agriculture. This is not because domestic subjects belong in a college
of agriculture more than elsewhere, but only that these colleges see the
problem, and most general colleges or universities have not seen it. The
college of agriculture, if it is highly developed, represents a
civilization rather than a series of subjects; and it cannot omit the
home-making phase if it meets its obligation to the society that it
represents (page 64).
If the customary subjects in a college of agriculture are organized and
designed to train a man for efficiency in country life and to develop
his outlook, so also is a department of home economics to train a woman
for efficiency and to develop her outlook to life.
Home economics is not one "department" or subject, in the sense in which
dairying or entomology or plant-breeding is a department. It is not a
single specialty. It stands for the whole round of woman's work and
place. Many technical or educational departments will grow out of it as
time goes on. That is, it will be broken up into its integral parts, and
it will then cease to be an administrative department of an educational
institution; and very likely we shall lose the terms "home economics,"
"household economics," "domestic science," and the rest.
I would not limit the entrance of women into any courses in a college of
agriculture; on the contrary, I want all courses open to them freely and
on equal terms with men; but the subjects that are arranged under the
general head of home economics are her special field and sphere. On the
other hand, I do not want to limit the attendance of men in courses of
home economics; in fact, I think it will be found that an increasing
number of men desire to take these subjects as the work develops, and
this will be best for society in general.
Furthermore, I do not conceive it to be essential that all teachers in
home economic subjects shall be women; nor, on the other hand, do I
think it is essential that all teachers in the other series of
departments shall be men. The person who is best qualified to teach the
subject should be the one who teaches it, whether man or woman.
As rapidly as colleges and universities come to represent society and to
develop in all students a philosophy of life, the home-making units will
of necessity take their place with other units.
HOW SHALL WE SECURE COMMUNITY LIFE IN THE OPEN COUNTRY?
It is generally agreed that one of the greatest insufficiencies in
country life is its lack of organization or cohesion, both in a social
and economic way. Country people are separated both because of the
distances between their properties, and also because they own their land
and are largely confined to its sphere of activities. There is a general
absence of such common feeling as would cause them to act together
unitedly and quickly on questions that concern the whole community, or
on matters of public moment.
This lack of united action cannot be overcome by any single or brief
process, but as one result of a general redirection of rural effort and
the stimulating of a new or different point of view toward life. It will
come as a result of a quickened agricultural life rather than as an
effect of any direct plan or propaganda. When the rural social sense is
thoroughly established, we shall be in a new epoch of rural
civilization.
It is now the habit to say that this desired rural life must be
coöperative. A society that is fully coöperative in all ways is one from
which the present basis of competition is eliminated. I think that no
one intends, however, in the common discussion of coöperation to take
sides on the theoretical question as to whether society in the end will
be coöperative or competitive; these persons only mean that coöperative
association is often the best means to secure a given result and that
such association may exert great educational influence on the
coöperators.
Theoretically, the coöperative organization of society may be the
better. Practically, a capitalistic organization may be better: it
quickly recognizes merit and leadership; but if it is better, it is so
only when it is very carefully safeguarded.
It cannot be contended that a coöperative organization is correct
because the majority rules. Majorities show only what the people want,
not necessarily what is best. Minorities are much more likely to be
right, because thinking men and fundamental students are relatively few;
yet it may be the best practice, in common affairs, to let the majority
have its way, for this provides the best means of education.
It will now be interesting to try to picture to ourselves some of the
particular means by which social connection in the open country may be
brought about. It is commonly, but I think erroneously, thought that
community life necessarily means a living together in centers or
villages. I conceive, on the contrary, that it is possible to develop a
very effective community mind whilst the persons still remain on their
farms. In this day of rapid communication, transportation, and spread of
intelligence, the necessity of mere physical contiguity has partly
passed away.
That is, "isolation," as the city man conceives of it, is not
necessarily a bar to community feeling. The farmer does not think in
terms of compact neighborhoods, trolley cars, and picture shows. The
country is not "lonely" to him, as it is to a city man. He does not
search for amusement at night.
_Hamlet life._
It is said that the American farmer must live in hamlets, as does the
European peasant. The hamlet system that exists in parts of Europe
represents the result of an historical condition. It is the product of a
long line of social evolution, during which time the persons who have
worked the land have been peasants, and to a greater or less extent have
not owned the land that they have worked.
Some persons fear that the American farmer is drifting toward peasantry.
This notion has no doubt arisen from the fact that in certain places the
man who works the land is driven to great extremity of poverty, and he
remains uneducated and undeveloped; but ignorance and poverty do not
constitute peasantry. The peasanthood of the Old World is a social caste
or class, and is in part a remnant of feudal government, of religious
subjugation, and of the old necessity of protection. The present day is
characterized by the rise of the people on the land; this movement is a
part of the general rise of the common people (or the proletariat). If
popular education, popular rights, and the general extension of means of
communication signify anything, it is that we necessarily are developing
away from a condition of peasantry rather than toward it, however much
degradation or unsuccess there may be in certain regions or how much
inadjustment there may be in the process (page 129).
In contradistinction to the exclusive hamlet system of living together,
I would emphasize the necessity that a first-rate good man must live on
the farm if he is to make the most of it. Farming by proxy or by any
absentee method is just as inefficient and as disastrous in the long run
as the doing of any other business by proxy; in fact, it is likely to be
even more disastrous in the end because it usually results in the
depletion of the fertility of the land, or in the using up of the
capital stock; and this becomes a national disaster. I hold that it is
essential that the very best kind of people live actually on the land.
The business is conducted on the land. The crops are there. The
live-stock is there. The machinery is there. All the investment is in
the place itself. If this business is to be most effective, a good man
must constantly be with it and manage it. A farm is not like a store or
a factory, that is shut up at night and on Sunday.
The more difficult and complex the farming business becomes, the greater
will be the necessity that a good man remain with it.
We must remember also that if the landowner or the farmer lives in a
village or hamlet and another man lives on his farm, a social division
at once results, and we have a stratification into two classes of
society; and this works directly against any community of interest. It
is not likely that the farmer who has retired to town and the hired man
who works his farm under orders will develop any very close personal
relation. The farmer becomes an extraneous element injected into the
town, and has little interest in its welfare, and he has taken his
personality, enterprise, and influence out of the country. He is in a
very real sense "a man without a country." The increase of his living
expenses in town is likely to cause him to raise the rent on his farm,
or, if the tenant works for wages, to reduce the improvements on the
place to the lowest extent compatible with profit. We need above all
things to produce such a rural condition as will satisfy the farmer to
live permanently in the country rather than to move to town when the
farm has given him a competence.
I am not to be understood as saying that farmers ought never to live in
town. There will always be shifting both ways between town and country.
In some cases, small-area farming develops around a village; or a
village grows up because the farms are small and are intensively
handled. In irrigation regions, the whole community may be practically a
hamlet or village. In parts of the Eastern states, small farmers
sometimes live in the village and go to the farm each day, to work it
themselves. But all these are special adaptations, and do not
constitute a broad agricultural system.
In time we probably shall develop a new kind of rural settlement, one
that will be the result of coöperative units or organizations, and not a
consolidation about the present kinds of business places; but it is a
question whether these will be villages or hamlets in the sense in which
we now use these words.
_The category of agencies._
My position, therefore, is that we must evolve our social rural
community directly from the land itself, and mostly by means of the
resident forces that now are there.
This being our proposition, it is then necessary to discover whether,
given permanent residence on pieces of land, it is still possible to
develop anything like a community sense. I do not now propose to discuss
this question at any length, but merely to call attention to a few ways
in which I think the neighborhood life of the open country may be very
distinctly improved.
In this discussion, I purposely omit reference to public utilities and
governmental action, because they are outside my present range. The
farmer will share with all the people any needful improvement that may
be made in regulation of transportation and transportation rates, in
control of corporations, in equalizing of taxation, in providing new
means of credit, in extending means of communication, in revising
tariffs, in reforming the currency, and in perfecting the mail service.
To work out the means of neighborhood coöperation, there should be
sufficient and attractive meeting places. The rural schoolhouse is
seldom adapted to this purpose. The Grange hall does not represent all
the people. The church is not a public institution. Libraries are yet
insufficient. Town halls are few, and usually as unattractive as
possible. There is now considerable discussion of community halls.
Several of them have been built in different parts of the country to
meet the new needs, and the practice should grow.
1. The mere _increase of population_ will necessarily bring people
closer together, and by that much it will tend to social solidarity.
2. The natural _dividing up of large farms_, which is coming both as a
result of the extension of population and from the failure of certain
very large estates to be profitable, will also bring country people
closer together. The so-called "bonanza farms" are unwieldy and
ineffective economic units; and many farmers are "land poor."
3. We shall also _assemble farms_. The increasing population on the land
will not always result in smaller farms. Most of the richer and more
profitable lands will gradually be divided because, with our increased
knowledge and skill, persons can make a living from smaller areas. The
remoter and less productive lands will naturally be combined into larger
farm areas, however, because a large proportion of such lands cannot
make a sufficient profit, when divided into ordinary farm areas, to
support and educate a present-day family (page 38). Contiguous areas of
the better lands will be combined with them, in order to make a good
business unit. As several farms come together under one general
ownership, this owner will naturally gather about him a considerable
population to work his lands.
The probability is that, under thoroughly skillful single management, a
given area of remote or low-productive lands will sustain a larger
population than they are now able to sustain under the many indifferent
or incompetent ownerships. It is to be hoped that some of these
amalgamated areas will develop a share-working or associative farming of
a kind that is now practically unknown.
4. The _re-creative life_ of the country community greatly needs to be
stimulated. Not only games and recreation days need to be encouraged,
but the spirit of release from continuous and deadening toil must be
encouraged. The country population needs to be livened up. This will
come about through the extension of education and the work of ministers,
teachers, and organizations. All persons can come together on a
recreation basis (pp. 173, 211).
The good farmer will have one day a week for recreation, vacation, and
study.
5. _Local politics_ ought to further the entire neighborhood life,
rather than to divide the community into hostile camps. All movements,
as direct nominations, that stimulate local initiative and develop the
sense of responsibility in the people will help toward this end.
6. _Rural government_ is commonly ineffective. It needs awakening by men
and women who have arrived at some degree of mastery over their
conditions. We talk much of the need of improving municipal government,
but very little about rural government; yet government in rural
communities is inert and dead, as compared with what it might be, and
there is probably as much machine politics in it, in proportion to the
opportunities, as in city government. Very much of the lack of gumption
in the open country is due to the want of a perfectly free and able
administration of the public affairs.[3]
[3] See "The Training of Farmers," pp. 26-28, and "The State and the
Farmer," p. 125.
The whole political organization of rural communities needs new
attention, and perhaps radical overhauling. As I write these sentences,
I have before me a newspaper in which a progressive surgeon expresses
his opinion (which he has verified for me) on the question of
supervision of health in a rural county in an Eastern state. He found
the statistics too inaccurate and too indefinite to enable him to draw
exact conclusions, but these are approximately the facts:
"No township seems to have deliberately paid its health officer, and but
one town deliberately paid its poor physician. The others paid various
bills for 'quarantine' and 'fumigating' and 'fees' and other misleading
items. There was no way in which to distinguish between the care of the
poor and the sick-poor except to guess and to figure on what I happened
to know about. A----, the richest and largest township, has no health
officers, and spent $200 for the poor in a population of 4000 people
living in an area of 93 square miles. B----, the poorest township, with
a population of 1000, and an area of 36 square miles, paid her health
officer $28 and her poor physician $23.
"One township has 2170 inhabitants living in 51 square miles of
territory, worth one and one-eighth million dollars. Its supervisor is
paid $352.95 a year for a few days' work; its officers are paid $612.95.
It costs $274.79 each year to elect these officers, and I understand
each township is to spend about $5000 for good roads. The health officer
that cares for these 2000 people over 51 miles of territory gets $42.53
a year, and the poor physician $34; while the sick-poor get helped to
the munificent sum of $59.36, or two and one-half cents from each
citizen. The health officers get almost exactly two cents a head for
caring for the inhabitants over 51 square miles of land. The supervisor
gets out of each inhabitant seventeen cents a year, the officers get
thirty cents, while the sick-poor take from each citizen almost three
cents. The discrepancy is too glaring to need comment. A community
assessed a million dollars and probably worth two millions spends $40 a
year on public health, and $60 a year on one-sixteenth of its population
for sickness."
The physician proposes a county commission to take the place of the
board of supervisors. He declares that the members of the board have
outgrown their usefulness. "They should be junked along with other
stagecoaches and a nice, new 60 h. p. county commission put in their
place. The fact is that the system is wrong. Our 'government' is a
survival of early times, and our science is up to date. They do not fit.
You cannot expect supervisors who were useful in the time of Adam, when
there were no cities, no problems, no roads, to serve in the twentieth
century with its surgical treatment of degenerates, its germs and
prophylactics, its preventive medicine and its scientific spirit.
Supervisors could look after noxious plants and animals in the old days,
and they could paper the court-house and eat fat dinners at the
poor-house. They did fairly well at settling line fences, drinking sweet
cider, and blarneying with insurgents. But they are out of place when
it is a question of constructing roads of macadam, of building a
tuberculosis hospital for an $18,000,000 county, and especially they are
out of place when it is a question of dozens of defectives in the jails
and thousands outside who ought to be in hospitals."
7. A _community program for health_[4] is much needed. The farmer lives
by himself in his own house, on his own place. If a disease arises in
his neighbor's family, it is not likely to spread to his family.
Therefore, disease has seemed to him to be a personal rather than a
neighborhood matter. There is the greatest need that the farmer possess
a community sense in respect to disease and sanitary conditions. If the
city is the center of enlightenment, it should help the country to get
hold of this problem.
[4] Another discussion of rural health will be found in my "Training
of Farmers," pp. 46-68. The Century Co.
We should have a thoroughgoing system of health supervision and
inspection for the open country as well as in the city. Health
inspection should run out from the cities and towns into all the
adjoining regions, maintaining proper connections with state departments
of health. It should be continuous. It should include inspection of
animals as well as of human beings. In other words, the whole region is
a unit, one part depending on the other. The remarks of the physician,
just quoted, indicate how great is the need of an organized health
supervision for country communities.
We need meat inspection laws for meat killed and sold within the states,
to supplement the inter-state law. We need community slaughter-houses in
which all slaughtering of animals shall be under proper inspection. We
need state milk inspection programs. It is not right that any large city
should be compelled to inspect the milk throughout the state in order to
protect itself. It is not right to the farming districts that such
inspection should center in the city.
We must not assume that the farmer is specially guilty of sanitary
faults. There are many such shortcomings in the open country, and I
accept them without apology; but I can match them every one in city
conditions. The fact is that the whole people has not yet risen to an
appreciation of thoroughly sanitary conditions, and we cannot say that
this deficiency is the special mark of any one class of our population.
Persons ride along the country roads and see repulsive barn-yards,
glaring manure piles, untidy back-yards, and at once make remarks about
them. All these things are relegated to the rear in towns and cities and
are not so visible, but they exist there.
I know that there are very filthy stables in the country districts, but
I have never known worse stable conditions than I have seen in cities
and towns. All progress in these directions must come slowly, and we
must remember that it is expensive to rebuild and reorganize a stable.
No doubt one of the reasons for the high cost of living is the demand of
the people that pure-food laws shall be enacted and enforced, for this
all adds to the cost of food supplies; similarly, we must expect a
betterment in conditions of stabling to result in increased price of
dairy products. In the cost of living we must figure the expense of
having clean and pure food.
The farmer is much criticized for polluting streams; but when the farmer
pollutes one stream occasionally, a city will pollute a whole system of
streams continually. One of the greatest sins of society is the
wholesale befoulment of streams, lakes, and water-courses. I do not see
how we can expect to be called a civilized people until we have taken
care of our refuse without using it to fill up ponds and lakes, and to
corrupt the free water supplies of the earth.
If the countryman has been ignorant of sanitary conditions, we must
remember that his ideas are largely such as he has derived from
teachers, physicians, and others.
We cannot expect a man to develop within himself enough community pride
and altruism to compel him to go to great expense for the benefit of the
public; but he will gladly contribute his part to a public program.
8. _Local factories and industries_ of whatever kind tend to develop
community pride and effectiveness. Creameries have had a marked effect
in this way in many places, giving the community or locality a reason
for existence and a pride in itself that it never had before, or at
least that it had not enjoyed since the passing out of the small
factories. There is much need of local industries in the open country,
whether they are distinctly agricultural or otherwise, not only for the
purpose of providing additional employment for country people but to
direct the flow of capital and enterprise into the country and to
stimulate local interest of all kinds. It is not by any means essential
that all the new life in country neighborhoods should be primarily
agricultural.
Much has been said of late about the necessity of introducing the
handicrafts in the open country in winter with the idea of providing
work for farm people during that season. I do not look for any great
extension of this idea in real agricultural sections, and for the
following reasons: (1) because as better agriculture develops, the
farms will of themselves employ their help more continuously. Modern
diversified and intensive farming brings about this result. The
present-day dairying employs men continuously. The fruit-grower needs
help in winter for pruning and spraying. Live-stock men need help in
feeding and caring for the animals. Modern floriculture and
vegetable-gardening are likely to run the year round. (2) The conditions
of American country life are such that skilled handicraft has not arisen
amongst the rural people, and we cannot expect that it will arise.
Skilled artisanship of this kind is not the growth of a generation, nor
is it a result of the utilization of merely a few weeks or months of
time. (3) It is very doubtful whether such handicrafts as are often
mentioned could compete in the markets with the goods produced by
consolidated factories, or could find a sufficient patronage of people
interested in this kind of handicraft products.