Nothing could better voice, to the young men and women of America, the heroic appeal of country life leadership and service than Professor Carver’s manly challenge printed on the next page. Though not written exclusively for the country, it fits rural life most admirably.
The Productive Life Fellowship
“It offers to young men days of toil and nights of study. It offers frugal fare and plain clothes. It offers lean bodies, hard muscles, horny hands, or furrowed brows. It offers wholesome recreation to the extent necessary to maintain the highest efficiency. It offers the burdens of bringing up large families and training them in the productive life. It offers the obligation of using all wealth as tools and not as means of self-gratification. It does not offer the insult of a life of ease, or æsthetic enjoyment, or graceful consumption, or emotional ecstasy. It offers, instead, the joy of productive achievement, of participating in the building of the Kingdom of God.
To young women also it offers toil, study, frugal fare, and plain clothes, such as befit those who are honored with a great and difficult task. It offers also the pains, the burdens and responsibilities of motherhood. It offers also the obligation and perpetuating in succeeding generations the principles of the productive life made manifest in themselves. It does not offer the insult of a life of pride and vanity. It offers the joys of achievement, of self-expression, not alone in dead marble and canvas, but also in the plastic lives of children to be shaped and moulded into those ideal forms of mind and heart which their dreams have pictured. In these ways it offers to them also the joys of participating in the building of the Kingdom of God.”[45]
Test Questions on Chapter VIII.
1.—Why are college students discovering a new interest in studying the rural problem?
2.—What proportion of your college enrollment came from country communities, and what percentage of your alumni have invested their lives in the country? Compare this with other colleges mentioned in this chapter.
3.—Show how the vital interests of the city are deeply involved in the problem of rural leadership.