Village Improvements and Farm Villages

by George E. Waring

The change that is now taking place, especially in New England, is toward the greater economy of living, and the harder work and closer management of business, that comes with immigrant proprietorship; and this element is by no means to be depended upon for the improvement of our farming. It may result in a more money-making agriculture, but it will supplant our best political element by the introduction of what has thus far seemed to be one of the worst.

Look at this question as we will, it is difficult to see how else than by improving the race of American farmers we are to accomplish any result whose good effect will be radical and lasting. This brings us around to that threadbare subject of the vague discussion of agricultural writers: "How to keep the boys on the farm."

The devices recommended for accomplishing this result have thus far failed of their object. The average farmer boy is not a sentimentalist, and he is not likely to be moved by the sort of talk so often lavished upon him. To use a vulgarism, he has an extremely "level head." He fails to realize the attraction and the dignity which are implied by what he is told of the nobleness of his father's calling, of the purifying and elevating influences of a daily intercourse with nature. He is not to be caught with this sort of chaff. His cultivation has not been of that æsthetic character that he has an especial drawing toward nobleness, or purity, or elevation. Nature, as he knows it, shows at times an unattractive side; and he fails to recognize precisely what is meant by Mother Earth as a source of dignity. To him Mother Earth is an exacting parent, calling for constant and regular toil, and whipping him on day by day with weeds to be hoed, dry gardens to be watered, snowdrifts to be shovelled, and an almost endless round of embarrassments to be overcome. As for the purity and simplicity of the farmer's life, he knows very much better than to pin his faith to it. To him the farmer's house is too often a place where the mother is overworked, tired, wearied with constant annoyance, and made peevish and fretful. The conversation of hired men and young neighbors and brothers is not marked by refined delicacy and simplicity, as he understands these terms. At the end of all our preaching he will say, at least to himself, that this is probably the sort of talk that we consider appropriate to the occasion, but that, if we knew what he knows about farming, we should see how little effect it is likely to have. If he sought our motive in saying it, he would conclude that we were interested in keeping up the supply of farm labor; and that so far as he was concerned, since he must work for a living, he would work at some other industry if he could get a chance, and leave those who were less fortunate to work on the farm.

The more sentimental and more influential considerations governing in this matter were very well set forth by Dr. Holland in a paper on Farm Life in New England, published in "The Atlantic Monthly" some twenty years ago. While acknowledging the frequency of bright exceptions to the rule, he does not hesitate to set it down as a rule that the life described is in every way a hateful one; where every member of the family, from father to child, is driven by the lash of stern necessity, and where many conditions which are deemed requisite in the life of all other classes of the same wealth are comparatively rare; where the expectant mother of the child is worked without stint to her last day, while the mother of the colt is relieved from all hard toil and treated with consideration throughout the last months of her time; where, in short, whether from interest or from a mistaken idea of necessity, hard work long hours, poor food, and dismal surroundings are the rule of the farmer's household.

Since that time there have been noticeable modifications, involving the introduction of more or less tastefulness, because of the cheap literature and cheap music of these later days. But, much as these have done to affect the individual characters of the younger members of the family, they have only aggravated the evil, so far as farm-work is concerned, by creating a desire, born of knowledge, for the pleasanter manner of life which the town has to offer. The young girls whom one now sees about railway stations in the most distant part of the country are dressed after the instructions of "Harper's Bazar" and "Peterson's Magazine;" and they know more than their older sisters did of the difference between their own life and that of their city cousins. They are certainly not to be blamed if they long for some vocation in which they can more freely indulge their growing ideas of luxury, and gratify their growing desire for better dress and more interesting companionship.

All that has here been said is seriously true and important. The circumstances described are so generally prevalent as to constitute, with constant minor variations, an almost universal rule. Where we are to look for relief, is the most serious problem. Relief must be found, or the character of our farming class must assuredly degenerate. In one way or another we must change, in a radical degree, the conditions of the farmer's life. We can perfectly understand why it should be distasteful to any young person of ordinary ambition or intelligence; and we know, from the constant flocking of farmers' sons and daughters to even the least attractive employments of the town or village, that this distaste is everywhere a controlling one.

It is easy to say that the farmer's life must be made more cheerful, attractive, and refined, and less arduous; but it is by no means easy to see how the improvement is to be brought about. The cardinal defect is the loneliness and dulness of the isolated farmhouse. Intelligent and educated young women, brought up among the pleasantest surroundings, marry young farmers, and undertake their new life with the determination that, in their case at least, the more obvious social requirements shall be met. During the earlier years after marriage they adhere to their resolution, and are regular in attendance at the church and public lecture; and they keep up, so far as possible, social intercourse with their neighbors. But as time goes on, as the family increases, as toil begins to tell on health and strength and energy, they drop out, little by little, from the habit of going abroad, until often for weeks together they never exchange a look or thought with any human being outside of their own households. Aside from the overworked members of their own families, their companionship is confined to hired men who smell of the stable, and to hired girls with whom they are yoked in the daily round of household duties.

Having given much consideration to the subject, I have come to believe that the agriculture of Continental Europe is far more wisely arranged than ours; for there, almost as a universal rule, isolated farm-life is unknown. The reward of the cultivator is less, and his labor is at least as great. The people are of a very much lower order, and are lacking in the cultivated intelligence which distinguishes so many of our own farming class. Women and even young girls perform rude labor in the field and in the stable; and those aspirations which are born of a universal diffusion of periodical literature are almost unknown. At the same time, when the hard and long day's work is over, there comes to all the inexpressible relief and delight of the active social intercourse of the village, where the tillers of the country for a mile around have gathered together their homes and their herds, and where the most intimate social life prevails.

Observation even indicates that the habit of out-of-door labor has had no injurious effect upon the women of these villages. The "nut-brown maid" grows too fast into the wrinkled-brown woman; but better a sunburnt and weather-beaten cheek than that pallor that comes of anthracite and in-door toil. Better the broad back and stout limb of the peasant mother than the hollow chest and wasted energy of the American farmer's wife.

I by no means intend to say that our own farming class is not far superior to the peasantry of Europe; but I do believe that if a good system of village life for farmers could be adopted here under the modifying influences of the more refined and intelligent American character, we should have gained a most important step in advance. We have in New England many villages almost exclusively of farmers,—villages where the old-time settlers gathered together for defence against the Indians, and for the protection of houses and stock and store from river floods. These villages are as different as it is possible to conceive from the ordinary European cluster of unattractive cottages, lining both sides of a street which is filled for one-half of its width with manure-heaps. It may be naturally assumed that any adaptation of the village system among us would be governed by the same refining influences which have made our few existing agricultural villages so beautiful and attractive.