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To the country boy: “Why does he want to leave his father’s farm to go to the city? He ought to be able to find his highest happiness and usefulness in the country, his native environment, where he is sadly needed. Can we make it worthwhile for this boy to invest his life in rural leadership?”
To the college men and women: “Who love country life enough to resist the lure of the city, and invest their talents in rural Christian Leadership, we offer this ‘Challenges of the Country’ - a challenging vision of the need of trained leadership in every phase of rural life, as well as a real opportunity for life investment.”
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COUNTRY LIFE OPPORTUNITY
The glare of the city dazzles the eyes of many a man in college. Thinking people see clearly that in spite of the growth of cities, the nation is still rural.
Agriculture is still the main business of our people. The nation’s prosperity still depends upon “bumper crops.” The nation’s character still depends upon country conscience.
Not only is it true that most of our leaders in politics, in the pulpit, in all professions and in the great industries were born and bred in the country; the city is still looking to the country to develop in large degree the leadership of the future.
Were it not for the immigration tides and the continuous supply of fresh young life from the country, the city would be unable to maintain itself; it would be crushed beneath its burdens.
For the city is the “graveyard of the national physique.” With its moral and industrial overstrain, it is the burial place of health, as well as youthful ambitions and hopes, for many a young person not accustomed to its high-geared life.
The nervous system rebels against the city pace. In an incognito life the character crumbles under the subtle disintegration of city temptations.
The young man with exceptional ability finds his way to high success in the city; the average man trudges on in mediocrity, lost in the crowd — just a “high private in the rear rank,” when he might have stayed in the country home and won a measure of real influence and substantial happiness in his natural environment.
Not only has the lure of the city drawn thousands of young people who were better off in their country homes, the real claims of the country village upon those young people have but timidly been uttered.
Not only has the call of the city been magnified by artificial echoes, the call of the open country has scarcely been sounded at all. The opportunity of the city as a life arena has been advertised beyond all reason.
It is time to talk of the life chance for stalwart young “citizens” to stay right in the country and realize their high privileges. They are in many respects the chosen youth of the land.
The truest idealists, the finest altruists are right here among these; often reminded that the real motive of it all is: “Education for power and power for service.”
The best men and women are now planning their future according to what they believe to be the will of God for them. Many have caught the vision of the possibility of genuine consecration in any honorable life calling, making it a life of genuine service, which after all is life’s greatest opportunity.
For such young men and women the question simply is: What shall this service be and where shall it be rendered?
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THE RURAL PROBLEM
It was discovered that majority of influential city leaders had come from country homes. They were born on farms in the open country or in rural villages. Facts like these no longer surprise intelligent people. They are common to most cities.
The rural problem is the problem of maintaining in our farm and village communities a Christian civilization with modern ideals of happiness, efficiency and progress.
It is a problem of industrial efficiency, of economic progress, of social cooperation and recreation, of home comfort, of educational equipment for rural life, of personal happiness, of religious vitality and of institutional development for community service.
Though the problem would exist independently of the city, its acuteness is due to city competition. The fact that city leadership is still largely drawn from the country makes the rural problem of vital importance to the welfare of the city and in a real sense a national issue.
For the classification of communities - the terms “rural” and “urban”, “country” and “city”, “town”, “village” and “township” are so variously used they cause much ambiguity.
For years the line between rural and urban was arbitrarily set at the 8,000 mark, but the census has placed it at 2,500. It seems petty however to dub a village of 2,501 people a city! This is convenient but very inaccurate.
There are “towns” among states having over 8,000 people which refuse to be called cities. Cities of the first class have a population of 100,000 upwards; cities of the second class number from 25,000 to 100,000 people; and communities from 8,000 to 25,000 may well be styled small cities.
The term village is naturally applied to a community of 2,500 or less. When located in the country it is a country village; when near a city it is a suburban village and essentially urban. When no community center is visible, the term “open country” best fits the case.
The disputed territory between 2,500 and 8,000 will be urban or rural, according to circumstances. A community of this size in the urban tract is by no means rural; but if away from the domination of city life, it is purely country. The terms “rural” and “urban” are qualitative rather than quantitative.
In spite of the apparent paradox, there are “rural cities” and “urban villages”; small provincial cities where the people are largely rural-minded, and suburban villages of a few hundred people whose interests are all in the life of the city.
How the growing city developed the problem? - We can almost say the growth of the city made the country problem. The problem of rural progress would still exist, even if there were no cities.
It is well to remember that the growth of cities is not merely a “national” fact. It is universal in the entire civilized world. Wherever the modern industrial system holds sway, the cities have been growing phenomenally.
Unquestionably a false impression has prevailed in the cities because of obviously unjust comparisons. Families coming from villages to prosperous cities have talked much of rural decadence - stories of neglected rural communities. Meanwhile, congested city slums never visited by the prosperous, concealed from popular view, festering social corruption and indescribable poverty and vice.
While rural depletion is widespread, rural decadence must be studied not as a general condition at all; but as the abnormal, unusual state found in special section; such as regions handicapped by poor soil, sections drained by neighboring industrial centers, etc.
For the extent of rural depletion, census shows that in spite of the steady gain in the country districts as a whole, thousands of rural townships have continued to lose population. Thousands of rural villages have lost population. Country towns continue to report losses, not only in the rural villages.
Mere growth does not necessarily mean improvement either in business or morals. It depends entirely on the kind of people that remain. If it is really the survival of the fittest, there will be no serious problem. But if it is “the heritage of the unfit,” if only the unambitious and shiftless have remained, then the village is probably doomed.
The question has long been debated as to whether criminals and defectives are more common in the city or the country.
Dwellers in prosperous, well-governed suburban cities, that know no slums, are positive that the rural districts are degenerate. Country people in prosperous rural sections where no poor-house or jail can be found for many miles, insist that degeneracy is a city symptom!
It would be fully as reasonable to condemn the city as a whole for the breeding places of vice, insanity and crime which we call the slums, as it is to characterize rural life in general as degenerate.
Rural decadence comes as an easy evolution passing through rather distinct stages, when the rural community has really lost its best blood; then schools and churches are weakened.
The challenge of the country not only quotes the peril of rural depletion and threatened degeneracy, but also appeals to consecrated young manhood and womanhood with a living faith in the permanency of a reconstructed rural life. Our rural communities must be saved from decadence, for the sake of the nation.
A professor said: “Genius is rarely born in the city. The city owes the great discoveries and immortal creations to those who have lived with nature and with simple folk. The country produces the original ideas, the raw materials of social life, and the city combines ideas and forms the social mind.”
We know there is something the matter with country life. We discover that the vitality and stability of rural life is in very many places threatened. It is the business of Christian students and leaders to study the conditions and try to remove or remedy the causes.
For generations there has been a mighty life-current toward the cities, sweeping off the farm many of the brightest boys and most ambitious girls in all the country-side, whom the country could ill afford to spare.
The city needed many of them doubtless; but not all, for it has not used all of them well. Everywhere the country has suffered from the loss of them.
Why did they go? It is evident that a larger proportion of the brightest country boys and girls must be kept on the farms if the rural communities are to hold their own and the new rural civilization really has a chance to develop as it should.
The unfortunate urbanizing of rural life is that the educational trend is toward the city. The teachers of rural schools are mostly from the larger villages and towns where they have caught the city fever, and they infect the children.
Even in the lower grades the stories of city life begin early to allure the country children, and with a subtle suggestion the echoes of the distant city’s surging life come with all the power.
Early visits to the enchanted land of busy streets and wonderful stores and factories, the circus and the theater, deepen the impression, and the fascination grows.
In proportion to the nearness to the city, there has been a distinct urbanizing of rural life. To a degree this has been well. It has raised the standard of comfort in country homes.
But the impression has come to prevail widely that the city is the source of all that is interesting, profitable and worthwhile; until many country folks have really come to think meanly of themselves and their surroundings, taking the superficial city estimate of rural values as the true one. A real slavery to city fashions has been growing insidiously in the country.
It has made for “progress”; but as seen in the adoption of unhospitable vertical city architecture for country homes — an insult to broad acres which suggest home-like horizontals — it is surely an abomination pure and simple.
If the country learns from the city - the finer culture, social graces, and industrial cooperation; but let these gains not be bought by surrendering rural self-respect or compromising rural sincerity, or losing the wholesome country character.
The new rural civilization must be indigenous to the soil, not a mere urbanizing veneer. Only so can it foster genuine community pride and loyalty to its own natural environment. But herein is the heart of our problem.
Farm life is shunned by many boys and girls because they say it is too narrow and confining, lacking in freedom, social advantages, activities and pleasures - which the city offers in infinite variety. Many ambitious young people see little future on the farm.
They feel that the farmer never can be famous in the outside world and that people have a low regard for him. In their village high school they have caught visions of high ideals; but they fail to discover high ideals in farm life and feel that high and noble achievement is impossible there, that the farmer cannot serve humanity in any large way and can attain little political influence or personal power.
If country life is to develop a permanently satisfying opportunity for the farm boys and girls, these conditions must be met. The business of farming must be made more profitable, until clerking in the city cannot stand the competition.
The social and recreative side of rural life must be developed. The rural community must be socialized and the country school must really fit for rural life. The lot of the farm mothers and daughters must be made easier and happier.
Scientific farming must worthily appeal to the boys as a genuine profession, not a mere matter of luck with the weather, and the farm boy must no longer be treated as a slave but a partner in the firm.
The city depends upon the country as the natural source of supply for the nation. The city has never yet been self-sustaining. It has always drawn its raw materials and its population from the open country.
The country must continue to produce the food, the hardiest young men and women, and much of the idealism and best leadership of the nation. All of these have proven to be indigenous to country life.
Our civilization is fundamentally rural, and the rural problem is a national problem, equally vital to the city and the whole country. The cities should remember that they have a vast deal at stake in the welfare of the rural districts.
For centuries, the country got along fairly well without the city, and could continue to do so; but the city could not live a month without the country! The railway strikes (and among workers) revealed the fact that the cities had but a week’s food supply. A serious famine threatened, and this forced a speedy settlement as the people of the cities learned in a striking way their utter dependence upon the country as their source of supply.
The philosophy of one of the sages of ancient China is still profoundly true: “The well-being of a people is like a tree - agriculture is its root, manufactures and commerce are its branches and its life; but if the root be injured, the leaves fall, the branches break away and the tree dies.”
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COUNTRY LIFE OPTIMISM
Signs of a new faith in rural life say, “The farm is the best home of the family; the main source of national wealth; the foundation of civilized society; the natural providence.”
It suggests that in spite of rural depletion, country life is so essential to our welfare it will permanently maintain itself. For as long as there is a city civilization to be fed and clothed, there must always be a rural civilization to produce the raw materials. The question is, will it be a Christian civilization?
There is a strong and growing sentiment in the city favoring rural life. Many city people are longing for the freedom of the open country and would be glad of the chance to move out on the land for their own sake as well as for the sake of their children.
In many agricultural colleges and state universities, we find an increasing proportion of students coming from the cities for training in the science of agriculture and the arts of rural life. This is a very significant and encouraging as country life is beginning to be appreciated again.
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THE COUNTRY BOY’S CREED
“I believe that the country which God made is more beautiful than the city which man made; that life out-of-doors and in touch with the earth is the natural life of man.
I believe that work is work wherever I find it; but that work with Nature is more inspiring than work with the most intricate machinery.
I believe that the dignity of labor depends not on what you do, but on how you do it; that opportunity comes to a boy on the farm as often as to a boy in the city; that life is larger and freer and happier on the farm than in the town; that my success depends not upon my location, but upon myself — not upon my dreams, but upon what I actually do, not upon luck but upon pluck.
I believe in working when you work and playing when you play, and in giving and demanding a square deal in every act of life.”
The severe nervous tension of city life, the high speed of both social life and industry and the tyranny to hours and close confinement in offices, banks and stores are particularly hard for the country bred.
The many disadvantages of the wage-earner, slack work alternating with the cruel pace, occasional strikes or lockouts, and the impersonal character of the corporation employer, coupled with the fact often realized that in spite of the crowds there are “no neighbors” in the city, reminds the country-bred laborer of the truth of President Roosevelt’s words:
“There is not in the cities the same sense of common underlying brotherliness which there is still in the country districts.”
A striking cartoon was published by the Guardian newspaper entitled, “The City Problem”. It represented “Mr. Ruralite” in the foreground halting at the road which leads down to the city, while from the factory blocks by the river two colossal grimy hands are raised in warning, with the message, “go back!”; and on one hand is written ‘high prices’; on the other ‘poor health’.
With the recent improvement in city sanitation, which has perceptibly lowered the death rate, the city is physically a safer place to live in than it used to be; but slum sections are still reeking with contagion, and through most of the city wilderness the smoke and grime is perpetual and both pure air and clear sunshine are luxuries indeed.
For most people the crowded city offers little attraction for a home. The heart of great cities has ceased to grow. The growing sections are the outlying wards and the suburbs, for obvious reasons.
The moral dangers of the city where the saloon is usually entrenched in politics and vice is flagrantly tolerated if not actually protected help to explain the fact that a continuous procession of city families is seeking homes in suburban or rural towns where the perils surrounding their children are not so serious.
The attractiveness of country life is evidently true, a Dean suggested, “Even in this epoch of hurried city-building, the love of the open country and of plain, quiet living still remains as a real and vital force.”
“I intend to stick to farm life,” wrote an agricultural student, “for I see nothing in the turmoil of city life to tempt me to leave the quiet, calm and nearness to nature with which we, as farmers, are surrounded. I also see the possibilities of just as great financial success on a farm as in any profession which my circumstances permit me to attain.”
Another contented country boy wrote, “I think the farm offers the best opportunity for the ideal home. I believe that farming is the farthest removed of any business from the blind struggle after money, and that the farmer with a modest capital can be rich in independence, contentment and happiness.”
“I expect to make a business of breeding live-stock. I like to work out of doors, where the sun shines and the wind blows, where I can look up from my work and not be obliged to look at a wall. I want to make new things and create new wealth, not to collect to myself the money earned by others. I cannot feel the sympathy which makes me a part of nature, unless I can be nearer to it than office or university life allows.”
The partnership with Nature as the attractiveness of country life would be incomplete without reference to the nearness to nature and the privilege of her inspiring comradeship.
Not only is the farmer’s sense of partnership with nature a mighty impulse which tends to make him an elemental man; but every dweller in the country with any fineness of perception cannot fail to respond to the subtle appeal of the beautiful in the natural life about him.
As Washington Irving wrote, in describing rural life: “In rural occupation it leads a man forth among scenes of natural grandeur and beauty; it leaves him to the working of his own mind, operated upon by the purest and most elevating of external influences. Such a man may be simple, but he cannot be ‘of pretentious display’.”
As young man wrote among the beautiful hills, “To him who in the love of nature holds communion with her visible forms, she speaks a various language.”
Without an interpreter, sometimes the message to the soul is heard as in a foreign tongue; but the message is voiced again like the music of perennial springs, and others hear it with ear and heart, and it brings peace and comfort and God’s love.
In his beautiful chapter, a doctor wrote: “By a subtle potency the rural environment comes to be not the obtrusive masses of earth, nor the monotonous acres of grass, nor the dazzling stress of endless flowers, nor the disturbing chatter of the birds; but instead of these, hills that speak of freedom, a sky that brings the infinite near, meadows verdant with beauty, air vocal with song. Beauty, sublimity, music and freedom are in the soul.”
Surely the uplifting influence of nature is a wonderful gift to those who are fortunate enough to live in the country. It takes the petty and sordid out of life. It transfigures common things with beauty and fresh meaning, with the cycle of the seasons and ever freshness of the days. It brings to those who listens a quiet message of content.
“Wonder, then, is the attitude of reverence for the infinite ‘family’ values and ‘Christian’ meaning over God’s purpose.”
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