SOME RURAL PROBLEMS
There are many mysteries of marriage, quite unanticipated by the bachelor
before he changes his state. Not the least of them is the new range
of social relations and impulses which follow a happy union. I do not
mean social relations with a capital S. About such I know little and
care less. Presumably marriage may bring them, also, into the life of a
man who chooses the wrong wife. In fact, Stella and I have seen more
than one case of it in Bentford, where we dwell near enough to the
fringes of Society to observe the parasitic aspirations of several ladies
with more fortune than "position." Mrs. Eckstrom, we have discovered
since her call, is such a one. We, of course, were of no use to her,
and she had not troubled us since, though two gold fish did arrive that
night, as I have told. We are grateful for Antony and Cleopatra.
No, what I mean by social relations and impulses are the opportunities
for service and the impulses to jump in and help others, which matrimony
discloses and breeds. Who can say why this is so? Who can say why the
bachelor is generally negatively--if not actively--selfish, while the
same man when he has achieved a good wife, opened a house of his own,
begun to employ labour directly instead of through the medium of a club
or bachelor apartment hotel, is suddenly aware of wrong conditions
in the world about him and a new desire to help set them right? It
cannot entirely be due to the woman, for very often her maiden life has
been as barren of social service as his own. It is inherent in the state
of matrimony, and to me it seems one of the glories of that state.
Those couples who have not felt it, I think, have been but sterilely
mated, though they have reproduced their kind never so many times.
At any rate, it was not long after the Eckstrom invasion that Stella and
I went to play golf, carrying a load of lettuce heads and cauliflowers
to market on our way. As all Bert's cauliflowers are sold in bulk to a
New York commission merchant, I found I had the local market pretty
much to myself, and was getting 15 cents a head for my plants. Mike
dearly loved cauliflowers, and babied ours as a flower gardener babies
his hybrid tea roses. They were splendid heads, and were bringing me in a
dollar a day or more. I had visions of greatly increasing my output
another season, for I could easily supply the two hotels as well.
We left our farm wagon in the church horse-sheds and went down to the
links. There was a crowd of caddies of all ages sitting on the benches
reserved for them, and half a dozen came rushing toward us. I chose
a large boy, because I am one of those idiots who carries around at
least seven more clubs than he ever uses, and Stella picked a smaller boy
because she liked his face. As golf is not an engrossing game when you
are playing with your wife, and she's a beginner into the bargain
(matrimony has its drawbacks, too!) we fell to talking with our caddies.
"You must be in the high school, eh?" said I to mine.
"I went last year," he replied, "but I ain't goin' no more. Goin'
to work."
"Work at your age? What are you going to do?" asked Stella.
"I dunno--somethin'," he answered.
"Why don't you keep on at school?" I said.
"Aw, what's the use?" said he. "They don't learn you
nothin'--algebra and English and stuff like that."
"A little English wouldn't hurt you at all, young man," said Stella.
"You don't like to study, do you?"
The boy looked sheepish, but admitted that he didn't.
"What do you like to do?" I asked. "You don't like to caddy very
well, because you don't keep your eye on the ball, and you've made
the little fellow take out the pin on every hole so far."
The boy flushed at this, and went up to the next pin himself.
"I'd like to work in a garden," he said, as we were walking to the
next tee.
"You want to be a gardener, eh?" said I. "Has anybody ever taught you
how to start a hotbed?"
"No, sir."
"Ever run a wheel hoe?"
"No, sir."
"Would you know what date to plant early peas, and corn, and lima
beans?"
"No, sir."
"Ever graft an apple tree?"
"No, sir."
"Well, you're not very well fitted to take a job as a gardener yet,
are you?" said I.
He admitted that he wasn't.
"Would you keep on going to school if they taught you how to be a
gardener?" asked Stella, carrying on the line of questioning.
"You bet," he replied. "But, gee! they don't teach nothin' like
that. Only bookkeepin' and typewritin', and then you have to go away
to a business college somewhere before you can get a job."
"We seem to have stumbled on a civic problem," I remarked to my wife
as we teed up. "I don't believe an educational survey would do this
town any harm."
"And the finger of destiny points to us?" she smiled.
"Probably," said I. "You'd hardly expect the Eckstroms to tackle the
job!"
That night we began by consulting Bert. Bert is one of the best men I
know, and he applies the latest methods to growing cauliflowers; but
he's a New England farmer, none the less, and he has the true "rural
mind."
"'Vocational education!'" he exclaimed. "We got more education than
we kin afford now. Taxes are way up, an' the school appropriation's
the biggest one we have--$19,000, to only $7,000 for the roads! And then
you talk about more! We got along pretty well without it so far."
"Have you, though?" said Stella. "You've got a high school, but how
many boys have you got in it?"
"I dunno," said Bert.
"That's it. You don't know. You don't know anything about what your
schools are doing. You must be on the school committee!"
Bert grinned at this. "No, I ain't," he said, "but I guess I'm ez
good ez them that are. They do say Buckstone--you know, the man who runs
the meat market--engages teachers on their looks."
"Not a bad idea," said Stella; "looks mean a lot to children."
"Not the kind Buckie's after, I reckon," said Bert. "But you two go
run your farm an' don't worry about this town. We'll git along."
Bert spoke good naturedly, but we felt, none the less, as if he were
rebuking us.
"He thinks we are butting in," said Stella, as we walked home. "I
suppose you have to live in a New England town thirty years before you
are really a citizen. Well, I'm getting my mad up. Let's butt!"
We next consulted Mrs. Pillig on the subject, and found her as stiffly
opposed to vocational education as Bert, but on entirely different
grounds.
"I don't want my boy educated as if he wa'n't as good as anybody
else's," she said. "Just because I'm poor is no reason why my boy
shouldn't be fitted to go to college same as young Carl Swain."
Carl Swain was the son of the village bank president. He, I happened to
know, had been obliged to go to Phillips Andover for a year after his
graduation from our high school before he could get into college.
"In the first place," I answered, "your high school doesn't fit for
college now. In the second place, is Peter going to college?"
"Of course he ain't," said Mrs. Pillig.
"Then why not educate him in some way that will really fit him to make
a better living, and be a better man?" said Stella.
"I want he should have what the rest have," the mother stoutly
maintained.
Stella shook her head. "It's hopeless," she whispered.
I mentioned the matter next to Mr. Swain, when I was in the bank. He,
too, was a true New Englander, of a different class from Bert, but with
the fundamental conservatism--to give it the pleasantest name possible.
"There's too much fol-de-rol in the school now," he said. "If they'd
just try to teach 'em Greek and Latin and the things you need for a
liberal education and the college entrance examinations, I wouldn't
have had to send my boy to Andover."
"Your boy, yes," I answered. "How many other boys and girls in his
class are going to college?"
"Well, there's another one," he replied.
"Out of a class of how many?"
"Twenty," said he.
"Hm--you want to make your school entirely for the 10 per cent., then?"
He had no very adequate reply, and I departed, wondering anew at
human selfishness. My next encounter was with the rector. He didn't
believe in vocational education, either. He had one of those vague
and paradoxically commendable though entirely fallacious reasons for his
opposition which are almost the hardest to combat, because they are
grounded in the fetish of the old "humanist" curriculum (which when
it originated was strictly vocational). He didn't believe that trade
instruction educated. There was no "culture" in it. I left him,
wondering if Matthew Arnold hadn't done as much harm as good in the
world.
After that, Stella and I hunted up the superintendent of schools. We
brought him and his wife over to dinner, and sat in the orchard
afterward, talking. He was a pleasant man, who seemed to take a
grateful interest in our enthusiasm, but supplied no hope.
"Yes," he said, "there are seventy-one girls and eleven boys in the
high school. It ought to be plain that something is wrong. But you are
in the Town Meeting belt here, Mr. Upton, and you've got to get your
arguments through the skulls of every voter in the place before we can
have any money to work with. The Town Meeting is your truest democracy,
they say. Perhaps that is why Germany has so much better schools than
we do in rural New England!"
I didn't quite believe him then, but I do now. I have seen a Bentford
Town Meeting! Stella and I made a survey of the town during the ensuing
autumn and winter, with the aid of the Town Clerk and the list of
voters. As I have said, there are no manufactories of any sort in
Bentford. It is exclusively a residence village, with a considerable
summer population of wealthy householders who pay the great bulk of our
taxes, and a considerable outlying rural population engaged (however
desultorily) in agriculture. Our figures showed that out of a total
voting population of six hundred and one males, one hundred and twenty
were directly employed in some capacity as gardeners or caretakers on
the estates of others, one hundred and forty were at least part time
farmers, though they worked on the roads and did other jobs of a
similar nature when they could, and at least fifty more were engaged in
manual labour in some way connected with the soil or with the roads
or trees. Three hundred and ten out of a total of six hundred and
one, then, of the adult males of Bentford, were in a position to
benefit by agricultural education--a truly tremendous proportion. At the
same time we learned that exactly eighteen boys had gone to higher
institutions of learning from the village in the past decade, and a
slightly greater number of girls--most of the latter to normal school.
It was with such overwhelming figures as these, backed up by the promise
of state aid for an approved agricultural course, which would reduce the
expenses of the town to $500 a year, that the superintendent of schools
and I, supported by a few members of the Grange, went before the town
at the annual Town Meeting in March, and asked for an appropriation.
Our article in the warrant was laid on the table. The appropriation
committee refused to endorse it. The town was too poor. It was going to
cost $9,000 for roads that year.
This would be rather amusing if it weren't, as Stella points out, so
terribly tragic. The roads cost us $9,000 not alone because we do not
employ a road superintendent, and don't know how to build them
right, still employing the ancient American method of scraping back
the gutters to crown the road anew every spring (and this soil,
furthermore, is now so saturated with oil that it makes a pudding
whenever there is a heavy frost), but because a great deal of the money
evaporates in petty graft. I had supposed that Tammany Hall was the great
grafting institution till I moved to a New England small town. There
I learned Tammany Hall was, relatively, a mere child. I've told how
selectman Morrissy scraped my lawn--admitting I was party to the
crime. Since then I have learned how this same Morrissy sold gravel to
the town at 50 cents a load, from a gravel bed the town already owned,
and, as selectman, O. K'd his own bill! I have seen how our "honest
farmers" rush to gobble their share of that road appropriation as soon
as Town Meeting is over, hauling gravel where a good deal of the time
it isn't needed, if the roads are properly made, getting their teams
on the job about an hour after contract time and taking them home at
night an hour early, and seeing to it that all of the $9,000 is spent
before July, so there is nothing to repair roads with in the autumn.
Of course some roads do have to be repaired in the autumn, so the
selectmen used to overdraw the appropriation, and the town was so
much the poorer, and couldn't afford an extra $500 to educate its
children properly. The law has at least stopped the overdraft, but we
still lack the $500.
If an honest selectman gets into office and tries to let out a road
contract to a scientific builder, a storm of protest goes up that he is
taking away the bread from town labour, and the next year he is so
snowed under at the polls that you never hear of him again. He is
snowed under with equal effectiveness if he tries to keep town labour
up to contract, or tries to take away the vicious drugstore liquor
license. Fifty per cent. of our working population are grafters, even
when they don't know it. Twenty-five per cent. of our people--the
richest taxpayers, who are summer residents--don't care anyhow, so
long as they can get men to look after their estates. Also, these
rich men are grafters, too, of the worst kind, because they never declare
a half of their taxable personal property. Those of us who are left
are, as the expressive phrase goes, "up against it."
That is what I told Stella as we came home from our first Town Meeting. I
was blue, despondent, ready to give up.
"Twenty-five per cent. who really cared," said she, "could reform the
universe. Reform is like the dictionary--it takes infinite patience. The
first thing is to get the 25 per cent. together."
"You're right!" I cried, taking heart again. "There's plenty of
work for our hands ahead! They think in Bentford that we are mere
upstarts because we've lived here only a year or two. But that is just
why we can see so many things which must be altered. We've got to keep
our batteries on the firing line. We've got plenty of work besides
getting these hotbeds ready for the spring planting and uncovering
our perennials."
We had reached home, and, as I concluded, we were standing by the
woodshed contemplating the new hotbed sashes which had not been used the
spring before.
It was those sashes which gave me the idea of school gardens, I think. If
we couldn't have real vocational instruction, at least we might have
school gardens, with volunteer instruction and prizes awarded, perhaps,
by the Grange. I sent away that evening for bulletins on the subject,
and presently took the matter up with the school superintendent and
the master of the Grange. Results speedily followed. I discovered that,
after all, what our town chiefly lacked (and, inferentially, what
similar towns chiefly lack) was a spirit of cooperation among those
working for improvement. The selectmen cheerfully gave the use of a
piece of town land for the gardens. One of our farmers cheerfully
volunteered to plough it. The Grange voted small money prizes as an
incentive to the children. And two gardeners on one of the large
estates (one of them an Englishman, at that, who was not a citizen)
volunteered to come down to the gardens on alternate days, at five
o'clock, and give instruction. Finally, our Congressman from the
district sent quantities of government seeds, and more were donated
by one of the local storekeepers. In two weeks we had a piece of land,
nicely ploughed and harrowed, divided into more than twenty little
squares, and in each square you could see of an afternoon a small boy
toiling. We had the beginnings of vocational instruction. It had been
entirely accomplished by voluntary cooperation among the minority
who saw the need for it.
I was talking this over one day with our new selectman, an
Irish-American who had practically grown up into the management of one
of the large estates, where he had a perfectly free hand, and his natural
strength of character had been developed by responsibility.
"The trouble is," he said, "that we organize for political parties,
for personal ends, for the election of individuals, but we don't
organize for the town. I believe we could start a Town Club, say of
twenty-five or fifty men, with the sole object of talking over what
the town needs, and inaugurating civic movements. That club would bring
together forces that are now scattered and helpless, and put the weight
of numbers behind them. There would be no politics in such a club.
It would be for the town, not for a party."
He carried out his idea, too, and the Bentford Town Club was the result.
It meets now once every month, and it gives voice to the hitherto
scattered and ineffectual minority.
It was this same selectman who altered some of my ideas about grafting. I
remarked one day that the town didn't get more than 60 cents' worth
of labour for every dollar it spent, and he answered: "Well, if we
didn't pay some of those men $2 a day to shovel gravel on the roads, or
to break out the snowdrifts in winter, we'd have to pay for their keep
in some other way. They would be 'on the town.'"
"On the town!" The phrase haunted me. I walked home past the golf
links, where comfortable males in knickerbockers were losing 75-cent
balls, past two estates that cost a hundred thousand dollars apiece,
past the groggy signpost which pointed to Albany and Twin Fires, and
saw my own pleasant acres, with the white house above the orchard
slope, the ghost of Rome in roses marching across the sundial lawn,
the fertile tillage beyond. Far off in every direction stretched the
green countryside to the ring of hills. Why should anybody, in such a
pleasant land, be "on the town?" Why should some of us own acres
upon acres of this land and others own nothing? None of us made the
land. None of us cleared it, won it from the wilderness. If any white
men had a right to it to-day, surely they would be the descendants
of the original pioneers. Yet one of those descendants now did our
washing, and owned but a scrubby acre of the great tract which had once
stood in her ancestor's name. Why had the acres slipped away in the
intervening generations? In that case, I knew. The land had gone to pay
for the liquor which had devastated the stock. In other cases, no
doubt, a similar cause could be found. Then, too, in many cases the
best blood of the families had gone away to feed the cities--to make
New York great. The weaker blood had remained behind, not to mingle
with fresh blood, but to cross too often with its own strain, till
something perilously close to degeneracy resulted.
"On the town!" The town had once been a community of hardy pioneers,
all firm in the iron faith of Calvin and Jonathan Edwards, all
independent and self-respecting, even though they did call themselves
"poor worms" on the Sabbath. The faith and the independence alike were
gone. They bled the town for little jobs, badly done, to keep out of
the poorhouse. The rugged pioneer community had become, I suddenly
saw, a rural backwater. The great tide of agricultural prosperity had
swept on to the West; industrial prosperity had withdrawn into the
cities. We, in rural New England, were entering the twentieth century
with a new problem on our hands.
And I felt utterly helpless to solve it. But it has never since then
ceased to be troublesome in the background of my consciousness, and when
I see the road work being done by "town labour," I think of what that
means; I think of the farms abandoned to summer estates or weeds, the
terrible toll of whiskey and cider, the price the city has exacted of the
country, the pitiful end of these my brothers of the Pilgrim breed. I
reflect that even in Twin Fires we cannot escape the terrible problems of
the modern world. This is the leaden lining to that silver cloud which
floats in the blue above our dwelling.