farm and of a land-owning people. Obviously the church
for the pioneer and for the land farmer could be a very weak and
indifferent organization, but efficient for the religious needs of those
independent, self-reliant types of countrymen.
For these reasons in all parts of the country the pitiful story is heard
of divided communities. One need not recite it here. It usually is the
account of three hundred or four hundred people with five or six country
churches. At its worst there is a small community in which missionary
agencies are supporting ministers who do not average one hundred
possible families apiece in the community. The condition of Center Hall,
Pennsylvania, has been described in another chapter, in which there are
within a radius of four miles from a given point twenty-four country
churches. This community represents a condition of transition from the
land-farmer type to that of exploitation. Some of these churches are the
old churches of the land-owning resident farmers, but the most of them
are said to be the newer churches of tenants who have come into the
community. Our present concern is to recognize the relation of the
divided churches to the divided social life of the community. The
criticism of the country community must be made on an understanding of
the stage of development to which that community has attained. Whatever
is planned for the upbuilding of the country community must be planned
in harmony with the well-known facts of rural development.
Business life introduces into the community a new standard of values.
Cash and credit take the place of barter. The exchange in kind on which
originally the community depended comes to an end. Business life very
shortly induces combination. The whole of modern business presents a
spectacle of universal combination and co-operation. The farmer who is
most conservative is surrounded on all sides by the aggressive forces of
business. Combined in their own interest they compete with him on
unequal terms. He stands alone and they stand combined.
Americans are looking with growing interest on the experience of Denmark
where a multitude of co-operative associations represent the spirit of
the people. This spirit has been deliberately cultivated in the land for
forty years. It is the universal testimony of observers that the
prosperity of Denmark is dependent on these co-operative agencies and
upon this united spirit. The exodus from the country has been arrested,
agriculture has been made a desirable occupation, profitable for the
farmer and most probable for the state, and the people as a whole have
taken front rank in social and economic welfare. Essential to this
constructive period of Denmark's life is co-operation.[32]
In Sir Horace Plunkett's recent book, "The Rural Life Problem in The
United States," he develops this principle clearly. He says that in the
organization of country life in Ireland it was necessary to go into the
very heart of the people's experience and organize their economic and
social processes in forms of co-operation.
"When farmers combine, it is a combination not of money only, but of
personal effort in relation to the entire business. In a co-operative
creamery for example, the chief contribution of a shareholder is in
milk; in a co-operative elevator, corn; in other cases it may be fruit
or vegetables, or a variety of material things rather than cash. But it
is, most of all, a combination of neighbors within an area small enough
to allow of all the members meeting frequently at the business center.
As the system develops, the local associations are federated for larger
business transactions, but these are governed by delegates carefully
chosen by the members of the constituent bodies. The object of such
associations is primarily, not to declare a dividend, but rather to
improve the conditions of the industry for the members.
"It is recognized that the poor man's co-operation is as important as
the rich man's subscription. 'One man, one vote,' is the almost
universal principle in co-operative bodies.
"The distinction between the capitalistic basis of joint stock
organization and the more human character of the co-operative system is
fundamentally important.
"In this matter I am here speaking from practical experience in Ireland.
Twenty years ago the pioneers of our rural life movement found it
necessary to concentrate their efforts upon the reorganization of the
farmer's business.
"1. We began with the dairying industry, and already half the export of
Irish butter comes from the co-operative societies we established.
"2. Organized bodies of farmers are learning to purchase their
agricultural requirements intelligently and economically.
"3. They are also beginning to adopt the methods of the organized
foreign farmer in controlling the sale of their butter, eggs and poultry
in the British markets.