SOME INTER-RELATIONS OF CITY AND COUNTRY

Every one knows that city populations are increasing more rapidly than country populations. By some persons, this of itself is considered to be a cause for much alarm. But the relative size of the populations is not so disturbing as the economic and social relations existing between these two phases of civilization.

Some contrasts of town folk and country folk.

We know that farming is the primitive and underlying business of mankind. As human desires have arisen, other occupations have developed to satisfy the increasing needs and aspirations, the products of the earth have been assembled and changed by manufacture into a thousand forms, and these departures have resulted in more refined products, a more resourceful civilization, and a more sensitive people.

Complex developments have been taken out of and away from agriculture, and have left it with the simple and undifferentiated products and the elemental contact with nature. The farmer is largely a residuary force in society; this explains his conservatism.

If we have very highly developed persons in the city, we have very rugged persons in the country. If the sense of brotherhood is highly evolved in the city, individualism is strongly expressed in the country. If the world-movement appeals to men in the city, local attachments have great power with men in the country. If commercial consolidation and organization are characteristic of the city, the economic separateness of the man or family is highly marked in the country. The more marked progress of the city is due to its greater number of leaders and to its consolidated interests; country people are personally as progressive as city people of equal intellectual groups, but they have not been able to attract as much attention or perhaps to make as much headway.

Comparisons of town and country affairs.

Civilization oscillates between two poles. At the one extreme is the so-called laboring class, and at the other are the syndicated and corporate and monopolized interests. Both these elements or phases tend to go to extremes. Many efforts are being made to weld them into some sort of share-earning or commonness of interest, but without very great results. Between these two poles is the great agricultural class, which is the natural balance-force or the middle-wheel of society. These people are steady, conservative, abiding by the law, and are to a greater extent than we recognize a controlling element in our social structure.

The man on the farm has the opportunity to found a dynasty. City properties may come and go, rented houses may be removed, stocks and bonds may rise and fall, but the land still remains; and a man can remain on the land and subsist with it so long as he knows how to handle it properly. It is largely, therefore, a question of education as to how long any family can establish itself on a piece of land.

In the accelerating mobility of our civilization it is increasingly important that we have many anchoring places; and these anchoring places are the farms.

These two phases of society produce marked results in ways of doing business. The great centers invite combinations, and, because society has not kept pace with guiding and correcting measures, immense abuses have arisen and the few have tended to fatten on the many. There are two general modes of correcting, or at least of modifying, these abuses,—by doing what we can to make men personally honest and responsible, and by evening up society so that all men may have something like a natural opportunity.

The two minds.

There is a town mind and a country mind. I do not pretend to know what may be the psychological processes, but it is clear that the mode of approach to the problem of life is very different as between the real urbanite and the real ruralite. This factor is not sufficiently taken into account by city men who would remove to real farms and make a living there. It is the cause of most of the failure of well-intentioned social workers to accomplish much for country people.

All this is singularly reflected in our literature, and most of all, perhaps, in guide-books. These books—made to meet the demand—illustrate how completely the open country has been in eclipse. There is little rural country discoverable in these books, unless it is mere "sights" or "places,"—nothing of the people, of the lands, of the products, of the markets, of the country dorfs, of the way of life; but there is surfeit of cathedrals, of history of cities, of seats of famous personages, of bridges and streets, of galleries and works of art. We begin to see evidences of travel out into the farming regions, part of it, no doubt, merely a desire for new experiences and diversion, and we shall now look for guide-books that recognize the background on which the cities rest. But all this will call for a new intention in travel.

Will the American farmer hold his own?

What future lies before the American farmer? Will he hold something like a position of independence and individualism, or will he become submerged in the social order, and form only an underlying stratum? What ultimate hope is there for a farmer as a member of society?

It is strange that the producer of the raw material has thus far in the history of the world taken a subordinate place to the trader in this material and to the fabricator of it. The trader and fabricator live in centers that we call cities. One type of mind assembles; the other type remains more or less scattered. So there have arisen in human society two divergent streams,—the collective and coöperative, and the isolated and individualistic.

The fundamental weakness in our civilization is the fact that the city and the country represent antagonistic forces. Sympathetically, they have been and are opposed. The city lives on the country. It always tends to destroy its province.

The city sits like a parasite, running out its roots into the open country and draining it of its substance. The city takes everything to itself—materials, money, men—and gives back only what it does not want; it does not reconstruct or even maintain its contributory country. Many country places are already sucked dry.

The future state of the farmer, or real countryman, will depend directly on the kind of balance or relationship that exists between urban and rural forces; and in the end, the state of the city will rest on the same basis. Whatever the city does for the country, it does also for itself.

Mankind has not yet worked out this organic relation of town and country. City and country are gradually coming together fraternally, but this is due more to acquaintanceship than to any underlying coöperation between them as equal forces in society. Until such an organic relationship exists, civilization cannot be perfected or sustained, however high it may rise in its various parts.

The first two remedies.

Of course there are no two or even a dozen means that can bring about this fundamental adjustment, but the two most important means are at hand and can be immediately put into better operation.

The first necessity is to place broadly trained persons in the open country, for all progress depends on the ability and the outlook of men and women.

The second necessity is that city folk and country folk work together on all great public questions. Look over the directories of big undertakings, the memberships of commissions and councils, the committees that lay plans for great enterprises affecting all the people, and note how few are the names that really represent the ideas and affairs of the open country. Note also how many are the names that represent financial interests, as if such interests should have the right of way and should exert the largest influence in determining public policies. In all enterprises and movements in which social benefit is involved, the agricultural country should be as much represented as the city. There are men and women enough out in the open country who are qualified to serve on such commissions and directories; but even if there were not, it would now be our duty to raise them up by giving rural people a chance. Rural talent has not had adequate opportunity to express itself or to make its contribution to the welfare of the world.

I know it is said, in reply to these remarks, that many of the city persons on such organizations are country-born, but this does not change the point of my contention. Many country-born townsmen are widely out of knowledge of present rural conditions, even though their sympathies are still countryward. It is also said that many of them live in country villages, small cities, and in suburbs; but even so, their real relations may be with town rather than country, and they may have little of the farm-country mind; and the suburban mind is really a town mind.

Every broad public movement should have country people on its board of control. Both urban and rural forces must shape our civilization.

Movement from city to country as a remedy.

Some persons seem to think that the movement of city men out to the country offers a solution of country problems. It usually offers only a solution of a city problem,—how a city man may find the most enjoyment for his leisure hours and his vacations. Much of the rising interest in country life on the part of certain people is only a demand for a new form of entertainment. These people strike the high places in the country, but they may contribute little or nothing to real country welfare. This form of entertainment will lose its novelty, as the sea-shore loses it for the mountains and the horse loses it for the motor-car or aëroplane. The farming of some city men is demoralizing to real country interests. I do not look for much permanent good to come to rural society from the moving out of some of the types of city men or from the farming in which they ordinarily engage.

I am glad of all movements to place persons on the land who ought to go there, and to direct country-minded immigrants away from the cities; but we must not expect too much from the process, and we must distinguish between the benefit that may accrue to these persons themselves and the need of reconstruction in the open country. It is one thing for a family to move to the land in order to raise its own supplies and to secure the benefits of country life; it is quite another thing to suppose that an exodus from city to country will relieve the economic situation or make any difference in the general cost of living, even assuming that the town folk would make good farmers. And we must be very careful not to confuse suburbanism and gardening with country life.

To have any continuing effect on the course of rural development, a person or an agency must become a real part and parcel of the country life.

Sending the surplus population to the country.

It is also proposed to send to the country the poor-to-do and the dissatisfied and the unemployed. This is very doubtful policy. In the first place, the presumption is that a person who does not do well or is much dissatisfied in the town would not do well in the country. In the second place, the country does not need him. We may need more farm labor, as we need more of all kinds of labor, but in the long run this labor should be produced mostly in the country and kept there by a profitable and attractive rural life. The city should not be expected permanently to supply it. The labor that the city can supply with profit to country districts is the very labor that is good enough for the city to keep.

The relief of cities, if relief is to be secured, must lie in the evolution of the entire situation, and not merely in sending the surplus population into the country.

In my opinion, the present back-to-the-farm cry is for the most part unscientific and unsound, as a corrective of social ills. It rests largely on the assumption that one solution of city congestion is to send people away from itself to the open country, and on another assumption that "a little farm well tilled" will abundantly support a family. There is bound to be a strong reaction against much of the present agitation. We are to consider the welfare of the open country as well as that of the city itself. The open country needs more good farmers, whether they are country-bred or city-bred; but it cannot utilize or assimilate to any great extent the typical urban-minded man; and the farm is not a refuge.

Back-to-the-village.

It seems to me that what is really needed is a back-to-the-village movement. This should be more than a mere suburban movement. The suburban development enlarges the boundaries of the city. It is perfectly feasible, however, to establish manufacturing and other concentrated enterprises in villages in many parts of the country. Persons connected with these enterprises could own small pieces of land, and by working these areas could add something to their means of support, and also satisfy their desire for a nature-connection. In many of the villages there are vacant houses and comparatively unoccupied land in sufficient number and amount to house and establish many enterprises; and there would be room for growth. If the rural village, freed from urban influences, could then become a real integrating part of the open country surrounding it, all parties ought to be better served than now, and the social condition of both cities and country ought to be improved. We have over-built our cities at the expense of the hamlets and the towns. I look for a great development of the village and small community in the next generation; but this involves a re-study of freight rates.

Can a city man make a living on a farm?

Yes, if he is industrious and knows how. Many city persons have made good on the land, but they are the exceptions, unless they began young.

There is the most curious confusion of ideas on this question. We say that farming requires the highest kind of knowledge and at the same time think that any man may go on a farm, no matter how unsuccessful he may have been elsewhere. Even if he has been successful as a middleman or manufacturer or merchant, it does not at all follow that he would be successful as a farmer. Farming cannot be done at long range or by proxy any more than banking, or storekeeping, or railroading, and especially not by one who does not know how; and he cannot learn it out of books and bulletins. If a man can run a large factory without first learning the business, or a theater or a department store, then he might be able also to run a farm, although the running of a farm of equal investment would probably be the more difficult undertaking.

I am glad to see earnest city men go into farming when they are qualified to do so, but I warn my friends that many good people who go out from cities to farms with golden hopes will be sadly disappointed. Farming is a good business and it is getting better, but it is a business for farmers; and on the farmers as a group must rest the immediate responsibility of improving rural conditions in general.

The younger the man when he begins to consider being a farmer, the greater will be his chances of success; here the student has the great advantage.

City people must be on their guard against attractive land schemes. Now and then it is possible to pay for the land and make a living out of it at the same time, but these cases are so few that the intending purchaser would better not make his calculations on them. Farming is no longer a poor man's business. It requires capital to equip and run a farm as well as to buy it, the same as in other business. It is a common fault of land schemes to magnify the income, and to minimize both the risks and the amount of needed capital. Plans that read well may be wholly unsound or even impossible when translated into plain business practice. The exploiting of exceptional results in reporter's English and with charming pictures is having a very dangerous effect on the public mind; and even some of these results may not stand business analysis.

What the city may do.

It is not incumbent on cities, corporations, colleges, or other institutions to demonstrate, by going into general practical farming, that the farming business may be made to pay: thousands of farmers are demonstrating this every day.

If the city ever saves the open country, it will be by working out a real economic and social coördination between city and country, not by the city going into farming.

We need to correct the abnormal urban domination in political power, in control of the agencies of trade, in discriminatory practices, and in artificial stimulation, and at the same time to protect the evolution of a new rural welfare. The agrarian situation in the world is not to be met alone by increasing the technical efficiency of farming.