Nature, with her ever-varying form and color, beauty and symmetry, is forgotten in the city; the shady forest, the meadow brook, the waving fields, are unknown. There, instead, is incessant noise, the clang and clash of trade, towering and ugly buildings, skies darkened by the smoke of factories, children who never saw a tree or played elsewhere than upon a hard and filthy pavement; and worst of all is the nerve-destroying haste and unequal competition, wearing out body and soul. In rural life, however tame and lonely, the home is not merely a few square feet hedged in by brick walls, but the whole wide countryside: the barns, the fields, the woods, the orchards, the animals wild and domesticated, the outlook over hill and valley—these all constitute the farmer’s home.
The manufacturer locates his factory in some by-street or suburb where land is cheap, and as far as possible from the residence part of the city; his home is far removed from these unsightly surroundings. But the farmer must live within a few hundred feet of his barns and outbuildings, and if these be ugly and dirty, the beauty and comfort of the home are sadly marred. If the farmer, then, has the whole landscape as a background for his home, he must on the other hand modify his immediate surroundings so as to overcome their almost inevitable unsightliness.
Besides the ever-present beauties of nature, country life has certain other advantages over the city: it is the place to develop the strong health-physique. The luxury of rich and populous communities tends to produce puny and enervated citizens; the excessive toil, bad air, limited space and scant food of the poor tend to degrade and destroy body and soul; but the comfortable simplicity, space, air, sunlight and abundant food of the open country give opportunity for the finest development of the human animal. It is true that even on the farm there are sometimes overwork and privation; but, at the worst, these cannot be so severe as in cities so long as the sun shines, the wind blows, and green things grow for the worker out of doors. Here the child may be born right and nourished by pure food and air. It is surrounded by animals whose life and motion become an incentive to action, and who become its companions without danger of moral contamination. The lamb, the calf, the colt, are far safer playmates than the city urchin precociously wise in evil ways.
Professor Amos G. Warner says that “children reared in institutions are much below par because they lack the power of initiative.” The farm child has an incessant, varied and unconscious training of the eye, the hand, and the mind. While he is developing strength, symmetry, courage, the mental is being coördinated with the physical. The hand is made to obey the will, while the fact that the handicraft is made useful lends charm and delight to the work. The city child must try to learn, by a course of manual training in some public school, what the country child picks up unconsciously in the natural process of play and work.
After half a century, I look back to one of the happiest moments of my life, when I presented my mother with a dove-tailed wooden flower box, painted bright red. That flower box first taught me how to make wood take the form desired. While the flower box has long since rotted, the board-runner sled smashed, the water wheel broken, and the boat lies rotten in the bottom of the lake, the time spent upon them was not thrown away, for they gave me the inspiration and power to “boss” wood, and this power has served me well in many an emergency.
As knowledge begins to dominate the hand and train it to change the form and character of things, certain physical laws are discovered. If the sail is made too large or the boat too narrow, a cold bath is the result. If the sled runners are too short and rough, the school-mate arrives at the bottom of the hill first. No schoolmaster was needed, for when one of these natural laws was broken or ignored, the penalty followed quickly and with full force. So, in a thousand ways, the youth is taught respect for the laws which govern matter. All this leads the youth on the farm, if full play and direction are given, to investigate everything in sight, to discover that there are other than physical laws. The higher laws puzzle him greatly, give him much concern, lead to doubts, for they are too abstract and too far-reaching for his youthful comprehension. The physical laws have been found by experience to be ever true and stable, and the youth cannot but believe that moral and spiritual laws are equally so. This is the sheet anchor which holds him to belief in them, however imperfectly he may understand them. He is anxious to investigate, even to experiment along these lines, but is disappointed because the results cannot be set down in pounds or feet or units of energy. If here on the farm the mental and physical have been kept healthy and active, the moral and spiritual will develop as naturally as the fruit from the blossom. The development of spiritual fruit to high perfection is slow, because the power to think and reason correctly and abstractly comes only with age, experience and mental development.
But the greatest advantage of country life lies in the opportunity for the promotion of healthy family relations. Parents naturally find their chief happiness in the education and development of their children; and in time the children stimulate the parents. The sharing of common labors from babyhood up, the working together for common interests and ambition, which farm life especially entails, produce the most wholesome family relations. The most valuable part of any person’s education is really in the home. To “help father and mother” becomes the keynote of a child’s life, and unselfish, willing service is the first and last and best lesson of morality and religion. The pride in honest and capable ancestors, the natural and wholesome ambition for the future of the children, fill up a measure of contentment difficult to find elsewhere. In such a family there need be nothing to conceal; life takes on dignity in place of affectation, honesty instead of sham; it has simplicity, pure affections, fidelity. Artificial sex distinctions disappear; men and women may do that which is needful and human, the woman in the field, the man in the house, if desirable, sharing their common, healthful activities.
All this is very well, some will say, but how shall such a home be maintained on the income of the farm? “Farming doesn’t pay.” This statement is unverified, and, carrying on its face, as it does, a little truth, is misleading. Does farming pay? Does anything pay? What is pay? All depends upon how you value the currency in which the pay is received. Is “wisdom better than rubies?” Are the sayings of the wisest and best of men true? “Give me neither riches nor poverty. Get wisdom, get understanding. Take fast hold of instruction.”
A modern thinker, Professor L. H. Bailey, in the report of the Secretary of the Connecticut Board of Agriculture, 1898, puts it in this wise: “But there is another cause of apprehension which I ought to mention, perhaps founded upon the probable tendencies of our sociological and economic conditions, especially as they apply to rural communities. There is a tendency towards a division of estates as population increases, and the profits of farming are often so small that educated tastes, it is thought, cannot be satisfied on the farm. There are those who believe that because of these two facts we are ourselves drifting towards an American peasantry. Let us take the second proposition first,—that the profits of farming are so small that educated tastes cannot be satisfied and gratified on the farm. Now I grant this to be true if the measure of the satisfaction of an educated taste is money; but I deny it most strenuously if the satisfaction of an educated taste lies in a purer and better life. We must make this distinction very deep and broad, for it is a fundamental one. I believe we have made a mistake in teaching agriculture, during the last few years, by putting the emphasis on the money we make out of it. I do not believe that people are to become wealthy on the farm, as a few do in manufacturing; I should not hold out that hope to men. There are certain men here and there who have great executive ability, who see the strategic points and take advantage of them, who can make a success of farming the same as they would at the making of shoes, or harnesses, or buttons, or anything else. But as a general thing, the farmer should be taught that the farm is not the place to become wealthy. I do not believe it is. Certainly I should not go on the farm with that idea in view. But if I wanted to live a happy life, if I wanted to have at my command independence and the comforts of living, I do not know where I could better find them than on the farm; for those very things which appeal to an educated taste are the things which the farmer does not have to buy,—they are the things which are his already.”
The wealthy few of the cities give voice to the thought that the farming classes in the United States are always on the verge of poverty, yet in the last century they have rescued from barbarism and solitude nearly all of the arable land of the two billion acres of which the United States are composed. More than four million five hundred thousand farm homes have been planted, valued at more than thirteen billion dollars. Much hue and cry has been raised of late about farm mortgages. If the facts were known, it is more than probable that the farmers, as a whole, have assets in mortgages, promissory notes and savings banks amply sufficient to liquidate all such outstanding obligations. Added to the real estate, the farmers own implements and machines valued at five hundred millions of dollars, and their live stock, upon ten thousand hills, numbers one hundred and seventy-five millions, valued at more than two billions of dollars, while the annual value of the farm products is between two and three billions of dollars. It should be remembered that these values are nominal, the true value being in most cases more than double these amounts. The farmers are not now in danger of becoming paupers. From the farms come more than half of the college students. At the present time it is probable that the income of the farmers exceeds three billion dollars annually. When it is considered that there is little or no direct outgo for rent of house, and that nearly three-fourths of the food is produced at home, and that these items are seldom taken into account in the statistics of income, it appears that the farmer’s real income is much larger than is usually estimated in money. In other words, a five hundred dollar net income on the farm, under the conditions which now prevail, provides for a more comfortable living than does a thousand dollars in the city.