Our rural communities must be saved from decadence, for the sake of the nation. Professor Giddings well says: “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.” In the threatened decadence of depleted rural communities, and in the lack of adequate leadership in many places, to revive a dying church, to equip a modern school, to develop a new rural civilization, to build a cooperating community with a really satisfying and efficient life, we have a problem which challenges both our patriotism and our religious spirit, for the problem is fundamentally a religious one.
IV. The Urgency of the Problem.
A broad-minded leader of the religious life of college men has recently expressed his opinion that the rural problem is more pressing just now than any other North American problem. He is a city man and is giving his attention impartially to the needs of all sections. Two classes of people will be surprised by his statement. Many of his city neighbors are so overwhelmed by the serious needs of the city, they near-sightedly cannot see any particular problem in the country,—except how to take the next train for New York! And doubtless many country people, contented with second-rate conditions, are even unaware that they and their environment are being studied as a problem at all. Some prosperous farmers really resent the “interference” of people interested in better rural conditions and say “the country would be all right if let alone.” But neither sordid rural complacency nor urban obliviousness can satisfy thinking people. 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.
An Abandoned Church, Daviess County, Indiana.
A Hunt for Fundamental Causes
Depletion added to isolation, and later tending toward degeneracy, is what makes the rural problem acute. It is the growth of the city which has made the problem serious. If we would discover a constructive policy for handling this problem successfully by making country life worth while, and better able to compete with the city, then we must find out why the boys and girls go to the big towns and why their parents rent the farm and move into the village.
For two 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 have a chance to develop as it should.
The Unfortunate Urbanizing of Rural Life
As a rule the whole 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 of the Arabian Nights tales. 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.