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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Rural Life Problem of the United States, by
+Horace Curzon Plunkett
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Rural Life Problem of the United States
+       Notes of an Irish Observer
+
+Author: Horace Curzon Plunkett
+
+Release Date: November 21, 2008 [EBook #27305]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RURAL LIFE PROBLEM OF U.S. ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Tom Roch, Martin Pettit and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images produced by Core Historical
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+
+
+THE RURAL LIFE PROBLEM OF THE UNITED STATES
+
+[Illustration: Publisher's logo]
+
+THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO
+DALLAS . SAN FRANCISCO
+
+MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
+LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA
+MELBOURNE
+
+THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
+TORONTO
+
+
+
+
+THE RURAL LIFE PROBLEM OF THE UNITED STATES
+
+NOTES OF AN IRISH OBSERVER
+BY
+SIR HORACE PLUNKETT
+
+New York
+THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+1919
+
+_All rights reserved_
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1910,
+
+BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
+
+Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1910. Reprinted October, 1910;
+January, 1911; October, 1912; September, 1913; January, 1917.
+
+Norwood Press
+J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
+Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+PREFATORY NOTE
+
+
+The thoughts contained in the following pages relate to one side of the
+life of a country which has been to me, as to many Irishmen, a second
+home. They are offered in friendly recognition of kindness I cannot hope
+to repay, received largely as a student of American social and economic
+problems, from public-spirited Americans who, I know, will appreciate
+most highly any slight service to their country.
+
+The substance of the book appeared in five articles contributed to the
+New York _Outlook_ under the title "Conservation and Rural Life."
+Several American friends, deeply interested in the Rural Life problem,
+asked me to republish the series. In doing so, I have felt that I ought
+to present a more comprehensive view of my subject than either the space
+allowed or the more casual publication demanded.
+
+I have to thank the editors of the _Outlook_ for the generous
+hospitality of their columns, and for full freedom to republish what
+belongs to them.
+
+HORACE PLUNKETT.
+
+THE PLUNKETT HOUSE, DUBLIN,
+April, 1910.
+
+
+
+
+TABLE OF CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE SUBJECT AND THE POINT OF VIEW
+
+                                                                PAGE
+The subject defined--A reconstruction of rural life in
+English-speaking communities essential to the progress of
+Western civilisation--A movement for a new rural
+civilisation to be proposed--The author's point of view
+derived from thirty years of Irish and American
+experience--The physical contrast and moral resemblances in
+the Irish and American rural problems--Mr. Roosevelt's
+interest in this aspect of the question--His Conservation
+and Country Life policies                                          1
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE LAUNCHING OF TWO ROOSEVELT POLICIES
+
+The sane emotionalism of American public opinion--Gifford
+Pinchot as the Apostle of Conservation--His test of
+national efficiency--Mr. James J. Hill's notable
+pronouncements upon the wastage of natural resources--The
+evolution of the Conservation policy--Historical and
+present causes of national extravagance--The Conference of
+Governors and their pronouncement upon Conservation--Mr.
+Roosevelt's Country Life policy--His estimate of the lasting
+importance of the Conservation and Country Life ideas--The
+popularity of the Conservation policy and the lack of
+interest in the Country Life policy--The Country Life
+Commission's inquiries and the reality of the problem--The
+need and opportunity for reconstruction of rural life             17
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE ORIGIN AND CONSEQUENCES OF RURAL NEGLECT
+
+The origin of rural neglect in English-speaking countries
+traced to the Industrial Revolution in England--Effect of
+modern economic changes upon the mutual relations of town
+and country populations--Respects in which the old relations
+ought to be restored--Three economic reasons for the study
+of rural conditions--The social consequences of rural
+neglect--The political importance of rustic experience to
+reenforce urban intelligence in modern democracies--The
+analogue of the European exodus in the United States--The
+moral aspects of rural neglect--The danger to national
+efficiency of sacrificing agricultural to commercial and
+industrial interests--The happy circumstance of Mr.
+Roosevelt's interest in rural well-being                          35
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE INNER LIFE OF THE AMERICAN FARMER
+
+Reasons why the rural problem resulting from urban
+predominance exists only in English-speaking
+countries--Neglect of farmer more easily excused in the
+United States than elsewhere owing to his apparent
+prosperity--Country Life Commission's pronouncement on rural
+backwardness--Why the matter must be taken up by the
+towns--A survey of American rural life--The problem
+economically and sociologically considered in the Middle
+West--Causes and character of rural backwardness in the
+Southern States--The boll-weevil and the hookworm as
+illustrations of unconcern for the well-being of rural
+communities--The problem in the New England States not
+typically American--The progressive attitude of some
+communities in the Far West in rural reform                       57
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE WEAK SPOT IN AMERICAN RURAL ECONOMY
+
+The three elements of a rural existence--Mr. Roosevelt's
+formula: "Better farming, better business, better living"--A
+comparative analysis of urban and rural business methods
+shows that herein lies chief cause of rural
+backwardness--Reasons why farmers fail to adopt methods of
+combination--A description of the cooperative system in its
+application to agriculture--The introduction and development
+of agricultural cooperation in Ireland--The Raiffeisen
+Credit Association successful in poorest Irish
+districts--Summary of cooperative achievement by Irish
+farmers--British imitation of Irish agricultural organising
+methods--A criticism of American farmers'
+organisations--Lack of combination for business purposes the
+cause of political impotence--Urgent need for a
+reorganisation of American agriculture upon cooperative lines     83
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE WAY TO BETTER FARMING AND BETTER LIVING
+
+The retarded application of science to agriculture and
+neglect of agricultural education--Present progress in
+agricultural education--Full benefit of education must await
+cooperative organisation--Connection between cooperation and
+social progress--Mr. Roosevelt on the cause and cure of
+rural discontent--Two views upon the principles of rural
+betterment--The part cooperation is playing in Irish rural
+society--General observations on town and country
+pleasures--The social necessity for a redirection of rural
+education--The rural labour problem--The position of women
+in farm life--The reason why the remedy for rural
+backwardness must come from without--The paradox of the problem  117
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE TWO THINGS NEEDFUL
+
+Summary of diagnosis and indication of treatment--Chief aim
+the cooerdination of agencies available for social work in
+the country--Numerical strength and fine social spirit
+abroad, but leadership needed--Mutual interest of advocates
+of Conservation and of rural reform--The psychological
+difficulty due to predominance of urban idea--Roman history
+repeating itself in New York--The natural leaders of the
+Country Life movement to be found in the cities--The objects
+of the movement defined--Two new institutions to be created;
+the one executive and organising, the other academic--The
+National Conservation Association qualified to initiate and
+direct the movement--Possibly an American Agricultural
+Organisation Society should be founded for the work--The
+chief practical work the introduction of agricultural
+cooperation--Necessity for joining forces with existing
+philanthropic agencies--Suggested enlistment of country
+clergy in cooperative propagandism--The Country Life
+Institute, its purpose and functions--Reason why one body
+cannot undertake work assigned to the two new
+institutions--The financial requirements of the
+Institute--Summary and conclusions                               145
+
+
+
+
+THE RURAL LIFE PROBLEM
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE SUBJECT AND THE POINT OF VIEW
+
+
+I submit in the following pages a proposition and a proposal--a
+distinction which an old-country writer of English may, perhaps, be
+permitted to preserve. The proposition is that, in the United States, as
+in other English-speaking communities, the city has been developed to
+the neglect of the country. I shall not have to labour the argument, as
+nobody seriously disputes the contention; but I shall trace the main
+causes of the neglect, and indicate what, in my view, must be its
+inevitable consequences. If I make my case, it will appear that our
+civilisation has thus become dangerously one-sided, and that, in the
+interests of national well-being, it is high time for steps to be taken
+to counteract the townward tendency.
+
+My definite proposal to those who accept these conclusions is that a
+Country Life movement, upon lines which will be laid down, should be
+initiated by existing associations, whose efforts should be supplemented
+by a new organisation which I shall call a Country Life Institute. There
+are in the United States a multiplicity of agencies, both public and
+voluntary, available for this work. But the army of workers in this
+field of social service needs two things: first, some definite plan for
+cooerdinating their several activities, and, next, some recognised source
+of information collected from the experience of the Old and the New
+World. It is the purpose of these pages to show that these needs are
+real and can be met.
+
+Two obvious questions will here suggest themselves. Why should the
+United States--of all countries in the world--be chosen for such a theme
+instead of a country like Ireland, where the population depends mainly
+upon agriculture? What qualifications has an Irishman, be he never so
+competent to advise upon the social and economic problems of his own
+country, to talk to Americans about the life of their rural population?
+I admit at once that, while I have made some study of American
+agriculture and rural economy, my actual work upon the problem of which
+I write has been restricted to Ireland. But I claim, with some pride,
+that, in thought upon rural economy, Ireland is ahead of any
+English-speaking country. She has troubles of her own, some inherent in
+the adverse physical conditions, and others due to well-known historical
+causes, that too often impede the action to which her best thoughts
+should lead. But the very fact that those who grapple with Irish
+problems have to work through failure to success will certainly not
+lessen the value to the social student of the experience gained. I
+recognise, however, that I must give the reader so much of personal
+narrative as is required to enable him to estimate the value of my
+facts, and of the conclusions which I base upon them.
+
+To have enjoyed an Irish-American existence, to have been profoundly
+interested in, and more or less in touch with, public affairs in both
+countries, to have been an unwilling politician in Ireland and not a
+politician at all in America, is, to say the least, an unusual
+experience for an Irishman. But such has been my record during the last
+twenty years. Soon after graduating at Oxford, I was advised to live in
+mountain air for a while, and for the next decade I was a ranchman along
+the foothills of the Rockies. To those who knew that my heart was in
+Ireland, I used to explain that I might some day be in politics at home,
+and must take care of my lungs. In 1889 I returned to live and work in
+my own country, but I retained business interests, including some
+farming operations, in the Western States. Ever since then I have taken
+my annual holiday across the Atlantic, and have studied rural
+conditions over a wider area in the United States than my business
+interests demanded.
+
+For eight years, commencing in 1892, I was a Member of Parliament. My
+legislative ambition was to get something done for Irish industry, and
+especially Irish agriculture. Having secured the assistance of an
+unprecedented combination of representative Irishmen, known as the
+Recess Committee (because it sat during the Parliamentary recess), we
+succeeded in getting the addition we wanted to the machinery of Irish
+Government. The functions of the new institution are sufficiently
+indicated by its cumbrous Parliamentary title, "The Department of
+Agriculture and other Industries and for Technical Instruction for
+Ireland." I mention this official experience because it not only
+intensified my desire to study American conditions, but it also brought
+me frequently to Washington to study the working of those Federal
+institutions which are concerned for the welfare of the rural
+population. There I enjoyed the unfailing courtesy of American public
+servants to the foreign inquirer.
+
+On one of these visits, in the winter of 1905-1906, I called upon
+President Roosevelt to pay him my respects, and to express to him my
+obligations to some members of his Administration. I wished especially
+to acknowledge my indebtedness to that veteran statesman, Secretary
+Wilson, the value of whose long service to the American farmer it would
+be hard to exaggerate. Mr. Roosevelt questioned me as to the exact
+object of my inquiries, and asked me to come again and discuss with him
+more fully than was possible at the moment certain economic and social
+questions which had engaged much of his own thoughts. He was greatly
+interested to learn that in Ireland we have been approaching many of
+these questions from his own point of view. He made me tell him the
+story of Irish land legislation, and of recent Irish movements for the
+improvement of agricultural conditions. Ever since, his interest in
+these Irish questions--to _the_ Irish Question we gave a wide berth--has
+been maintained on account of their bearing upon his Rural Life policy,
+for I had shown him how the economic strengthening and social elevation
+of the Irish farmer had become a matter of urgent Irish concern. I
+recall many things he said on that occasion, which show that his two
+great policies of Conservation and Country Life reform were maturing in
+his mind. I need hardly say how deeply interesting these policies are to
+me, embracing as they do economic and social problems, the working out
+of which in my own country happens to be the task to which I have
+devoted the best years of my life.
+
+I must now offer to the reader so much of the story of the Country Life
+movement in my own country as will enable him to understand its
+interest to Mr. Roosevelt and to many another worker upon the analogous
+problems of the United States. Ireland is passing through an agrarian
+revolution. There, as in many other European countries, the title to
+most of the agricultural land rested upon conquest. The English attempt
+to colonise Ireland never completely succeeded nor completely failed;
+consequently the Irish never ceased to repudiate the title of the alien
+landlord. In 1881 Mr. Gladstone introduced one of the greatest agrarian
+reforms in history--rent-fixing by judicial authority--which was
+certainly a bold attempt to put an end to a desolating conflict,
+centuries old.
+
+The scheme failed,--whether, as some hold, from its inherent defects, or
+from the circumstances of the time, is an open question. It is but fair
+to its author to point out that a rapidly increasing foreign
+competition, chiefly from the newly opened tracts of virgin soil in the
+New World, led to a fall in agricultural prices, which made the first
+rents fixed appear too high. Quicker and cheaper transit, together with
+processes for keeping produce fresh over the longest routes, soon showed
+that the new market conditions had come to stay. A bad land system on a
+rising market might succeed better than a good one on a falling. The
+land tenure reforms begun in 1881, having broken down under stress of
+foreign competition, and Purchase Acts on a smaller scale having been
+tentatively tried in the interval, in 1903 Parliament finally decreed
+that sufficient money should be provided to buy out all the remaining
+agricultural land. In a not remote future, some two hundred million
+pounds sterling--a billion dollars--will have been advanced by the
+British Government to enable the tenants to purchase their holdings, the
+money to be repaid in easy instalments during periods averaging over
+sixty years.
+
+Twenty years ago this general course of events was foreseen, and a few
+Irishmen conceived and set to work upon what has come to be Ireland's
+Rural Life policy. The position taken up was simple. What Parliament was
+about to do would pull down the whole structure of Ireland's
+agricultural economy, and would clear away the chief hindrance to
+economic and social progress. But upon the ground thus cleared the
+edifice of a new rural social economy would have to be built. This work,
+although it needs the fostering care of government, and liberal
+facilities for a system of education intimately related to the people's
+working lives, belongs mainly to the sphere of voluntary effort.
+
+The new movement, which was started in 1889 to meet the circumstances I
+have indicated, was thus a movement for the up-building of country life.
+It anticipated the lines of the formula which Mr. Roosevelt adopted in
+his Message transmitting to Congress the Report of the Country Life
+Commission--better farming, better business, better living: we began
+with better business, which consisted in the introduction of
+agricultural cooperation into the farming industry, for several reasons
+which will appear later, and for one which I must mention here. We found
+that we could not develop in unorganised farmers a political influence
+strong enough to enable them to get the Government to do its part
+towards better farming. Owing to the new agricultural opinion which had
+been developed indirectly by organising the farmer, we were able to win
+from Parliament the department I have named above. This institution was
+so framed and endowed that it is able to give to the Irish farmers all
+the assistance which can be legitimately given by public agencies and at
+public expense. The assistance consists chiefly of education. But
+education is interpreted in the widest sense. Practical instruction to
+old and young, in schools, upon the farms, and at meetings, lectures,
+experiments, and demonstrations, the circulation of useful information
+and advice, and all the usual methods known to progressive governments,
+are being introduced with the chief aim of enabling the farmer to apply
+to the practice of farming the teachings of modern science. Better
+living, which includes making country life more interesting and
+attractive, is sought by using voluntary associations, some organised
+primarily for business purposes, and others, having no business aim, for
+social and intellectual ends. But Irish rural reformers are agreed that
+by far the most important step towards a higher and a better rural life
+would be a redirection of education in the country schools. To this I
+shall return in the proper place.
+
+I can now proceed with my American experiences without leaving any doubt
+as to the point of view from which I approach the problem of rural life
+in the United States. Having engaged in actual work upon that problem in
+Ireland, where a combination of economic changes and political events
+has made its solution imperative, and having been long in personal
+touch with rural conditions in some Western States, my interest in
+certain policies which were maturing at Washington may be easily
+surmised. There I found that, with wholly different conditions to be
+dealt with, the thoughts of the President and of others in his
+confidence were, as regards the main issue, moving in the same direction
+as my own. They too had come to feel that the welfare of the rural
+population had been too long neglected, and that it was high time to
+consider how the neglect might be repaired. In his annual message to
+Congress in 1904, Mr. Roosevelt had made it clear that he was fully
+conscious of this necessity. "Nearly half of the people of this
+country," he wrote, "devote their energies to growing things from the
+soil. Until a recent date little has been done to prepare these millions
+for their life work." I did not realise at the time the full import of
+these sentences. Nor did I foresee that the problem of rural life was
+to be forced to the front by the awakening of public opinion, upon
+another issue differing from and yet closely related to the subject of
+these pages. Mr. Roosevelt was thinking out the Conservation idea, which
+I believe will some day be recognised as the greatest of his policies.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE LAUNCHING OF TWO ROOSEVELT POLICIES
+
+
+Although somebody has already said something like it, I would say there
+is a tide in the thoughts of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to
+action. We make the general claim for our Western civilisation, that,
+whatever the form of government, once public opinion is thoroughly
+stirred upon a great and vital issue, it is but a question of time for
+the will to find the way. But in the life of the United States, the
+passage from thought to action is more rapid than in any country that I
+know. Nowhere do we find such a combination of emotionalism with sanity.
+No better illustration of these national qualities could be desired than
+that afforded by the inception and early growth of the Conservation
+policy.
+
+I have already shown how my inquiries at Washington gave me access to
+the most accessible of the world's statesmen. At the same time there
+came into my life another remarkable personality. To the United States
+Forester of that day I owe my earliest interest in the Conservation
+policy. In counsel with him I came to regard the Conservation and Rural
+Life policies as one organic whole. So I must say here a word about the
+man who, more than any other, has inspired whatever in these pages may
+be worth printing.
+
+I first met Gifford Pinchot in his office in Washington in 1905. I was
+not especially interested in forestry, but the Forester was so
+interesting that I listened with increasing delight to the story of his
+work. I noticed that as an administrator he had a grasp of detail and a
+mastery of method which are not usually found in men who have had no
+training in large business affairs. I thought the secret of his success
+lay between love of work and sympathy with workers, which gained him
+the devotion and enthusiastic cooperation of his staff. It is, however,
+as a statesman rather than as an administrator that his achievement is
+and will be known.
+
+When I first knew the Forester, I found that already the conservation of
+timber was but a small part of his material aims: every national
+resource must be husbanded. But over the whole scheme of Conservation a
+great moral issue reigned supreme. He clung affectionately to his task,
+but it was not to him mere forestry administration. In his far vision he
+seemed to see men as trees walking. The saving of one great asset was
+broadening out into insistence upon a new test of national efficiency:
+the people of the United States were to be judged by the manner in which
+they applied their physical and mental energies to the conservation and
+development of their country's natural resources. The acceptance of this
+test would mean the success of a great policy for the initiation of
+which President Roosevelt gave almost the whole credit to Gifford
+Pinchot.
+
+There is one other name which will be ever honorably associated with the
+dawn of the Conservation idea which Mr. Roosevelt elevated to the status
+and dignity of a national policy. In September, 1906, Mr. James J. Hill
+delivered (under the title of "The Future of the United States") what I
+think was an epoch-making address. It is significant that this great
+railway president opened his campaign for the economic salvation of the
+United States by addressing himself, not to politicians or professors,
+but to a representative body of Minnesota farmers. This address
+presented for the first time in popular form a remarkable collection of
+economic facts, which formed the basis of conclusions as startling as
+they were new. Let me attempt a brief summary of its contents.
+
+The natural resources, to which the Conservation policy relates, may be
+divided into two classes: the minerals, which when used cannot be
+replaced, and things that grow from the soil, which admit of
+indefinitely augmented reproduction. At the head of the former category
+stands the supply of coal and iron. This factor in the nation's industry
+and commerce was being exhausted at a rate which made it certain that,
+long before the end of the century, the most important manufactures
+would be handicapped by a higher cost of production. The supply of
+merchantable timber was disappearing even more rapidly. But far more
+serious than all other forms of wastage was the reckless destruction of
+the natural fertility of the soil. The final result, according to Mr.
+Hill, must be that within a comparatively brief period--a period for
+which the present generation was bound to take thought--this veritable
+Land of Promise would be hard pressed to feed its own people, while the
+manufactured exports to pay for imported food would not be forthcoming.
+It should be added that this sensational forecast was no purposeless
+jeremiad. Mr. Hill told his hearers that the danger which threatened the
+future of the Nation would be averted only by the intelligence and
+industry of those who cultivated the farm lands, and that they had it in
+their power to provide a perfectly practicable and adequate remedy. This
+was to be found--if such a condensation be permissible--in the
+application of the physical sciences to the practice, and of economic
+science to the business, of farming.
+
+In spite of the immense burden of great undertakings which he carried,
+Mr. Hill repeated the substance of this address on many occasions. Lord
+Rosebery once said that speeches were the most ephemeral of all
+ephemeral things, and for some time it looked as if one of the most
+important speeches ever delivered by a public man on a great public
+issue was going to illustrate the truth of this saying. It seems
+strange that his facts and arguments should have remained unchallenged,
+and yet unsupported, by other public men. Perhaps the best explanation
+is to be found in a recent dictum of Mr. James Bryce. Speaking at the
+University of California, the British Ambassador said: "We can all think
+of the present, and are only too apt to think chiefly about the present.
+The average man, be he educated or uneducated, seldom thinks of anything
+else." There are, however, special circumstances in the history of the
+United States which account for the extraordinary unconcern about what
+is going to happen to the race in a period which may seem long to those
+whose personal interest fixes a limit to their gaze, but which is indeed
+short in the life of a nation. After the religious, political, and
+military struggles through which the American nation was brought to
+birth, there followed a century of no less strenuous wrestling with the
+forces of nature. That century stands divided by the greatest civil
+conflict in the world's history; but this only served to strengthen in a
+united people those indomitable qualities to which the nation owes its
+leadership in the advancement of civilisation. The abundance (until now
+considered as virtual inexhaustibility) of natural resources, the call
+for capital and men for their development, the rich reward of conquest
+in the field of industry, may explain, but can hardly excuse, a National
+attitude which seems to go against the strongest human instinct--one not
+altogether wanting in lower animal life--that of the preservation of the
+race. It is an attitude which recalls the question said to have been
+asked by an Irishman: "What has posterity done for me?" But this was
+before Conservation was in the air.
+
+I have now told what I came by chance to know about the origin of the
+Conservation idea. The story of its early growth was no less remarkable
+than the suddenness of its appearance. In the spring of 1908 matters
+had advanced so far that the governors of all the States and Territories
+met to discuss it. Before the Conference broke up they were moved to
+"declare the conviction that the great prosperity of our country rests
+upon the abundant resources of the land chosen by our forefathers for
+their homes," that these resources are "a heritage to be made use of in
+establishing and promoting the comfort, prosperity, and happiness of the
+American people, but not to be wasted, deteriorated, or needlessly
+destroyed; that this material basis is threatened with exhaustion"; that
+"conservation of our natural resources is a subject of transcendent
+importance which should engage unremittingly the attention of the
+Nation, the States, and the people in earnest cooperation"; and that
+"this cooperation should find expression in suitable action by the
+Congress and by the legislatures of the several States."
+
+It is, of course, not with Conservation, but with Rural Life, that we
+are here directly concerned; but it should be borne in mind that the
+chief of all the nation's resources is the fertility of the soil. More
+than one competent authority declared at the Conference of Governors
+that this national asset was the subject of the greatest actual waste,
+and was at the same time capable of the greatest development and
+conservation. This interdependence of the two Roosevelt policies--the
+fact that neither of them can come to fruition without the success of
+the other--makes those of us who work for rural progress rest our chief
+hopes upon the newly aroused public opinion in the American Republic.
+
+To my knowledge this view is shared by President Roosevelt, who always
+regarded his Conservation and Rural Life policies as complementary to
+each other. The last time I saw him--it was on Christmas Eve, 1908--he
+dwelt on this aspect of his public work and aims. I remember how he
+expressed the hope that, when the more striking incidents of his
+Administration were forgotten, public opinion would look kindly upon his
+Conservation and Rural Life policies. I ventured upon the confident
+prediction that he would not be disappointed in this anticipation.
+Already the authors of the Conservation policy have been rewarded by a
+general acceptance of the principle for which they stand. The national
+conscience now demands that the present generation, while enjoying the
+material blessings with which not only nature but also the labour and
+sacrifices of their forefathers have so bounteously endowed them, shall
+have due regard for the welfare of those who are to come after them.
+
+Americans, who are accustomed to rapid developments in public opinion,
+will hardly appreciate the impression made by the story I have just told
+upon the mind of an observer from old countries, where action does not
+tread upon the heels of thought. But surely an amazing thing has
+happened. In the life of one Administration a great idea seizes the mind
+of the American people. This leads to a stock-taking of natural
+resources and a searching of the national conscience. Then, suddenly,
+there emerges a quite new national policy. Conceived during the last
+Administration, when it brought Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Bryan on to the
+same platform, Conservation at once rose above party, and will be the
+accepted policy of all future Administrations. It has already secured
+almost Pan-American endorsement at its birthplace in Washington. The
+fathers of Conservation are now looking forward to a still larger sphere
+of influence for their offspring at an International Conference which it
+is hoped to assemble at the Hague.
+
+But it must be admitted that no such reception was accorded to Mr.
+Roosevelt's other policy, to which our attention must now be turned. The
+reasons for the comparative lack of interest in the problem of Rural
+Life are many and complex, but two of them may be noted in passing.
+Conservation calls for legislative and administrative action, and this
+always sets up a ferment in the political mind. The Rural Life idea, on
+the other hand, though it will demand some governmental assistance, must
+rely mainly upon voluntary effort. The methods necessary for its
+development, and their probable results, are also less obvious, and thus
+less easily appreciated by the public. Whatever the reason, while
+Conservation has rushed into the forefront of public interest and has
+won the status and dignity of a policy, the sister idea is still
+struggling for a platform, and its advocates must be content to see
+their efforts towards a higher and a better country life regarded as a
+movement.
+
+This estimate of the relative positions of these two ideas in the public
+mind will, I think, be borne out when we contrast the quiet initiation
+of the movement with the dramatic debut of the policy. For all the
+officialism with which it was launched, President Roosevelt's Country
+Life Commission might as well have been appointed by some wealthy
+philanthropist who would, at least, have paid its members' travelling
+expenses,[1] and private initiation might also have spared us the
+ridicule which greeted the alleged proposal to "uplift" a body of
+citizens who were told that they were already adorning the heights of
+American civilisation. The names of the men who volunteered for this
+unpaid service should have been a sufficient guarantee that theirs was
+no fool's errand.[2]
+
+How real was the problem the commissioners were investigating was
+abundantly proved to those who were present when they got into touch
+with working farmers and their wives, and discussed freely and
+informally the conditions, human and material, to which the problem of
+Rural Life relates. I shall refer again to their report. But I may here
+say I am firmly convinced that a complete change in the whole attitude
+of public opinion towards the old question of town and country must
+precede any large practical outcome to the labours of the Commission. It
+has to be brought home to those who lead public opinion that for many
+decades we, the English-speaking peoples, have been unconsciously guilty
+of having gravely neglected one side, and that perhaps the most
+important side, of Western civilisation.
+
+To sustain this judgment I must now view the sequence of events which
+led to the subordination of rural to urban interests, and try to
+estimate its probable consequences. It will be seen that the neglect is
+comparatively recent, and of English origin. I believe that the New
+World offers just now a rare opportunity for launching a movement which
+will be directed to a reconstruction of rural life. It is this belief
+which has prompted an Irish advocate of rural reform to turn his
+thoughts away for a brief space from the poorer peasantry of his own
+country and to take counsel with his fellow-workers in the United States
+and Canada on a problem which affects them all.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] These, as a matter of fact, were defrayed by the trustees of the
+Russell Sage Foundation.
+
+[2] The Commission consisted of L. H. Bailey, of the New York State
+College of Agriculture at Cornell University (chairman); Henry Wallace,
+editor of _Wallace's Farmer_, Des Moines, Iowa; Kenyon L. Butterfield,
+President of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, Amherst,
+Massachusetts; Walter H. Page, editor of _The World's Work_, New York
+City; Gifford Pinchot, United States Forester, and Chairman of the
+National Conservation Commission; C. S. Barrett, President of the
+Farmers' Co-operative and Educational Union of America, Union City,
+Georgia; W. A. Beard, of the _Great West Magazine_, Sacramento,
+California.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE ORIGIN AND CONSEQUENCES OF RURAL NEGLECT
+
+
+The most radical economic change which history records set in during the
+last half of the eighteenth century in England, as the result of that
+remarkable achievement of modern civilisation, the Industrial
+Revolution. Mechanical inventions changed all industry, setting up the
+factories of the town instead of the scattered home production of the
+country and its villages. In the wake of the new inventions economic
+science stepped in, and, scrupulously obeying its own law of demand and
+supply, told the then predominant middle classes just what they wished
+to be told. Adam Smith had made the wonderful discovery that money and
+wealth were not the same thing. Then Ricardo, and after him the
+Manchester School of economists, made division of labour the cardinal
+virtue in the new gospel of wealth. In order to give full play to this
+economic principle all workers in mechanical industries were huddled
+together in the towns. There they were to be transformed from
+capricious, undisciplined humans into mechanical attachments, and
+restricted to such functions as steam-driven automata had not yet
+learned to perform. That was the first stage of the Industrial
+Revolution, with its chief consequences, the rural exodus and urban
+overcrowding. It is a hideous nightmare to look back upon from these
+more enlightened days. Well might the angels weep over the flight of all
+that was best from the God-made country to the man-made town.
+
+Before the middle of the last century the clouds began to lift. For a
+while the good Lord Shaftesbury seemed to be crying in the wilderness of
+middle-class plutocracy, but it was not long before the crying of the
+children in their factories stirred the national conscience. The health
+of nations was allowed to be considered as well as their wealth. Social
+and political science rose up in protest against both the economists and
+the manufacturers. There followed a period of beneficent social changes,
+no less radical than those which the new mechanical inventions had
+produced in the economics of industry. The factory town of to-day
+presents a strange contrast to that which sacrificed humanity to
+material aggrandisement. What with its shortened hours of labour,
+superior artisan dwellings, improved sanitation, parks, open spaces and
+playgrounds, free instruction and cheap entertainment for old and young,
+hospitals and charities, rapid transportation, a popular Press, and full
+political freedom, the modern hive of industry stands as a monument of
+what, under liberal laws, can be done by education and organisation to
+realise the higher aspirations of a people.
+
+During this second period, another economic development produced upon
+the attitude of the urban mind towards the rural population an effect to
+which, I think, has not been given the consideration it deserves. Better
+and cheaper transportation, with the consequent establishment of what
+the economists call the world-market, completely changed the
+relationship between the townsman and the farmer. A sketch of their
+former mutual relations will make my meaning clear. Within the last
+century every town relied largely for its food supply on the produce of
+the fields around its walls. The countrymen coming into the weekly
+market were the chief customers for the wares of the town craftsmen. In
+this primitive state of trade, townsmen could not but realise the
+importance to themselves of a prosperous country population around them.
+But this simple exchange, as we all know, has developed into the complex
+commercial operations of modern times. To-day most large towns derive
+their household stuff from the food-growing tracts of the whole world,
+and I doubt whether any are dependent on the neighbouring farmers, or
+feel themselves specially concerned for their welfare. I do not think
+the general truth of this picture will be questioned, and I hope some
+consideration may be given to the conclusions I now draw.
+
+In the transition we are considering, the reciprocity between the
+producers of food and the raw material of clothes on the one hand, and
+manufacturers and general traders of the towns on the other, has not
+ceased; it has actually increased since the days of steam and
+electricity. But it has become national, and even international, rather
+than local. Town consumers are still dependent upon agricultural
+producers, who, in turn, are much larger consumers than formerly of all
+kinds of commodities made in towns. Forty-two per cent of materials used
+in manufacture in the United States are from the farm, which also
+contributes seventy per cent of the country's exports. But in the
+complexity of these trade developments townsmen have been cut off more
+and more from personal contact with the country, and in this way have
+lost their sense of its importance. My point is that the shifting of the
+trade relationship of town and country from its former local to its
+present national and international basis in reality increases their
+interdependence. And I hold most strongly that until in this matter the
+obligations of a common citizenship are realised by the town, we cannot
+hope for any lasting National progress.
+
+Whatever be the causes which have begotten the neglect of rural life, no
+one will gainsay the wisdom of estimating the consequences. These are
+economic, social, and political; and I will discuss them briefly under
+these heads. There are three main economic reasons which suggest a
+closer study of rural conditions. First, there is the interdependence of
+town and country, less obvious than it was in the days of the local
+market, but no less real. Any fall in the number, or decline in the
+efficiency, of the farming community, will be accompanied by a
+corresponding fall in the country sale of town products. This is
+especially true of America, where the foreign commerce is unimportant in
+comparison with internal trade. To nourish country life is the best way
+to help home trade. And quite as important as these considerations is
+the effect which good or bad farming must have upon the cost of living
+to the whole population. Excessive middle profits between producer and
+consumer may largely account for the very serious rise in the price of
+staple articles of food. This is a fact of the utmost significance, but,
+as I shall show later, the remedy for too high a cost of production and
+distribution lies with the farmer, the improvement of whose business
+methods will be seen to be the chief factor in the reform which the
+Rural Life movement must attempt to introduce.
+
+The essential dependence of nations on agriculture is the second
+economic consideration. The author of "The Return to the Land," Senator
+Jules Meline (successively Minister of Agriculture, Minister of Commerce
+and Premier of France), tells us that this remarkable book is "merely an
+expansion of a profound thought uttered long ago by a Chinese
+philosopher: 'The well-being of a people is like a tree; agriculture is
+its root, manufacture and commerce are its branches and its life; if the
+root is injured the leaves fall, the branches break away and the tree
+dies.'"
+
+This truth is not hard to apply to the conditions of to-day. The income
+of every country depends on its natural resources, and on the skill and
+energy of its inhabitants; and the quickest way to increase the income
+is to concentrate on the production of those articles for which there is
+the greatest demand throughout the commercial world. The relentless
+application of this principle has been characteristic of the nineteenth
+century. But the augmentation of income has in one special way been
+purchased by a diminution of capital. The industrial movement has been
+based on an immense expenditure of coal and iron; and in America and
+Great Britain the coal and iron which can be cheaply obtained are within
+measurable distance of exhaustion. As these supplies diminish, the
+industrial leadership of America and Great Britain must disappear,
+unless they can employ their activities in other forms of industry.
+Those, therefore, who desire that the English-speaking countries should
+maintain for many ages that high position which they now occupy, should
+do all in their power to encourage a proper system of agriculture--the
+one industry in which the fullest use can be made of natural resources
+without diminishing the inheritance of future generations--the industry
+"about which," Mr. James J. Hill emphatically declares, "all others
+revolve, and by which future America shall stand or fall."
+
+The third economic reason will hardly be disputed. Agricultural
+prosperity is an important factor in financial stability. The
+fluctuations of commerce depend largely on the good and bad harvests of
+the world, but, as they do not coincide with them in time, their
+violence is, on the whole, likely to be less in a nation where
+agricultural and manufacturing interests balance each other, than in one
+depending mainly or entirely on either. The small savings of numerous
+farmers, amounting in the aggregate to very large sums, are a powerful
+means of steadying the money market; they are not liable to the
+vicissitudes nor attracted by the temptations which affect the larger
+investors. They remain a permanent national resource, which, as the
+experience of France proves, may be confidently drawn upon in time of
+need. I have often thought that, were it not for the thrift and industry
+of the French peasantry, financial crises would be as frequent in France
+as political upheavals.
+
+As regards the social aspect of rural neglect, I suggest that the city
+may be more seriously concerned than is generally imagined for the
+well-being of the country. One cannot but admire the civic pride with
+which Americans contemplate their great centres of industry and
+commerce, where, owing to the many and varied improvements, the townsman
+of the future is expected to unite the physical health and longevity of
+the Boeotian with the mental superiority of the Athenian. But we may
+ask whether this somewhat optimistic forecast does not ignore one
+important question. Has it been sufficiently considered how far the
+moral and physical health of the modern city depends upon the constant
+influx of fresh blood from the country, which has ever been the source
+from which the town draws its best citizenship? You cannot keep on
+indefinitely skimming the pan and have equally good milk left. In
+America the drain may continue a while longer without the inevitable
+consequences becoming plainly visible. But sooner or later, if the
+balance of trade in this human traffic be not adjusted, the raw material
+out of which urban society is made will be seriously deteriorated, and
+the symptoms of National degeneracy will be properly charged against
+those who neglected to foresee the evil and treat the cause. It is
+enough for my present purpose if it be admitted that the people of every
+state are largely bred in rural districts, and that the physical and
+moral well-being of these districts must eventually influence the
+quality of the whole people.
+
+I come now to the political considerations which, I think, have not been
+sufficiently taken into account. In most countries political life
+depends largely for its steadiness and sanity upon a strong infusion of
+rural opinion into the counsels of the nation. It is a truism that
+democracy requires for success a higher level of intelligence and
+character in the mass of the people than other forms of government. But
+intelligence alone is not enough for the citizen of a democracy; he must
+have experience as well, and the experience of a townsman is essentially
+imperfect. He has generally a wider theoretical knowledge than the
+rustic of the main processes by which the community lives; but the
+rustic's practical knowledge of the more fundamental of them is wider
+than the townsman's. He knows actually and in detail how corn is grown
+and how beasts are bred, whereas the town artisan hardly knows how the
+whole of any one article of commerce is made. The townsman sees and
+takes part in the wonderful achievements of industrial science without
+any full understanding of its methods or of the relative importance and
+the interaction of the forces engaged. To this one-sided experience may
+be attributed in some measure that disregard of inconvenient facts, and
+that impatience of the limits of practicability, which many observers
+note as a characteristic defect of popular government.
+
+However that may be, there is one symptom in modern politics of which
+the gravity is generally acknowledged, while its special connection with
+the towns is an easily ascertainable fact; I mean the growth of the
+cruder forms of Socialism. The town artisan or labourer, who sees
+displayed before him vast masses of property in which he has no share,
+and contrasts the smallness of his remuneration with the immense results
+of his labour, is easily attracted to remedies worse than the disease. A
+fuller and more exact understanding of the means by which the wealth of
+the community is created is, for the townsman, the best antidote to
+mischievous agitation so far as it is not merely the result of poverty.
+But the countryman, especially the proprietor of a piece of land,
+however small, is protected from this infection. The atmosphere in which
+Socialism of the predatory kind can grow up does not exist among a
+prosperous farming community--perhaps because in the country the
+question of the divorce of the worker from his raw material by
+capitalism does not arise. The farm furnishes the raw material of the
+farmer; yet he cannot be said to spend his life creating the alleged
+"surplus value" of Marxian doctrine. For these reasons I suggest that
+the orderly and safe progress of democracy demands a strong agricultural
+population. It is as true now as when Aristotle said it that "where
+husbandmen and men of small fortune predominate government will be
+guided by law."
+
+I have now shown that for every reason the interests of the rural
+population ought no longer to be subordinated to those of the city. That
+such has been the tendency in English-speaking countries will hardly be
+questioned. In Great Britain the rural exodus has gone on with a
+vengeance. The last census (1901) showed that seventy-seven per cent of
+the population was urban, and only twenty-three per cent rural. A few
+years ago there were derelict farms within easy walk of the outskirts
+of London. In Ireland the rural exodus took the form of emigration,
+mainly to American cities, and this has been the chief factor in the
+reduction of the population in sixty years from more than eight millions
+to a trifle above four. But it may be thought that in the United States
+no similar tendency is in operation. Certainly those who admit the
+townward drift of country life may fairly say that it does not present
+so urgent a problem in the New World as in parts of the Old. Even
+granting that this is so, the fact remains that the town population of
+America is seriously outgrowing the rural population; for, while the
+towns are growing hugely, the country stands still. Moreover, we must
+not forget that, Australia apart, America is even still the most
+underpopulated part of the globe. We are accustomed to think Ireland
+underpopulated, owing to emigration, yet even to-day the scale of
+population is almost six times greater than that of the United States.
+If the Union were peopled as thickly as Ireland even still is, the
+population would be nearly five hundred millions. There is still a vast
+deal of filling-up to be done in America, mostly in the rural parts.
+
+But the main consideration I wish to emphasise throughout is that the
+problem under review is moral and social far more than economic, human
+rather than material. This is the natural view of an Irish worker, who
+knows that the solution of _his_ problem depends upon the possibility of
+endowing country life with such social improvements as will provide an
+effective compensation for a necessarily modest standard of comfort. But
+the citizens of the United States may be pardoned for being physiocrats.
+The statistical proof, annually furnished, of the growing agricultural
+wealth, is apt to obscure other essentials of progress. The astronomical
+proportions of the figures stagger the imagination, and engender the
+kind of pride a man feels when he is first told the number of red
+corpuscles luxuriating in his blood. How can there be agricultural
+depression in a country whose farm lands Secretary Wilson, in his
+notable Annual Report for 1905, declared to have increased in value over
+a period of five years at the astounding rate of $3,400,000 per day? Yet
+to the deeper insight, the same moral influence through which we in
+Ireland are seeking to combat the evils of material poverty may in the
+United States be needed as a moral corrective to a too rapidly growing
+material prosperity. The patriotic American, who thinks of the life of
+the Nation rather than of the individual, will, if he looks beneath the
+surface, discern in this God-prospered country symptoms of rural
+decadence fraught with danger to National efficiency.
+
+The reckless sacrifice of agricultural interests by the legislators of
+the towns is condemned by the verdict of history. We need not now fear
+that invading hordes of hardy barbarians will mar the destiny of the
+great Western Republic, as they ended the career of the Roman Empire.
+There are, however, other clouds upon the horizon. Only a few years ago,
+the American people could well treat with contempt the bogy of the
+Yellow Peril. With a transformation unprecedented in history, the
+situation has been changed. Japan is already devoting to the arts of
+peace qualities but yesterday displayed in war, to the amazement of the
+Western world. In another Eastern empire there are vast
+resources--especially coal and iron in juxtaposition--awaiting only
+industrial leadership to utilise a practically limitless labour supply
+for their development. These are facts worthy of consideration for their
+potential bearing upon the industrial and commercial standing of the
+United States.
+
+To the onlooker, it does seem a happy circumstance that there has just
+been, for seven critical years, at the head of American affairs the
+strenuous advocate of the strenuous life. I read through his Messages
+the warning that in the struggle for preeminence the ultimate victory
+will lie with those nations who found their prosperity on the high
+physical and ethical condition of the people. That is the oldest, as it
+is the latest, wisdom of the East. It is in this spirit that the
+neglected problem of Rural Life should now be given some share of the
+attention hitherto devoted to the life of the towns.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE INNER LIFE OF THE AMERICAN FARMER
+
+
+I recently asked a German economist if he could tell me the best books
+to read upon the problem of rural life in Germany. His reply was: "There
+are no books, because there is no problem." It is generally true, no
+doubt, that the Rural Life problem, in so far as it consists in the
+subordination of the country to the town, is peculiar to the
+English-speaking countries, where it seems to be mainly attributable to
+three causes. The chief of these was no doubt the Industrial Revolution
+in England, of which enough has already been said. Secondly, in the
+United States and in some portions of the British Empire, the opening up
+of vast tracts of virgin soil led not unnaturally to the postponement of
+social development until the pioneer farmers had settled down to the
+new life. The third cause was immunity from the danger of foreign
+invasion, which eliminated the military reasons for maintaining a
+numerous, virile, and progressive rural population.
+
+There are many in England who regret that it should have been forgotten
+how the English owed their commercial supremacy to the fighting
+qualities of the old yeoman class. In the United States it should be
+remembered that nowadays peace strength is quite as important as war
+strength, and it may be questioned whether there can be any sustained
+industrial efficiency where the great body of workers who conduct the
+chief--the only absolutely necessary--industry are wasting the resources
+at their command by bad husbandry. We may, however, concede that the
+neglect of rural life is much easier to explain and excuse in the United
+States than in the older English-speaking countries. Quite apart from
+the abundance of agricultural resources which the American farmers
+enjoy, it might well be thought that the rural communities are keeping
+pace with the progress of urban civilisation. The citizens who now
+occupy the farm lands of the United States have been largely drawn from
+the pick of the European peasantries. In the days of their coming, it
+took courage and enterprise to face the now almost forgotten terrors of
+the Atlantic Ocean. These immigrants, and the migrants from the Eastern
+States, have profited enormously by their change of residence. Their
+material well-being has already been admitted, and, with rare
+exceptions, they have displayed no overt symptoms of agrarian
+discontent.
+
+It must not, however, be imagined that the apparent apathy of American
+farmers is due to contentment. Like others of their calling, they keep a
+full stock of grievances in their mental stores. They have very definite
+opinions as to what is wrong, but to these opinions no formal expression
+is given. They vaguely feel that they would like to remould "the sorry
+scheme of things entire," but they lack the public spirit which is
+required before concerted action can be taken successfully. The Country
+Life Commission held a series of conferences throughout the United
+States, which brought them into the closest touch with every type of
+American farm life. They received written replies from some 125,000
+rural folk to whom they had sent a circular with a dozen questions
+covering the essential heads of inquiry. The Commissioners say in their
+report: "We have found by the testimony, not only of the farmers
+themselves, but of all persons in touch with farm life, more or less
+serious unrest in every part of the United States, even in the most
+prosperous regions."
+
+The truth is that, while judged by the standard of living of European
+peasantries, the farmers of the United States are prosperous, in
+comparison with the other citizens of the most progressive country in
+the world they are not well-off. Their accumulation of material wealth
+is unnaturally and unnecessarily restricted; their social life is
+barren; their political influence is relatively small. American farmers
+have been used by politicians, but have still to learn how to use them.
+This may be due to the fact that my countrymen elected to devote their
+genius for organisation to the problems of city government. And in the
+sphere of private action they are, as will be seen when I discuss the
+need for a reorganisation of their business, even less effective than in
+public affairs.
+
+It will be conceded that any hopeful plan to put things right will have
+to rely upon the organised efforts of those immediately concerned. Both
+in the sphere of governmental action, and in the vastly more important
+field of voluntary effort, the moving force will have to be public
+opinion. But the thought of the farming communities has long ago joined
+the rural exodus; and before the country life idea can find expression
+in an effective country life movement, those who are thinking out the
+problem will have to commend their arguments to the thought of the
+towns. Therefore I address these pages, not to farmers only, but to the
+general reader--who, I may observe, does not generally read if he
+happens to live in the open country.
+
+In the course of my own studies of American rural life I have found it
+convenient to divide the United States into four sections, each of them
+more or less homogeneous. As this method of treatment may help my
+readers, I will give them a look at my map of American rural life. The
+four sections may be called the North Eastern, the Middle Western, the
+Southern, and the Far Western. The division has no pretensions to be
+scientific; the boundaries can be adjusted to fit in with the experience
+of each reader.
+
+In my North Eastern section I include the New England States, New York,
+New Jersey, and most of Pennsylvania. This is a section where
+manufacturing communities have long been established, where migration
+from country to town has been most marked, and where the competition of
+the newly settled Western farm lands has been followed by effects upon
+agricultural society very similar to those produced by the same causes
+in many a rural community on the Continent of Europe. Second comes the
+Middle Western section, consisting mainly of the Mississippi Valley,
+with its vast area of high average fertility, the greatest
+food-producing tract on the continent. Third, I place the Southern
+section, where the governing factors in rural economy are the climate,
+the numerical strength of the colored population, the two staple
+industrial crops--cotton and tobacco--the comparatively recent abolition
+of slavery, and the long-drawn-out effects of the Civil War. My fourth
+division, the Far Western section, includes the ranching lands of the
+arid belt with their irrigation oases, and the fruit-growing and farming
+lands of the Pacific Coast.
+
+As we are discussing the problem chiefly in its human aspect, which
+affects alike communities wealthy and impoverished, large and small,
+old-settled and newly established, it will not matter essentially where
+we first direct our attention for the purpose of illustration. But if,
+as I hold, nothing less than a reconstruction of rural civilisation is
+called for, our inquiries will be more profitably directed to those
+sections where agricultural society is permanently established, or where
+the rural population might abandon the migratory habit if the conditions
+were more favorable to an advanced civilisation. At the present stage I
+feel that the whole subject can be most profitably discussed in its
+application to the Middle Western and the Southern sections. Here the
+intimate relationship of the Conservation and the Country Life ideas is
+best illustrated. Here, too, we get into touch with the problem at its
+two extremes of prosperity and poverty, each in its own way retarding
+the progress of rural civilisation. In both sections the conditions are
+typical, and distinctively American.
+
+Let us then consider first the general course of rural civilisation in
+the great food-producing tract of the Middle West. I have in my mind the
+portion I know best, the last-settled part of the corn belt. Thirty
+years ago I saw something of the newcomers who settled in this section,
+where there was still much raw land. These settlers, knowing that the
+land must rise rapidly in value, almost invariably purchased much larger
+farms than they could handle. They often sank their available working
+capital in making the first payments for their land, and went heavily
+into debt for the balance. They became "land poor," and, in order to
+meet the instalments of purchase and the high interest on their
+mortgages, they invented a system of farming unprecedented in its
+wastefulness. The farm was treated as a mine, or, to use Mr. James J.
+Hill's metaphor, as a bank where the depositors are always taking out
+more than they put in. A corn crop, year after year, without rotation or
+fertilisers, satisfied the new conception of husbandry--the easiest and
+least costly extraction of the wealth in the soil. Land, labour,
+capital, and ability I had been taught to regard as the essentials of
+production; but here capital was reduced to the minimum, and ability
+left to nature. Many of the young men who took Horace Greeley's advice
+and went West knew nothing about farming. I remember writing home that I
+was in a country where the rolling stone gathered most moss. Possibly
+the method adopted was the quickest way to get rich; living on capital
+is all right provided somebody will replace the squandered resources.
+While there were ample unoccupied lands, Uncle Sam looked kindly upon
+these enterprising pioneers. It was only in the second Roosevelt
+Administration that it dawned upon the national conscience that the
+nation had some claim to be considered as well as the individual. Of
+course all this is changed now; although I am not sure that western
+Canada is not being educated in soil exhaustion by some of these
+extemporised husbandmen whose habits and temperament lead them to seek
+"fresh fields and pastures new." "We are not out here for our health,"
+was the reply I got when I showed that my old-fashioned economic sense
+was shocked by this substitution of land speculation for farming.
+
+I am aware that this very uneconomic procedure is capable of some
+plausible explanations. The opening up of the vast new territory by the
+provision of local traffic for transcontinental lines was an object of
+national urgency and importance. Nevertheless, I think it must now be
+regretted that a little more thought was not given to the general
+problem of rural economy, of which transit is but one factor. This may
+be that irritating kind of wisdom which comes after the event, but I
+cannot help regarding the policy of rewarding railroad enterprises with
+unconditional grants of vast areas of agricultural land as one of the
+many evidences of the urban domination over rural affairs.
+
+Of the earlier settled portions of this section I cannot speak from
+personal knowledge. But a recent magazine article,[3] "The Agrarian
+Revolution in the Middle West," follows closely the line of my own
+thoughts. In this article Mr. Joseph B. Ross, of Lafayette, Indiana, who
+is making a special study of the evolution of American rural life,
+considers it in three periods: from 1800 to 1835, from 1835 to 1890, and
+from 1890 to the present time. In the middle period he shows how the
+most progressive families raised their standard of living steadily with
+the growing prosperity of the country. They built themselves stately
+homes with substantial barns. The farmer was developing into a citizen
+with the solid virtues, the virile independence, the strong political
+opinions, religious interest, and social instincts which characterised
+the English yeoman of the preceding century. The social life which these
+communities built up, as soon as their economic position was assured,
+was a reflection of the best English traditions--it centred round the
+churches and the Sunday-school. There was a growing distribution of
+literature as well as organisation for intellectual, educational and
+social purposes. Mr. Ross notes the winter excursions to Florida and
+California, the adornment of the homes, and many other evidences of a
+social progress developing a character of its own. During this period
+there was a migration from the country homes to the cities; but it was
+only the natural outflow of the surplus members of the rural families
+into the professional and business life of the growing centres of
+commerce and industry.
+
+In the period through which we are now passing a transformation is
+taking place. The rural exodus is no longer that of individuals, but of
+whole families. The farms thus vacated are let to tenants, generally on
+a three years' lease, at a competition rent. The Country Life Commission
+says that this tendency to move to the cities "is not peculiar to any
+region. In difficult farming regions, and where the competition with
+other farming sections is most severe, the young people may go to town
+to better their condition. In the best regions the older people retire
+to town because it is socially more attractive, and they see a prospect
+of living in comparative ease and comfort on the rental of their lands.
+Nearly everywhere there is a townward movement for the purpose of
+securing school advantages for the children. All this tends to sterilize
+the open country and to lower its social status." The Commission points
+out that the new addition of what is likely to be a stationary element,
+whose economic interests lie elsewhere, to the citizenship of the town,
+may create there a new social problem, while the tenant in the country
+will not have that interest in building up rural society which might be
+expected in the owners of land. Mr. Ross's studies lead him very
+definitely to the same conclusion. Churches and educational
+institutions, he tells us, are being starved, and rural society is fast
+reverting to the type which was prevalent from thirty to fifty years
+ago. But there is one great difference between then and now. Then, rural
+civilisation was passing through a stage of marked social advancement
+which was common throughout the country; now, there are distinct
+indications of social degeneration, which Mr. Ross regards as the
+inevitable consequence of the new landlord and tenant system. Many
+members of these communities must have left the Old World to escape from
+the selfsame conditions which they are reproducing in the New.
+
+Rural society in the Middle West, as it presents itself to the observer
+whose authority I have cited, is obviously in a transitional stage. The
+lack of farm labourers, which is the common subject of complaint by
+farmers in all parts of the United States, cannot fail to be aggravated
+by the change in the conditions of tenancy just noted. The man whose
+chief concern is to get the most out of the land, at the least expense,
+in two or three years, will not treat his labourers so well--nor the
+land so well--as will the man who means to spend his life on the farm;
+and therefore the labourers will not stay. This scarcity of labour may
+be met to some extent by an increased use of machinery; but it is more
+likely to lead to poorer cultivation, which means the depopulation of
+agricultural districts. England and Ireland furnish too many examples of
+the rural decay immortalised in Goldsmith's "Deserted Village." It would
+be strange and sad if the experience were to be repeated on the richest
+soil of America.
+
+In the Southern section we find a wastefulness similar to that in the
+corn belt, but due to wholly different causes. The communities are
+old-settled, but in many instances they are still abnormally depressed
+by the terrible effects of the great war, followed by a period of social
+and economic stagnation. Here there was little but agriculture for the
+people to rely upon, and their methods have, until recent years, been
+very backward. The growing of the same crops year after year upon the
+same fields, the neglect of precaution against the washing away of the
+soil surface, and the failure to use fertilisers, have made the profits
+of tillage disappointingly small. Billions of dollars have been lost by
+these communities through persistent soil exhaustion and erosion. In the
+last few years the Federal Department of Agriculture has maintained a
+most efficient staff of agricultural experts under the direction of Dr.
+Knapp, one of the ablest organisers of farm improvement I have ever met.
+The General Education Board, who administer large sums provided by Mr.
+Rockefeller, recognising the educational value of Dr. Knapp's
+operations, are contributing about one hundred thousand dollars a year
+to his work. Dr. Knapp and his field agents have no difficulty at all in
+demonstrating that the yield may be doubled, and the cost of production
+greatly reduced, merely by the application of the most elementary
+science to agriculture. I heard him tell of a farmer whom he had induced
+to allow his boy--still attending school--to cultivate one acre under
+his instructions. In the result the boy quadrupled the number of bushels
+of corn to the acre that his father, following the traditional methods,
+was able to raise. It would be easy to multiply such instances of
+thriftlessness and neglected opportunity, of poverty within easy reach
+of abundance, which have brought it about that the future of the nation
+is actually endangered by the failure of the food supply to keep pace
+with the increase of its still relatively sparse population.
+
+The Southern section furnishes two illustrations of long-standing
+neglect, both well worthy of consideration for their pregnant
+suggestiveness. The Federal Department of Agriculture recently scored a
+notable success in dealing with an insect pest which was threatening the
+cotton-growing industry with economic ruin. The boll-weevil, like the
+legal and medical professions, thrives upon the follies of humanity. It
+attacks the cotton plants which have been weakened by bad husbandry. The
+scientists did not succeed in finding in the commonwealth of bugs the
+natural enemy of the pest they were after, but Dr. Knapp, with the
+wisdom which prefers prevention to cure, seized the opportunity of
+teaching cotton-growers to diversify their cultivation. The consequence
+was that the cotton crop itself is gradually responding to the
+treatment. Many other crops are adding their quota to the produce of the
+Southern farms, and an all-round improvement, moral as well as material,
+is accompanying the educational discipline through which this reformer
+is putting the communities with whom and for whom he is working.
+
+There is another pest in the South which does not attack the farm crops,
+but goes straight for the farmer. If the Country Life Commission had
+done nothing more, they would have justified their appointment by the
+attention they called to the ravages of the hookworm, which have, no one
+knows how long, scourged the poor white communities in the Southern
+States. The effect of the disease set up by the hookworm, which infests
+the intestines, is a complete sapping of all energy, mental and
+physical. Mr. Rockefeller has provided a million dollars for the
+necessary research work and for such subsequent organisation of sanitary
+effort as may be required to extirpate this unquestionably preventable
+evil. I wonder how long such a state of affairs would have been
+permitted to interfere with the health and to paralyse the industry of
+urban communities. Had the hookworm, instead of lurking in country
+lanes, walked the streets, how would it have fared?
+
+These two pests furnish a fine illustration of the length to which the
+neglect of rural life has been allowed to go in the Southern States.
+
+Neither the Eastern nor the Far Western section presents aspects of
+special interest to the foreign student of the Rural problem in the
+United States, but in both the constructive statesman and the social
+worker will find a rich field for their efforts. In the New England
+States--more especially in the manufacturing districts--the competition
+between town and country for labour is as marked as in Industrial
+England. In this section, however, the lure of the city has a rival in
+the call of the West, which still makes its appeal to the farmer's boy.
+Secretary Wilson has recently given it as his opinion that land-seekers
+who pass by the farms now offered for sale in the western portions of
+New York State often go further and fare worse. In these relatively
+low-priced lands, it ought not to be difficult for agricultural
+communities to establish permanently a rural society worthy of American
+ideas of progress. But to do this is to solve the problem we are
+discussing. We have some other aspects of that problem to consider
+before we can agree upon the essentials of a philosophic and
+comprehensive scheme for the rehabilitation of rural life--before we can
+lay down the lines of a movement to give effect to our plan.
+
+The Far Western section has hardly yet emerged from the frontier-pioneer
+stage, and its rural problem is still below the horizon. I may, however,
+note in passing a few evidences that the people of this section have
+already shown a very real concern for rural progress. The fruit-growers
+of the Pacific Coast have, in the cooperative marketing of their
+produce, made an excellent beginning in a matter of first importance in
+any scheme of rural development. On irrigation farm lands there has
+been developed, in connection with the upkeep and control of the water
+systems, a community spirit which will surely lead to many forms of
+organisation for mutual economic and social advantage. In the city of
+Spokane, Washington, the Chamber of Commerce has aroused a public
+interest in the work of the Country Life Commission which, so far as my
+information goes, has not been equalled elsewhere in the United States.
+The Chamber is republishing the Report of the Commission, for which no
+Federal appropriation appears to have been made. It would seem to be a
+not wild speculation that the statesmen and social workers who will
+first solve the rural problem of the English-speaking peoples may be
+found in the Far West of the New World as well as of the Old.
+
+I must now conclude the diagnosis of rural decadence by a consideration
+of what in my judgment is the chief cause of the malady, and so get to
+a point where we can determine the nature of the remedy. It will then
+remain only to sketch the outlines of the movement which is to give
+practical effect to the agreed principles in the life of rural
+communities.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[3] _North American Review_, September, 1909.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE WEAK SPOT IN AMERICAN RURAL ECONOMY
+
+
+The evidence of competent American witnesses proves that there is, in
+the United States, notwithstanding its immense agricultural wealth, a
+Rural Life problem. Here, as elsewhere, on a fuller analysis, the utmost
+variety of race, soil, climate and market facilities serve but to
+emphasise the importance of the human factor. But this consideration
+does not lessen the need for a sternly practical treatment of the rural
+social economy under review. In this chapter, I propose to go right down
+to the roots of the rural problem, find what is wrong with the industry
+by which the country people live, and see how it can be righted. We
+should then have clearly in our minds the essentials of prosperity in a
+rural community.
+
+Agriculture, the basis of a rural existence, must be regarded as a
+science, as a business and as a life. I have already adverted to
+President Roosevelt's formula for solving the rural problem--"better
+farming, better business, better living." Better farming simply means
+the application of modern science to the practice of agriculture. Better
+business is the no less necessary application of modern commercial
+methods to the business side of the farming industry. Better living is
+the building up, in rural communities, of a domestic and social life
+which will withstand the growing attractions of the modern city.
+
+This threefold scheme of reform covers the whole ground and will become
+the basis of the Country Life movement to be suggested later. But in the
+working out of the general scheme, there must be one important change in
+the order of procedure--'better business' must come first. The dull
+commercial details of agriculture have been sadly neglected, perhaps on
+account of the more human interest of the scientific and social aspects
+of country life. Yet my own experience in working at the rural problem
+in Ireland has convinced me that our first step towards its solution is
+to be found in a better organisation of the farmer's business. It is
+strange but true that the level of efficiency reached in many European
+countries was due to American competition, which in the last half of the
+nineteenth century forced Continental farmers to reorganise their
+industry alike in production, in distribution and in its finance. Both
+Irish experience and Continental study have convinced me that neither
+good husbandry nor a worthy social life can be ensured unless
+accompanied by intelligent and efficient business methods. We must,
+therefore, examine somewhat critically the agricultural system of the
+American farmer, and see wherein its weakness lies.
+
+The superiority of the business methods of the town to those of the
+country is obvious, but I do not think the precise nature of that
+superiority is generally understood. What strikes the eye is the
+material apparatus of business,--the street cars, the advertisements,
+the exchange, the telephone, the typewriter; all these form an
+impressive contrast with the slow, simple life of the farmer, who very
+likely scratches his accounts on a shingle or keeps them in his head.
+But most of this city apparatus is due merely to the necessity of swift
+movement in the concentrated process of exchange and distribution. Such
+swiftness is neither necessary nor possible in the process of isolated
+production. But there is an economic law, applicable alike to rural and
+to urban pursuits, which is being more and more fully recognised and
+obeyed by the farmers of most European countries, including Ireland, but
+which has been too little heeded by the farmers of the United States and
+Great Britain. Under modern economic conditions, things must be done in
+a large way if they are to be done profitably; and this necessitates a
+resort to combination.
+
+The advantage which combination gives to the town over the country was
+recognised long before the recent economic changes forced men to
+combine. In the old towns of Europe all trades began as strict and
+exclusive corporations. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries new
+scientific and economic forces broke up these combinations, which were
+far too narrow for the growing volume of industrial activity, and an
+epoch of competition began. The great towns of America opened their
+business career during this epoch, and have brought the arts of
+competition to a higher perfection than exists in Europe. But it has
+always been known that competition did not exclude combination against
+the consumer; and it is now beginning to be perceived that the fiercer
+the competition, the more surely does it lead in the end to such
+combination.
+
+A trade combination has three principal objects: it aims, first, at
+improving what I may call the internal business methods of the trade
+itself by eliminating the waste due to competition, by economising
+staff, plant, etc., and by the ready circulation of intelligence, and in
+other ways. In the second place, it aims at strengthening the trade
+against outside interests. These may be of various kinds; but in the
+typical case we are considering, namely, the combination of great
+middlemen who control exchange and distribution, the outside interests
+are those of the producer on one side and the consumer on the other; and
+the trade combination, by its organised unity of action, succeeds in
+lowering the prices it pays to the unorganised producer and in raising
+the prices it charges to the unorganised consumer. In the third place,
+the trade combination seeks to favour its own interests in their
+relation to other interests through political control--control not so
+much of the machinery of politics as of its products, legislation and
+administration. I am not now arguing the question whether or how far
+this action on the part of trade combinations is morally justifiable. My
+point is simply that the towns have flourished at the expense of the
+country by the use of these methods, and that the countryman must adopt
+them if he is to get his own again. Moreover, as organisation tends to
+increase the volume and lower the cost of agricultural production and to
+make possible large transactions between organised communities of
+farmers and the trade, it will be seen that the organised combination of
+farmers will simplify the whole commerce of those countries where it is
+adopted, and thus benefit alike the farmer and the trader.
+
+This truth will be easily realised if we consider for a moment the
+system of distribution which the food demand of the modern market has
+evolved. Agricultural produce finds its chief market in the great
+cities. Their populations must have their food so sent in that it can
+be rapidly distributed; and this requires that the consignments must be
+delivered regularly, in large quantities, and of such uniform quality
+that a sample will give a correct indication of the whole. These three
+conditions are essential to rapid distribution, but their fulfilment is
+not within the power of isolated farmers, however large their
+operations. It is an open question whether farmers should themselves
+undertake the distribution of their produce through agencies of their
+own, thus saving the wholesale and possibly the retail profits. But
+unquestionably they should be so well organised at home that they can
+take this course if they are unfairly treated by organised middlemen.
+The Danish farmers, whose highly organised system of distribution has
+made them the chief competitors of the Irish farmers, have established
+(with Government assistance which their organisation enabled them to
+secure) very efficient machinery for distributing their butter, bacon
+and eggs in the British markets. Other European farming communities are
+becoming equally well organised, and similarly control the marketing of
+their produce. But where, as in America and the United Kingdom, the town
+dominates the country, and the machinery of distribution is owned by the
+business men of the towns, it is worked by them in their own interests.
+They naturally take from the unorganised producers as well as from the
+unorganised consumers the full business value of the service they
+render. With the growing cost of living, this has become a matter of
+urgent importance to the towns. In the cheaper-food campaign which began
+in the late fall of 1909, voices are heard calling the farmers to
+account for their uneconomical methods, while here and there
+organisations of consumers are endeavouring to solve the problem to
+their own satisfaction by acquiring land and raising upon it the produce
+which they require.
+
+In the face of such facts it is not easy to account for the
+backwardness of American and British farmers in the obviously important
+matter of organisation. The farmer, we know, is everywhere the most
+conservative and individualistic of human beings. He dislikes change in
+his methods, and he venerates those which have come down to him from his
+fathers' fathers. Whatever else he may waste, these traditions he
+conserves. He does not wish to interfere with anybody else's business,
+and he is fixedly determined that others shall not interfere with his.
+These estimable qualities make agricultural organisation more difficult
+in Anglo-Saxon communities than in those where clan or tribal instincts
+seem to survive.[4]
+
+Now it is fair to the farmer to admit that his calling does not lend
+itself readily to associative action. He lives apart; most of his time
+is spent in the open air, and in the evening of the working day physical
+repose is more congenial to him than mental activity. But when all this
+is said, we have not a complete explanation of the fact that, by failing
+to combine, American and British farmers, persistently disobey an
+accepted law, and refuse to follow the almost universal practice of
+modern business. I believe the true explanation to be one that has
+somehow escaped the notice of the agricultural economist. Those who
+accept it will feel that they have found the weak spot in American
+farming, and that the remedy is neither obscure nor difficult to apply.
+
+The form of combination which the towns have invented for industrial and
+commercial purposes is the Joint Stock Company. Here a number of persons
+contribute their capital to a common fund and entrust the direction to
+a single head or committee, taking no further part in the business
+except to change the management if the undertaking does not yield a
+satisfactory dividend. Our urban way of looking at things has made us
+assume that this city system must be suitable to rural conditions. The
+contrary is the fact. When farmers combine, it is a combination not of
+money only, but of personal effort in relation to the entire business.
+In a cooperative creamery, for example, the chief contribution of a
+shareholder is in milk; in a cooperative 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 neighbours within an
+area small enough to allow of all the members meeting frequently at the
+business centre. 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. After an agreed interest has been paid upon the shares, the net
+profits are divided between the participants in the undertaking, to each
+in proportion as he has contributed to them through the business he has
+done with the institution. And the same idea is applied to the control
+of the management. It is recognised that the poor man's cooperation is
+as important as the rich man's subscription. 'One man, one vote,' is the
+almost universal principle in cooperative bodies.[5]
+
+The distinction between the capitalistic basis of joint stock
+organisation and the more human character of the cooperative system is
+fundamentally important. It is recognised by law in England, where the
+cooperative trading societies are organised under _The Industrial and
+Provident Societies' Act_, and the cooperative credit associations under
+_The Friendly Societies' Act_. In the United States (I am told by
+friends in the legal profession), the Articles of Association of an
+ordinary limited liability company can be so drafted as to meet all the
+requirements I have named. Most countries have enacted laws specially
+devised to meet the requirements of cooperative societies. However it is
+done, the essential of success in agricultural cooperation is that the
+terms and conditions upon which it is based shall be accepted by all
+concerned as being equitable in the distribution of profits, risks and
+control. It then becomes the interest of every member to give his
+whole-hearted support and aid to the common undertaking. To accomplish
+this, it is necessary to explain and secure the acceptance of a
+constitution and procedure carefully thought out to suit each case. It
+will be readily believed that associations of farmers which will meet
+these conditions are not likely to be spontaneously generated; hence the
+necessity for a plan and for the machinery to carry it through.
+
+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 reorganisation of the
+farmer's business. They saw that foreign competition was not, as was
+commonly supposed, a visitation of Providence upon the farmers of the
+British Islands, but a natural economic revolution of permanent effect.
+Our message to Irish farmers was that they must imitate the methods of
+their Continental competitors, who were defeating them in their own
+markets simply by superior organisation. After five years of individual
+propagandism, the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society was formed in
+1894 to meet the demand for instruction as to the formation and the
+working of cooperative societies, a demand to which it was beyond the
+means of the few pioneers to respond.
+
+Two decades of steady development have confirmed the soundness of the
+original scheme, and a brief account of agricultural cooperation in
+Ireland will be of interest to any reader who has persevered so far. The
+conditions were in some respects favourable. The farms are small and
+their owners belong to the class to which cooperation brings most
+immediate benefit. The Irish peasantry are highly intelligent. They lack
+the strong individualism of the English, but they have highly developed
+associative instincts. For this reason cooperation, an alternative to
+communism,--which they abhor,--comes naturally to them. On the other
+hand, the ease with which they can be organised makes them peculiarly
+amenable to political influence. In backward rural communities the
+trader is almost invariably the political boss. He is a leader of
+agrarian agitation, in which he can safely advocate principles he would
+not like to see applied to the relations between himself and his
+customers. He bitterly opposes cooperation, which throws inconvenient
+light upon those relations. We are able to persuade the more enlightened
+rural traders that economies effected in agricultural production will
+raise the standard of living of his customers and make them larger
+consumers of general commodities and more punctual in their payments.
+But in the majority of cases the agricultural organiser finds politics
+in sharp conflict with business, and has a hard row to hoe. So, while we
+have advantages in organising Irish farmers, we have also, largely owing
+to well-known historical causes, to overcome difficulties which have no
+counterpart in the United States or England.
+
+Nevertheless, we managed to make progress. We began with the dairying
+industry, and already half the export of Irish butter comes from the
+cooperative societies we established. Organised bodies of farmers are
+learning to purchase their agricultural requirements intelligently and
+economically. They are also beginning to adopt the methods of the
+organised foreign farmer in controlling the sale of their butter, eggs
+and poultry in the British markets. And they not only combine in
+agricultural production and distribution, but are also making a
+promising beginning in grappling with the problem of agricultural
+finance. It is in this last portion of the Irish programme that by far
+the most interesting study of the cooperative system can be made, on
+account of its success in the poorest parts of the Island. Furthermore,
+the attempt to enable the most embarrassed section of the Irish
+peasantry to procure working capital illustrates some features of
+agricultural cooperation which will have suggestive value for American
+farmers. I will therefore give a brief description of our agricultural
+cooperative credit associations.
+
+The organisation was introduced in the middle of the last century by a
+German Burgomaster, the now famous Herr Raiffeisen. He set himself to
+provide the means of escape from the degrading indebtedness to
+storekeepers and usurers which is the almost invariable lot of poor
+peasantries. His scheme performs an apparent miracle. A body of very
+poor persons, individually--in the commercial sense of the
+term--insolvent, manage to create a new basis of security which has been
+somewhat grandiloquently and yet truthfully called the capitalisation of
+their honesty and industry. The way in which this is done is remarkably
+ingenious. The credit society is organised in the usual democratic way
+explained above, but its constitution is peculiar in one respect. The
+members have to become jointly and severally responsible for the debts
+of the association, which borrows on this unlimited liability from the
+ordinary commercial bank, or, in some cases, from Government sources.
+After the initial stage, when the institution becomes firmly
+established, it attracts local deposits, and thus the savings of the
+community, which are too often hoarded, are set free to fructify in the
+community. The procedure by which the money borrowed is lent to the
+members of the association is the essential feature of the scheme. The
+member requiring the loan must state what he is going to do with the
+money. He must satisfy the committee of the association, who know the
+man and his business, that the proposed investment is one which will
+enable him to repay both principal and interest. He must enter into a
+bond with two sureties for the repayment of the loan, and needless to
+say the characters of both the borrower and his sureties are very
+carefully considered. The period for which the loan is granted is
+arranged to meet the needs of the case, as determined by the committee
+after a full discussion with the borrower. Once the loan has been made,
+it becomes the concern of every member of the association to see that
+it is applied to the 'approved purpose'--as it is technically called.
+What is more important is that all the borrower's fellow-members become
+interested in his business and anxious for its success.
+
+The fact that nearly three hundred of these societies are at work in
+Ireland, and that, although their transactions are on a very modest
+scale, the system is steadily growing both in the numbers of its
+adherents and in the business transacted is, I think, a remarkable
+testimony to the value of the cooperative system. The details I have
+given illustrate the important distinction between cooperation, which
+enables the farmer to do his business in a way that suits him, and the
+urban form of combination, which is unsuited to his needs. The ordinary
+banks lend money to agriculturists for a term (generally ninety days)
+which has been fixed to suit the needs of town business. Thus, a farmer
+borrowing money to sow a crop, or to purchase young cattle, is obliged
+to repay his loan, in the first instance, before the crop is harvested,
+and in the second, before the cattle mature and are marketable. Far more
+important, however, than these not inconsiderable economic advantages
+are the social benefits which are derived by bringing people together to
+achieve in a very definite and practical way the aim of all cooperative
+effort--self-help by mutual help.
+
+Our cooperative movement, taken as a whole, is to-day represented by
+nearly one thousand farmers' organisations, with an aggregate membership
+of some one hundred thousand persons, mostly heads of families. Its
+business turnover last year was twelve and a half million dollars. In
+estimating the significance of these figures, American readers must not
+'think in continents,' and must give more weight to the moral than to
+the material achievement. As I have explained, the cooperative system
+requires for its success the exercise of higher moral qualities than
+does the joint stock company. Once a cooperative society becomes a
+soulless corporation, its days are numbered. It requires also the
+diffusion of a good deal of economic thought among its members, and
+this, also, is no small matter in the conditions. The most striking fact
+about this work in Ireland is that while in its earlier years
+organisation consisted mainly in expounding and commending to farmers
+the cooperative principle, we now find that the principle is taken for
+granted and the only question upon which advice is needed is how to
+apply it. The progress of agricultural cooperation depends largely on
+the character of the community; its commercial value may be measured by
+the extent to which it develops in the community the mental and moral
+qualities essential to success.[6]
+
+In agricultural cooperation, Ireland can claim to have shown the way to
+the United Kingdom. Ten years ago, after the Irish movement had been
+launched, the English rural reformers started a movement on exactly the
+same lines, even founding on the Irish model an English Agricultural
+Organisation Society. An Irishman, who had studied cooperation at home,
+was selected as its chief executive officer. Five years later, a
+Scottish Agricultural Organisation Society took the field. Both in
+England and in Scotland the chief difficulty to be overcome is the
+intense individualism of the farmers, and perhaps some lack of altruism.
+The large farmers did not feel the need of cooperation, and where the
+natural leader of the rural community will not lead, the small
+cultivator cannot follow. Whether the same difficulties have prevented
+any considerable adoption of agricultural cooperation in the United
+States, it is not necessary to inquire. It is certain that the
+underlying principles approved by every progressive rural, community in
+Europe have not so far exercised more than an occasional and fitful
+influence upon the rural economy of the American Republic.
+
+If I have given in these pages a true explanation of the deplorable
+backwardness of American farmers in the matter of business combination
+when compared with all other American workers, those who take part in
+the movement which is to provide the remedy will have set themselves a
+task as hopeful as it is interesting. Americans as a people are addicted
+to associated action. I have seen the principle of cooperation developed
+to the highest point in the ranching industry in the days of the
+unfenced range. Our cattle used to roam at large, the only means of
+identifying them being certain registered marks made by the
+branding-iron and the knife. The individual owner would have had no more
+property in his herd than he would have had in so many fishes in the
+sea but for a very effective cooperative organisation. The Stock
+Association, with its 'round-ups' and its occasional resort to the
+Supreme Court of Judge Lynch, were an adequate substitute for the title
+deeds to the lands, and for fences horse-high, bull-strong and
+hog-tight. But then we were in the Arid Belt and the frontier-pioneer
+stage; we had no politics and no politicians. I must return, however, to
+the less exciting, but I suppose more important, life of the regular
+farmer, and consider his efforts at organisation.
+
+Instances can be multiplied where the cooperative system has been
+adopted with immensely beneficial results; but in too many cases it has
+been abandoned. On the other hand, Granges, Institutes, Clubs, Leagues,
+Alliances and a multitude of miscellaneous farmers' associations have
+been organised for social, religious, political and economic objects.
+From my study of the work done by these bodies, the impression left is
+that almost everything that can be done better by working together than
+by working separately has been at some time the subject of organised
+effort. But these manifestations of activity have been fitful and
+sporadic. They were commonly marked by some or all of the same
+defects--mutual distrust, divided counsels, ignorance of what others
+were doing, want of continuity and impatience of results. Many
+organisations, after winning some advantages,--over the railroads for
+instance,--fell into abeyance or even out of existence; others lapsed
+under the enervating influence of a little temporary prosperity, such as
+a few years of better prices. The truth is, American farmers have had
+the will to organise, but they have missed the way.[7]
+
+The political influence of the farming community has for this reason
+never been commensurate either with the numerical strength of its
+members or the magnitude of their share in the nation's work. It is
+true that the Federal Department of Agriculture, appropriations for
+Agricultural Colleges, some railway legislation and other boons to
+farmers, are to be attributed to the efforts of their organisations.
+Yet, as compared with the influence exercised upon National affairs by
+the farmers of, say, France and Denmark, the American farmer has but a
+small influence upon legislation and administration affecting his
+interests. What better proof of this could be given than the absence of
+a Parcels Post in the United States? The whole farming community are
+agreed as to the need for this boon to the dwellers of the open country,
+and yet they have not succeeded in winning it against the opposition of
+the Express Companies, because it is merely a farmers' and not a
+townsmen's grievance. And not only political impotence, but political
+inertia, result from the lack of organisation. The state of the country
+roads--one of the greatest disabilities under which country life in the
+United States still suffers--is as good an instance as I know. Congress
+has shown itself well disposed towards the farmer, but not always so the
+State governments, and the good intentions of Congress on the roads
+question are largely nullified owing to the failure of one-third of the
+States to establish highway commissions, or make other provision for
+expending such amounts as might be voted to them by Congress. Here, as
+in the cases of the transit and marketing problems, we see the need for
+a strong, central, permanent organisation, fitted alike to direct local
+or promote National action; an association capable of securing the
+legislative protection of the farmer's interests, and an organisation
+fitted to further the business side of his industry. In fact, this need
+is urgent, and a cooperative movement of National dimensions should be
+established to meet it. Had such a movement been started after the War,
+or even twenty years later, the American farmer would be in a far
+stronger position to-day, and much misdirected effort would have been
+saved.
+
+I have now tried to explain the weak spot in American rural economy. It
+may be regarded from a more general point of view. If we were
+considering the life of some commercial or industrial community and
+trying to forecast its future development, one of the first things we
+should note would be its general business methods. No manufacturing
+concern with a defective office administration and incompetent
+travellers could survive, even if it had an Archimedes or an Edison in
+supreme control. I cannot see any reason why an agricultural community
+should expect to prosper while the industry by which its members live
+retains its present business organisation. I have urged that as things
+are, the farming interest is at a fatal disadvantage in the purchase of
+agricultural requirements, in the sale of agricultural produce, and in
+obtaining proper credit facilities. Whatever the cause--and I have set
+down those which I regard as the chief among them--American farmers have
+still to learn that they are subject to a law of modern business which
+governs all their country's industrial activities--the law that each
+body of workers engaged in supplying the modern market must combine, or
+be worsted at every turn in competition with those who do.
+
+I do not much fear that this general principle, overlooked, perhaps,
+because it was too obvious to be worth enforcing, will be disputed. I
+hope I may gain acceptance for my further contention that the inability
+of American farmers to sustain an effective business organisation has
+been due simply to the fact that the not obvious distinction between the
+capitalistic and the cooperative basis of combination suitable to town
+and country respectively was missed. For it will then be clear why, in
+the working out of Mr. Roosevelt's formula, better business must precede
+and form the basis of better farming and better living. The conviction
+that in this general procedure lies the one hope of solving the problem
+under review accounts for the otherwise disproportionate space given to
+that aspect of rural life which is of the least interest to the general
+reader.
+
+I shall now attempt to determine the principles which must be applied to
+the solution of our problem. Those who have followed the arguments up to
+this point will have a pretty clear idea of the general drift of my
+conclusions. The substitution in rural economy of the cooperative for
+the competitive principle, which I have so far advocated as a matter of
+business prudence, will be seen to have a wider import. This course will
+be shown to have an important bearing upon the application of the new
+knowledge to the oldest industry and also upon the building of a new
+rural civilisation we must provide for the dwellers of the open country
+a larger share of the intellectual and social pleasures for the want of
+which those most needed in the country are too often drawn to the
+town.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[4] I should expect the negroes in the Southern States to be very good
+subjects for agricultural organisation. I have discussed this question
+with the staff of the Hampton Institute in Virginia--a fine body of men,
+doing noble work. The Principal, the Rev. H. B. Frissell, D.D., whose
+judgment in this matter is probably the weightiest in the United States,
+and his leading assistants, both white and coloured, are of the same
+opinion.
+
+[5] Where capital is, in rare instances, subscribed by persons other
+than farmers, it is usually invested less as a commercial speculation
+than as an act of friendship on the part of the investor, who in no case
+exercises more control than his one vote affords.
+
+[6] Readers who are sufficiently interested in the rural life movement
+in Ireland will find a full description of it in my book, "Ireland in
+the New Century," John Murray, London, and E. P. Dutton, New York.
+
+[7] Mr. John Lee Coulter contributed to the _Yale Review_ for November,
+1909, an article on Organization among the farmers of the United States
+which is a most valuable summary of the important facts.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE WAY TO BETTER FARMING AND BETTER LIVING
+
+
+In no way is the contrast between rural and urban civilisation more
+marked than in the application of the teachings of modern science to
+their respective industries. Even the most important mechanical
+inventions were rather forced upon the farmer by the efficient selling
+organisation of the city manufacturers than demanded by him as a result
+of good instruction in farming. On the mammoth wheat farms, where, as
+the fable ran, the plough that started out one morning returned on the
+adjoining furrow the following day, mechanical science was indeed called
+in, but only to perpetrate the greatest soil robbery in agricultural
+history. Application of science to legitimate agriculture is
+comparatively new. In my ranching and farming days I well remember how
+general was the disbelief in its practical value throughout the Middle
+and Far West. In cowboy terminology, all scientists were classified as
+"bug-hunters," and farmers generally had no use for the theorist. The
+non-agricultural community had naturally no higher appreciation of the
+farmer's calling than he himself displayed. When some Universities first
+developed agricultural courses, the students who entered for them were
+nicknamed "aggies," and were not regarded as adding much to the dignity
+of a seat of higher learning. The Department of Agriculture was looked
+upon as a source of jobs, graft being the nearest approach to any known
+agricultural operation.
+
+All this is changing fast. The Federal Department of Agriculture is now
+perhaps the most popular and respected of the world's great
+administrative institutions. In the Middle West, a newly awakened
+public opinion has set up an honourable rivalry between such States as
+Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska and Minnesota, in developing the
+agricultural sides of their Universities and Colleges. None the less,
+Mr. James J. Hill has recently given it as his opinion that not more
+than one per cent of the farmers of these regions are working in direct
+touch with any educational institution. It is probable that this
+estimate leaves out of account the indirect influence of the vast amount
+of extension work and itinerant instruction which is embraced in the
+activities of the Universities and Colleges. I fear it cannot be denied
+that in the application of the natural sciences to the practical, and of
+economic science to the business of farming, the country folk are
+decades behind their urban fellow-citizens. And again I say the
+disparity is to be attributed to the difference in their respective
+degrees of organisation for business purposes.
+
+The relation between business organisation and economic progress ought,
+I submit, to be very seriously considered by the social workers who
+perceive that progress is mainly a question of education. Speaking from
+administrative experience at home, and from a good deal of interested
+observation in America, I am firmly convinced that the new rural
+education is badly handicapped by the lack of organised bodies of
+farmers to act as channels for the new knowledge now made available. In
+some instances, I am aware, great good has been done by the formation of
+farmers' institutes which have been established in order to interest
+rural communities in educational work and to make the local arrangements
+for instruction by lectures, demonstrations and otherwise. But all
+European experience proves the superiority for this purpose of the
+business association to the organisation _ad hoc_, and has a much better
+chance of permanence.
+
+Again, the influence upon rural life of the agricultural teaching of the
+Colleges and Universities, as exercised by their pupils, may be too
+easily accepted as being of greater potential utility than any work
+which these institutions can do amongst adults. This is a mistake. The
+thousands of young men who are now being trained for advanced farming
+too often have to restrict the practical application of their theoretic
+knowledge to the home circle, which is not always responsive, for a man
+is not usually a prophet in his own family. It is here that the
+educational value of cooperative societies comes in; they act as
+agencies through which scientific teaching may become actual practice,
+not in the uncertain future, but in the living present. A cooperative
+association has a quality which should commend it to the social
+reformer--the power of evoking character; it brings to the front a new
+type of local leader, not the best talker, but the man whose knowledge
+enables him to make some solid contribution to the welfare of the
+community.
+
+I come now to the last part of the threefold scheme--that which aims at
+a better life upon the farm. The cooperative association, in virtue of
+its non-capitalistic basis of constitution and procedure (which, as I
+have explained, distinguishes it from the Joint Stock Company), demands
+as a condition of its business success the exercise of certain social
+qualities of inestimable value to the community life. It is for this
+reason, no doubt, that where men and women have learned to work together
+under this system in the business of their lives, they are easily
+induced to use their organisation for social and intellectual purposes
+also.
+
+The new organisation of the rural community for social as well as
+economic purposes, which should follow from the acceptance of the
+opinion I have advanced, would bring with it the first effective
+counter-attraction to the towns. Their material advantages the country
+cannot hope to rival; nor can any conceivable evolution of rural life
+furnish a real counterpart to the cheap and garish entertainments of
+the modern city. Take, for example, the extravagant use of electric
+light for purposes of advertisement, which affords a nightly display of
+fireworks in any active business street of an American city far superior
+to the occasional exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London, which was
+the rare treat of my childhood days. These delights--if such they
+be--cannot be extended into remote villages in Kansas or Nebraska; but
+their enchantment must be reckoned with by those who would remould the
+life of the open country and make it morally and mentally satisfying to
+those who are born to it, or who, but for its social stagnation, would
+prefer a rural to an urban existence.
+
+In one of his many public references to country life, President
+Roosevelt attributed the rural exodus to the desire of "the more active
+and restless young men and women" to escape from "loneliness and lack of
+mental companionship."[8] He is hopeful that the rural free delivery,
+the telephone, the bicycle and the trolley will do much towards
+"lessening the isolation of farm life and making it brighter and more
+attractive." Many to whom I have spoken on this subject fear that the
+linking of the country with the town by these applications of modern
+science may, to some extent, operate in a direction the opposite of that
+which Mr. Roosevelt anticipates and desires. According to this view, the
+more intimate knowledge of the modern city may increase the desire to be
+in personal touch with it; the telephone may fail to give through the
+ear the satisfaction which is demanded by the eye; among the "more
+active and restless young men and women" the rural free delivery may
+circulate the dime novel and the trolley make accessible the dime
+museum. In the total result the occasional visit may become more and
+more frequent, until the duties of country life are first neglected and
+then abandoned.
+
+I do not feel competent to decide between these two views, but I offer
+one consideration with which I think many rural reformers will agree.
+The attempt to bring the advantages of the city within the reach of the
+dwellers in the country cannot, of itself, counteract the townward
+tendency in so far as it is due to the causes summarised above. However
+rapidly, in this respect, the country may be improved, the city is sure
+to advance more rapidly and the gap between them to be widened. The new
+rural civilisation should aim at trying to develop in the country the
+things of the country, the very existence of which seems to have been
+forgotten. But, after all, it is the world within us rather than the
+world without us that matters in the making of society, and I must give
+to the social influence of the cooperative idea what I believe to be its
+real importance.
+
+In Ireland, from which so much of my experience is drawn, we have found
+a tendency growing among farmers whose combinations are successful, to
+gather into one strong local association all those varied objects and
+activities which I have described as advocated by the Irish Agricultural
+Organisation Society. These local associations are ceasing to have one
+special purpose or one object only. They absorb more and more of the
+business of the district. One large, well-organised institution is being
+substituted for the numerous petty transactions of farmers with
+middlemen and small country traders. Gradually the Society becomes the
+most important institution in the district, the most important in a
+social as well as in an economic sense. The members feel a pride in its
+material expansion. They accumulate large profits, which in time become
+a kind of communal fund. In some cases this is used for the erection of
+village halls where social entertainments, concerts and dances are held,
+lectures delivered and libraries stored. Finally, the association
+assumes the character of a rural commune, where, instead of the old
+basis of the commune, the joint ownership of land, a new basis for union
+is found in the voluntary communism of effort.
+
+A true social organism is thus being created with common human and
+economic interests, and the clan feeling, which was so powerful an
+influence in early and mediaeval civilisations, with all its power of
+generating passionate loyalties, is born anew in the modern world. Our
+ancient Irish records show little clans with a common ownership of land
+hardly larger than a parish, but with all the patriotic feeling of large
+nations held with an intensity rare in our modern states. The history of
+these clans and of very small nations like the ancient Greek states
+shows that the social feeling assumes its most binding and powerful
+character where the community is large enough to allow free play to the
+various interests of human life, but is not so large that it becomes an
+abstraction to the imagination. Most of us feel no greater thrill in
+being one of a State with fifty million inhabitants than we do in
+recognising we are citizens of the solar system. The rural commune and
+the very small States exhibit the feeling of human solidarity in its
+most intense manifestations, working on itself, regenerating itself and
+seeking its own perfection. Combinations of agriculturists, when the
+rural organisation is complete, re-create in a new way the conditions
+where these social instincts germinate best, and it is only by this
+complete organisation of rural life that we can hope to build up a rural
+civilisation, and create those counter-attractions to urban life which
+will stay the exodus from the land.
+
+I do not wish to exaggerate the interest which the rural life of my own
+little island may have for those who are concerned for the vast and
+wealthy expanses of the American farm lands. But, even here there is a
+genuine desire for the really simple life, which in its commonest
+manifestation is a thing that rather simple people talk about. In a
+properly organised rural neighbourhood could be developed that higher
+kind of attraction which is suggested by the very word _neighbourhood_.
+Once get the farmers and their families all working together at
+something that concerns them all, and we have the beginning of a more
+stable and a more social community than is likely to exist amid the
+constant change and bustle of the large towns, where indeed some
+thinkers tell us that not only the family, but also the social life, is
+badly breaking down. When people are really interested in each
+other--and this interest comes of habitually working together--the
+smallest personal traits or events affecting one are of interest to all.
+The simplest piece of amateur acting or singing, done in the village
+hall by one of the villagers, will arouse more criticism and more
+enthusiasm among his friends and neighbours than can be excited by the
+most consummate performance of a professional in a great city theatre,
+where no one in the audience knows or cares for the performer.
+
+But if this attraction--the attraction of common work and social
+intercourse with a circle of friends--is to prevail in the long run over
+the lure which the city offers to eye and ear and pocket, there must be
+a change in rural education. At present country children are educated as
+if for the purpose of driving them into the towns. To the pleasure which
+the cultured city man feels in the country--because he has been taught
+to feel it--the country child is insensible. The country offers
+continual interest to the mind which has been trained to be thoughtful
+and observant; the town offers continual distraction to the vacant eye
+and brain. Yet, the education given to country children has been
+invented for them in the town, and it not only bears no relation to the
+life they are to lead, but actually attracts them towards a town career.
+I am aware that I am here on ground where angels--even if specialised in
+pedagogy--may well fear to tread. Upon the principles of a sound
+agricultural education pedagogues are in a normally violent state of
+disagreement with each other. But whatever compromise between general
+education and technical instruction be adopted, the resulting reform
+that is needed has two sides. We want two changes in the rural
+mind--beginning with the rural teacher's mind. First, the interest which
+the physical environment of the farmer provides to followers of almost
+every branch of science must be communicated to the agricultural classes
+according to their capacities. Second, that intimacy with and affection
+for nature, to which Wordsworth has given the highest expression, must
+in some way be engendered in the rural mind. In this way alone will the
+countryman come to realize the beauty of the life around him, as through
+the teaching of science he will learn to realise its truth.
+
+Upon this reformed education, as a basis, the rural economy must be
+built. It must, if my view be accepted, ensure, first and foremost, the
+combination of farmers for business purposes in such a manner as will
+enable them to control their own marketing and make use of the many
+advantages which a command of capital gives. In all European
+countries--with the exception of the British Isles--statesmen have
+recognised the national necessity for the good business organisation of
+the farmer. In some cases, for example France, even Government officials
+expound the cooperative principle. In Denmark, the most predominantly
+rural country in Europe, the education both in the common and in the
+high school has long been so admirably related to the working lives of
+the agricultural classes that the people adopt spontaneously the methods
+of organisation which the commercial instinct they have acquired through
+education tells them to be suitable to the conditions. The rural
+reformer knows that this is the better way; but our problem is not
+merely the education of a rising, but the development of a grown-up
+generation. We cannot wait for the slow process of education to produce
+its effect upon the mind of the rural youth, even if there were any way
+of ensuring their proper training for a progressive rural life without
+first giving to their parents such education as they can assimilate.
+Direct action is called for; we have to work with adult farmers and
+induce them to reorganise their business upon the lines which I have
+attempted to define. Moreover, this is essential to the future success
+of the work done in the schools, in order that the trained mind of youth
+may not afterwards find itself baulked by the ignorant apathy or lazy
+conservatism of its elders.
+
+I hold, then, that the new economy will mean a more scientific mastery
+of the technical side of farming, for farmers will make a much larger
+use of the advice, instruction and help which the Nation and the States
+offer them through the Department of Agriculture and the Colleges. It is
+equally certain that there will arise a more human social life in the
+rural districts, based upon the greater share of the products of the
+farmer's industry, which the new business organisation will enable him
+to retain; stimulated by the closer business relations with his fellows
+which that organisation will bring about, and fostered by the closer
+neighbourhood which is implied in a more intensive cultivation.
+
+The development of a more intensive cultivation must carry with it a
+much more careful consideration of the labour problem. The difficulty of
+getting and keeping labour on the farm is a commonplace. I think farmers
+have not faced the fact that this difficulty is due in the main to their
+own way of doing their business. Competent men will not stay at farm
+labour unless it offers them continuous employment as part of a
+well-ordered business concern; and this is not possible unless with a
+greatly improved husbandry.
+
+To-day agriculture has to compete in the labour market against other,
+and to many men more attractive, industries, and a marked elevation in
+the whole standard of life in the rural world is the best insurance of a
+better supply of good farm labour. Only an intensive system of farming
+can afford any large amount of permanent employment at decent wages to
+the rural labourer, and only a good supply of competent labour can
+render intensive farming on any large scale practicable. But the
+intensive system of farming not only gives regular employment and good
+wages; it also fits the labourer of to-day--in a country where a man can
+strike out for himself--to be the successful farmer of to-morrow. Nor,
+in these days of impersonal industrial relations, should the fact be
+overlooked that under an intensive system of agriculture, we find still
+preserved the kindly personal relation between employer and employed
+which contributes both to the pleasantness of life and to economic
+progress and security.
+
+Moreover, in a country where advanced farming is the rule, there is a
+remarkable, and, from the standpoint of national stability, most
+valuable, steadiness in employment. Good farming, by fixing the labourer
+on the soil, improves the general condition of rural life, by ridding
+the countryside of the worst of its present pests. Those wandering
+dervishes of the industrial world, the hobo, the tramp--the entire
+family of Weary Willies and Tired Timothys--will no longer have even an
+imaginary excuse for their troubled and troublesome existence. But the
+farmer who was the prey of these pests must, if he would be permanently
+rid of them, learn to respect his hired farm hand. He must provide him
+with a comfortable cottage and a modest garden plot upon which his young
+family may employ themselves; otherwise, whatever the farmer may do to
+attract labour, he will never retain it. In short, the labourer, too,
+must get his full and fair share of the prosperity of the coming good
+time in the country.
+
+There is one particular aspect of this improved social life which is so
+important that it ought properly to form the subject of a separate
+essay; I mean the position of women in rural life. In no country in the
+world is the general position of woman better, or her influence greater,
+than in the United States. But while woman has played a great part there
+in the social life and economic development of the town, I hold that the
+part she is destined to play in the future making of the country will be
+even greater.
+
+In the more intelligent scheme of the new country life, the economic
+position of woman is likely to be one of high importance. She enters
+largely into all three parts of our programme,--better farming, better
+business, better living. In the development of higher farming, for
+instance, she is better fitted than the more muscular but less patient
+animal, man, to carry on with care that work of milk records, egg
+records, etc., which underlies the selection on scientific lines of the
+more productive strains of cattle and poultry. And this kind of work is
+wanted in the study not only of animal, but also of plant life.
+
+Again, in the sphere of better business, the housekeeping faculty of
+woman is an important asset, since a good system of farm accounts is one
+of the most valuable aids to successful farming. But it is, of course,
+in the third part of the programme,--better living,--that woman's
+greatest opportunity lies. The woman makes the home life of the Nation.
+But she desires also social life, and where she has the chance she
+develops it. Here it is that the establishment of the cooperative
+society, or union, gives an opening and a range of conditions in which
+the social usefulness of woman makes itself quickly felt. I do not think
+that I am laying too much stress on this matter, because the pleasures,
+the interests and the duties of society, properly so called,--that is,
+the state of living on friendly terms with our neighbours,--are always
+more central and important in the life of a woman than of a man. The
+man needs them, too, for without them he becomes a mere machine for
+making money; but the woman, deprived of them, tends to become a mere
+drudge. The new rural social economy (which implies a denser population
+occupying smaller holdings) must therefore include a generous provision
+for all those forms of social intercourse which specially appeal to
+women. The Women's Sections of the Granges have done a great deal of
+useful work in this direction; we need a more general and complete
+application of the principles on which they act.
+
+I have now stated the broad principles which must govern any effective
+scheme for correcting the present harmful subordination of rural life to
+a civilisation too exclusively urban. Before I bring forward my definite
+proposal for a remedy calculated to meet the needs of the situation, I
+must anticipate a line of criticism which may occur to the mind of any
+social worker who does not happen to be very familiar with the
+conditions of country life.
+
+I can well imagine readers who have patiently followed my arguments
+wishing to interrogate me in some such terms as these: "Assuming," they
+may say, "that we accept all you tell us about the neglect of the rural
+population, and agree as to the grave consequences which must follow if
+it be continued, what on earth can we do? Of course the welfare of the
+rural population is a matter of paramount importance to the city and to
+the nation at large; but may we remind you that you said the evil and
+the consequences can be removed and averted only by those immediately
+concerned--the actual farmers--and that the remedy for the rural
+backwardness was to be sought for in the rural mind? 'Canst thou
+minister to a mind diseased?' Must not the patient 'minister' to
+himself?"
+
+Fair questions these, and altogether to the point. I answer at once that
+the patient ought to minister to himself, but he won't. He has acquired
+the habit of sending for the physician of the town, whose physic but
+aggravates the disease. Dropping metaphor, the farmer does not think for
+himself. In rural communities, there is as great a lack of collective
+thought as of cooperative action. All progress is conditional on public
+opinion, and this, even in the country, is a very much town-made thing.
+
+So I am, then, in this difficulty. My subject is rural, my audience
+urban. I have to commend to the statesmen and the philanthropists of the
+town the somewhat incongruous proposal that they should take the
+initiative in rural reform. Neither the thought nor the influence which
+can set in motion what in agricultural communities is no less than an
+economic revolution are to be found in the open country. To the townsmen
+I now address my appeal and submit a plan.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[8] Message to the Fifty-eighth Congress (1903).
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE TWO THINGS NEEDFUL
+
+
+In my earlier chapters I traced to the Industrial Revolution in England
+the origin of that subordination, in the English-speaking countries, of
+rural to urban interests which finds its expression to-day in the
+problem of rural life. I have shown that the continuance of the tendency
+in America was natural if not inevitable, and have urged that, for
+economic, social and political reasons, its further progress should now
+be stayed. If my view as to the origin, present effects and probable
+consequences of the evil be accepted, any serious proposals for a remedy
+will be welcomed by all who realise that national well-being cannot
+endure if urban prosperity is accompanied by rural decay. In this belief
+I offer the scheme for a Country Life movement which has slowly matured
+in my own mind as the result of the experience described in the
+preceding pages.
+
+The first aim of the movement should be to cooerdinate, and guide towards
+a common end, the efforts of a large number of agencies--educational,
+religious, social and philanthropic--which, in their several ways, are
+already engaged upon some part of the work to be done. For such a
+movement the United States offers advantages not to be found elsewhere
+in the area for which we are concerned. For here public-spirited
+individuals and associations of the kind required exist in larger
+numbers than can be known to any one who has not watched what is going
+on in this field of social service. If I had not already devoted too
+much space to personal experiences, I could of my own knowledge testify
+to the remarkable growth of organised effort in American rural
+communities. Sometimes this is the outcome of a growing spirit of
+neighbourliness, sometimes it emanates from young Universities and
+Colleges emulating the extension work with which nearly every big city
+is familiar. I have been much struck with the way in which, at
+gatherings of school teachers, pedagogic detail and questions affecting
+their status and emoluments have become less popular subjects for
+discussion than schemes of social progress.[9] Similarly, the
+agricultural Press is becoming less exclusively technical and
+commercial, and more human. Even the syndicated stuff is getting less
+townified. My correspondence, newspaper clippings sent to me, and many
+other indications, point in the same direction. They leave the
+impression upon my mind that there is a vast, efficient and enthusiastic
+army of social workers upon the farm lands of the United States badly in
+need of a Headquarters Staff.
+
+If I am right in believing that, of the English-speaking countries, the
+United States affords the best opportunity for such a consummation, most
+assuredly the present time is peculiarly auspicious. If Mr. Roosevelt's
+Country Life policy has not been received with any marked enthusiasm,
+American public opinion has been thoroughly aroused upon his
+Conservation policy. The latter cannot possibly come to fruition--nor
+even go much further--until the Country Life problem is boldly faced. In
+the Conference of Governors it was pointed out over and over again that
+the farmer, now the chief waster, must become the chief conserver. As
+such he will himself become a supporter of the policy, and will bring to
+the aid of those advocates of Conservation whose chief concern is for
+future generations, an interested public opinion which will go far to
+outweigh the influence of those who profit by the exhaustion of natural
+resources. To the country life reformer I would say that, as the one
+idea has caught on while the other lags, he will, if he is wise, hitch
+his Country Life waggon to the Conservation star.
+
+With every advantage of time and place, the promotion of the movement
+which is to counteract the townward tendency will have to reckon with
+the psychological difficulty inherent in the conditions. They must
+recognise the paradox of the situation already pointed out, the
+necessity of interesting the town in the problems of the country. The
+urban attitude of mind which caused the evil, and now makes it difficult
+to interest public opinion in the remedy, is not new; it pervades the
+literature of the Augustan age. I recall from my school days Virgil's
+great handbook on Italian agriculture, written with a mastery of
+technical detail unsurpassed by Kipling. But the farmers he had in mind
+when he indulged in his memorable rhapsody upon the happiness of their
+lot were out for pleasure rather than profit. While the suburban poet
+sang to the merchant princes, Rome was paying a bonus upon imported
+corn, and entering generally upon that fatal disregard for the interest
+of the rural population which is one of the accepted causes of the
+decline and fall.
+
+How that Old World tragi-comedy comes back to me when I talk to New York
+friends on the subject of these pages! I am not, so they tell me, up to
+date in my information; there is a marked revulsion of feeling upon the
+town _versus_ country question; the tide of the rural exodus has really
+turned, as I might have discerned without going far afield. At many a
+Long Island home I might see on Sundays, weather permitting, the
+horny-handed son of week-day toil in Wall Street, rustically attired,
+inspecting his Jersey cows and aristocratic fowls. These supply a select
+circle in New York with butter and eggs, at a price which leaves nothing
+to be desired--unless it be some information as to the cost of
+production. Full justice is done to the new country life when the
+Farmers' Club of New York fulfils its chief function, the annual dinner
+at Delmonico's. Then agriculture is extolled in fine Virgilian style,
+the Hudson villa and the Newport 'cottage' being permitted to divide the
+honours of the rural revival with the Long Island home. But to my
+bucolic intelligence, it would seem that against the 'back to the land'
+movement of Saturday afternoon the captious critic might set the rural
+exodus of Monday morning.
+
+These reflections are introduced in no unfriendly spirit, and with
+serious intent. To me this new rural life is associated with memories of
+characteristically American hospitality; but my interest in it is more
+than personal. It is giving to those who cultivate it, among whom are
+the helpers most needed at the moment, a point of view which will enable
+them to grasp the real problem of the open country, as it exists, for
+example, in the great food-producing and cotton-growing tracts of the
+West and South. Both in the countries where the townward tendency of
+the industrial age was foreseen and prevented, and in those in which the
+evil is being cured, the impulse and inspiration which will be required
+to initiate and sustain our Country Life movement came mainly from
+leaders who were not themselves agriculturists.[10] Proficiency in the
+practice or even in the business of farming is not necessary. What is
+needed is a comprehensive knowledge of public affairs, political
+imagination, an understanding sympathy with and a philosophic insight
+into the entire life of communities. Men who combine with the necessary
+experience those gifts of heart and mind which go to make the higher
+citizenship in the many, and the statesmanship in the few, will more
+likely be found in the city than in the country. Yet they are, in the
+conditions, the natural leaders of the Country Life movement, which must
+now be defined.
+
+The situation demands two things; on the one hand an association,
+popular, propagandist, organising; on the other, an Institute,
+scientific, philosophic, research-making. These two things are distinct
+in character, but they are complementary to each other. One will require
+popular enthusiasm and business organisation. To the service of the
+other must be brought the patient spirit of scientific and philosophic
+analysis and inquiry. These two bodies--the popular propagandist
+association and the scientific research-making Institute--must,
+therefore, be created; and, for a reason to be explained when we
+consider the work of the Institute, they should be independent of each
+other. This rough indication of the character of the work, which I will
+describe more in detail presently, will suffice for the moment. I feel
+that the work will be so intensely human in its interest that it will be
+well to say at once how the two central agencies can be established, and
+the movement made, not a writer's fancy, but a living and doing agency
+of human progress.
+
+A body, in many respects ideally fitted to give the necessary impulse
+and direction to the work of organisation, is already in the field. The
+leaders of the Conservation idea, recognising that their policy, in
+common with other policies, will need an organised public opinion at its
+back, have founded a National Conservation Association. Mr. Gifford
+Pinchot has now been selected as its President. Before he was available,
+the task of organising and setting to work the new institution was
+unanimously entrusted to and accepted by President Eliot, of whose
+qualifications all I will say is that we foreign students of social
+problems vie with his own countrymen in our appreciation of his public
+work and aims. These two appointments are sufficient proof of the
+serious importance of the work, and bespeak public influence and support
+for the Association. I have no doubt that this body would be fully
+qualified to formulate and initiate the Country Life movement, and act
+as the central agency for the active promotion of its objects. Its
+members, who, I am sure, agree with Mr. Roosevelt in regarding the
+movement as a necessary complement to the Conservation policy, might
+even feel that for this very reason it was incumbent upon them to set
+their organisation to this work.
+
+There is, however, one consideration which will make Mr. Pinchot and his
+associates hesitate to adopt this course. The doubt relates to the
+distinction I have drawn between the Conservation policy and the Country
+Life movement, the one seeking to promote legislative and administrative
+action, and the other, while it may give birth to a policy, being
+chiefly concerned with voluntary effort.[11] Although the National
+Conservation Association is founded for the purpose of educating public
+opinion upon the Conservation idea, it may decide to support the
+Conservation policy of one party rather than that of another. It would
+thus become too much involved in party controversy to act as a central
+agency of a movement which must embrace men of all parties. Should this
+view prevail, the difficulty can be easily surmounted by following the
+Irish precedent, where we had a very similar and indeed far more
+delicate situation to save from political trouble. An American
+Agricultural Organisation Society could be founded for the purpose in
+view, and as it is probable that leading advocates of the Conservation
+policy would take a prominent part in the Country Life movement, the
+interdependence of the two ideas would have practical recognition.
+
+Apart from the possibility of political complications, there is one
+strong reason to recommend this course. The movement will accomplish its
+best and most permanent results as an advocate of self-reliance; it will
+seek to make self-help effective through organisation; it will concern
+itself much more for those things which the farmers can do for
+themselves by cooperation than with those things which the Government
+can do for them.[12] The selection, however, between the two alternative
+courses is a question which the foreign critic cannot decide. The work
+to which I now return will be the same, whatever agency is charged with
+its execution.
+
+The central body (which for brevity I will call the Association) will
+have as its general aim the economic and social development of rural
+communities. The work will be mainly that of active organisation. For
+reasons explained in the earlier chapters, the organisation must be
+cooperative in character, and will be concentrated upon the business
+methods of the farmers. This will, it is believed, cure a radical defect
+in their system--a defect which, as I have argued, is responsible for a
+restricted production, and for a course of distribution injurious alike
+to producer and consumer, besides exercising a depressing influence upon
+the economic efficiency and social life of rural communities. It follows
+that the first step towards a general reconstruction of country life,
+which has the promise of giving to the country a social attraction
+strong enough to stem the tide of the townward migration, is
+agricultural cooperation.
+
+Such being the general aim and the definite procedure, the first
+practical question that arises will be, how to apply this
+solvent--agricultural cooperation. It will not suffice to throw these
+two long words at the hardy rustic; shorter and more emphatic words
+might come back. Two equally necessary things must be done; the
+principle must be made clear, and the practical details of this rural
+equivalent of urban business combination must be explained in language
+understanded of the people. It is not difficult to draft a paper scheme
+for this purpose, but the fitting of the plan to local conditions is a
+very expert business. Hence the central agency should have at its
+disposal a corps of experts in cooperative organisation for agricultural
+purposes. After a short visit to a likely district by a competent
+exponent of the theory and practice, local volunteers would be found to
+carry on the work. Experience shows that once a well-organised
+cooperative association of farmers is permanently established, similar
+associations spring up spontaneously under the magic influence of
+proved success in known conditions. I should strongly recommend
+concentration at first on a few selected districts, with the aim of
+making standard models to which other communities could work. I need
+hardly say that all this work would be done in cooperation with whatever
+other agencies would lend their aid. The Country Life movement would be
+extremely useful to the great educational foundations centred in New
+York. I happen to know that the Trustees of the Rockefeller, Carnegie
+and Russell Sage endowments are keenly desirous to promote such a
+redirection of rural education as will bring it into a more helpful
+relation with the working lives of the rural population. Then there are
+such bodies as the Y. M. C. A., whose leaders, I am told, are alive to
+the value of the open air life, and are anxious to extend their country
+work in the rural districts. The great army of rural teachers, the
+Farmers' Union, and other farmers' organisations I have already named
+would gladly cooperate with schemes making for rural progress.
+
+More important, I believe, than is generally realised, from an economic
+and social point of view, are the rural churches. In many European
+countries, where agricultural cooperation has played a great part in the
+people's lives, the clergy have ardently supported the system on account
+of its moral value. In Ireland, some of our very best volunteer
+organisers are clergymen. Some leaders of the rural church in the United
+States have told me that a feeling is growing that an increased economic
+usefulness in the clergy would strengthen their position in the society
+which they serve in a higher capacity. I know that the suggestion of
+clerical intervention in secular affairs is open to misunderstanding.
+But here is a body of educated citizens who would gladly take part in
+any real social service; and here is a situation where there is work of
+high moral and social value calling for volunteers. Nothing but good,
+it seems to me, could result if such men, who have more opportunity and
+inclination for general reading than the working farmer, would help in
+explaining the intricacies of cooperative organisation and procedure
+which must be understood and practised in order that the system may be
+fruitful.
+
+In addition to its active propagandist work, the central Association
+could exercise a powerful and helpful influence in other ways. It
+should, of course, keep both the agricultural and the general press
+informed of its plans and progress. It should also keep in touch with
+the agricultural work of all important educational bodies, and more
+especially urge upon them the necessity of spreading the cooperative
+idea. The Department of Agriculture would welcome and support the
+movement; for I know many leading men in that service who thoroughly
+understand and recognise the immense importance, especially to backward
+rural communities, of the cooperative principle.
+
+It is not necessary, at this stage, to go further into details. I feel
+confident that the work of assisting all suitable agencies, such as
+those I have named, and others which may be available, through
+organisers of agricultural cooperation and by the spreading of
+information, would soon enable the central body to render inestimable
+service to the cause of rural progress. Such, at any rate, is the
+outline of my first proposal for giving to my American fellow-workers
+upon the rural problem the assistance which I feel they most need at the
+present moment. I pass now to my second proposal.
+
+I suggest that an institution--which, as I have said, will be
+scientific, philosophic, research-making--should be founded. It would
+be, in effect, a Bureau of research in rural social economy. Personally
+I know that, in my own experience as an administrator and organiser, I
+have been constantly brought face to face with problems where we could
+turn to no guide--no patient band of investigators who had been
+measuring, analysing, determining the data. Yet in some directions much
+excellent work is being done. Every social worker knows how the
+knowledge of what others are doing will help him. It is strange how
+little the problems of the rural population have entered into the
+studies of economists and sociologists. At leading Universities I have
+sought in vain for light. At a recent anniversary in New York, which
+brought together the foremost economists of the Old and New World, there
+was an almost complete omission of the country side of things from a
+programme which I am sure was generally held to be almost exhaustive.
+The fact is, the subject must be treated as a new one, and it is
+urgently necessary, if the work of the Country Life movement is to be
+based on a solid foundation of fact, to make good the deficiency of
+information which has resulted from the general lack of interest in the
+subject under review. An Institute is wanted to survey the field, to
+collect, classify and cooerdinate information and to supplement and carry
+forward the work of research and inquiry. The rural social worker
+requires as far as possible to carry exact statistical method into his
+work so that he may no longer have to depend on general statements, but
+may have at his command evidence, the validity of which can be trusted,
+while its significance can be measured. I may mention a few typical
+questions on which useful light would be shed by the Institute's
+researches:--
+
+1. The influence of cooperative methods (_a_) on the productive and
+distributive efficiency of rural communities, and (_b_) on the
+development of a social country life.
+
+2. The systems of rural education, both general and technical, in
+different countries, and the administrative and financial basis of each
+system.
+
+3. The relation between agricultural economy and the cost of food.
+
+4. The changes (_a_) in the standard and cost of living, and (_b_) in
+the economy, solvency and stability of rural communities.
+
+5. The economic interdependence of the agricultural producer and the
+urban consumer, and the extent and incidence of middle profits in the
+distribution of agricultural produce.
+
+6. The action taken by different Governments to assist the development
+and secure the stability of the agricultural classes, and the
+possibilities and the dangers of such action, with special reference to
+the delimitation of the respective spheres of State aid and voluntary
+effort.
+
+7. How far agricultural and rural employment can relieve the problems of
+city unemployment, and assist the work of social reclamation.
+
+Some may think that I am assigning to two bodies work which could be as
+well done by one. While all proposals for multiplying organisations in
+the field of social service should be critically examined, there are
+strong reasons in this case for the course I suggest. The two bodies,
+while working to a common end, will differ essentially in their scope
+and method. The propagandist agency will be executive and
+administrative, and while its operations would have suggestive value to
+the country social worker everywhere, it would be concerned directly
+only with the United States. Furthermore, it need not necessarily have
+any lengthened existence as a national propagandist agency. It would be
+founded mainly to introduce that method into American agricultural
+economy which I have tried to show lies at the root of rural progress.
+As soon as the soundness of the general scheme had been demonstrated in
+any State, the central body would promote an organisation to take over
+the work within that State. The State organisation would, in its turn,
+soon be able to devolve its propagandist work upon a federation of the
+business associations which it had been the means of establishing. That
+is the contemplated evolution of my first proposal--the early delegation
+of the functions of the national to the State propagandist agency, which
+would further devolve the work upon bodies of farmers organised
+primarily for economic purposes, but with the ulterior aim of social
+advancement.
+
+The Country Life Institute would be on a wholly different footing. Its
+researches, if only to subserve the Country Life movement in the United
+States, would have to range over the civilised world, and to be
+historical as well as contemporary. It should be regarded as a
+contribution to the welfare of the English-speaking peoples, one aspect
+of whose civilisation--if there be truth in what I have written--needs
+to be reconsidered in the light which the Institute is designed to
+afford. Its task will be of no ephemeral character. Its success will
+not, as in the case of the active propagandist body, lessen the need for
+its services, but will rather stimulate the demand for them.
+
+These differences will have to be taken into account in considering the
+important question of ways and means. Both bodies will, I hope, appeal
+successfully to public-spirited philanthropists. The temporary body will
+need only temporary support; perhaps provision for a five-years'
+campaign would suffice. In the near future, local organisations would
+naturally defray the cost of the services rendered to them by the
+central body; but the Country Life Institute would need a permanent
+endowment. The man fitted for its chief control will not be found idle,
+but will have to be taken from other work. The scheme, as I have worked
+it out, will involve prolonged economic and social inquiry over a wide
+field. This would be conducted mostly by postgraduate students. From
+those who did this outside work with credit would be recruited the
+small staff which would be needed at the central office to get into the
+most accessible form the facts and opinions which are needed for the
+guidance of those who are doing practical work in the field of rural
+regeneration. My estimate of the amount required to do the work well is
+from forty to fifty thousand dollars a year, or say a capital sum of
+from a million to a million and a quarter dollars. Whether the project
+is worthy of such an expenditure, depends upon the question whether I
+have made good my case.
+
+Let me summarise this case. I have tried to show that modern
+civilisation is one-sided to a dangerous degree--that it has
+concentrated itself in the towns and left the country derelict. This
+tendency is peculiar to the English-speaking communities, where the
+great industrial movement has had as its consequence the rural problem I
+have examined. If the townward tendency cannot be checked, it will
+ultimately bring about the decay of the towns themselves, and of our
+whole civilisation, for the towns draw their supply of population from
+the country. Moreover, the waste of natural resources, and possibly the
+alarming increase in the price of food, which have lately attracted so
+much attention in America, are largely due to the fact that those who
+cultivate the land do not intend to spend their lives upon it; and
+without a rehabilitation of country life there can be no success for the
+Conservation policy. Therefore, the Country Life movement deals with
+what is probably the most important problem before the English-speaking
+peoples at this time. Now the predominance of the towns which is
+depressing the country is based partly on a fuller application of modern
+physical science, partly on superior business organisation, partly on
+facilities for occupation and amusement; and if the balance is to be
+redressed, the country must be improved in all three ways. There must be
+better farming, better business, and better living. These three are
+equally necessary, but better business must come first. For farmers, the
+way to better living is cooperation, and what cooperation means is the
+chief thing the American farmer has to learn.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[9] In the capital of Virginia, to take one notable example, I have
+witnessed a perfect ferment of social activity at one of the gatherings.
+It brought together such an ideal combination of the best spirits in
+both rural and urban life that I anticipate some striking developments
+in rural civilization which will surely extend beyond the borders of the
+State.
+
+[10] I may mention Raiffeisen, Luzzati, Rocquigny, Bishop Grundtwig,
+Henry W. Wolff, the Rev. T. A. Finlay, S.J., and most of the leaders in
+agricultural organization in Great Britain and Ireland.
+
+[11] See above, page 31.
+
+[12] It may seem a small matter even for a footnote, but an unambiguous
+terminology is so important to propagandist work that I must mention a
+somewhat unfortunate use of the word 'cooperation' which prevails in
+official and pedagogic circles. We hear of cooperative demonstration
+work, cooperative education, cooperative lectures, and so forth.
+Whenever a Government or State department, or an educational body works
+with any other agency, and sometimes when they are only doing their own
+work, they use the term, which is of course grammatically applicable
+whenever two people work together--from matrimony down. If the word in
+connection with agriculture could be retained for its technical sense,
+so long established and well understood in Europe, the proposed movement
+might be saved a good deal of confused thinking. Might not Government
+and educational authorities substitute the word 'cooerdinated' so as to
+preserve the distinction?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Printed in the United States of America.
+
+
+
+
+
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