The other great “bonanza” industry which still remains and which affects agriculture, and the land directly, is lumbering. This, like “bonanza” wheat farming, may be classed as a mining industry, carried on at the surface instead of in the bowels of the earth. Without rational direction, restraint or control, this agricultural mining goes on until the sources from which the profits are drawn are so depleted as to be no longer profitable. There is no home or competency for the farm boys in the lumber camp or on the great wheat farm. Here the rule is to take all and return nothing. After the ax and the binder, comes the fire to complete the wanton destruction. The shade-giving and moisture-conserving brush, stubble and straw, and all living plants, are destroyed, and nothing but the mineral matter, unmixed with surface humus, remains. A blackened waste, devoid of animal or vegetable life, is left behind. No homes can be reared here, no competence secured until nature, assisted by man in the coming years, slowly restores the covering and productivity of the soil. This unwise treatment of the land must soon come to an end; then the hardy home-builder will have opportunity to repair, by more rational methods, some of the wanton and unnecessary waste.
Is it too much to hope that before the close of another decade every state and territory will have a school of forestry, and that all national forest domains will have been brought under rational supervision and control? The future home-builders will need them, and the present owners of homes have a right to a share of the benefits which flow from intelligently managed forest preserves. It is not enough to show that intelligent farming is highly remunerative at the present time; provision must be made by which the children and the children’s children, for all generations, may have opportunity for securing a competence from rural pursuits.
Can a competence and a comfortable home be secured by the renter? If not, why not? Shall the farmer put his little capital into a home and run in debt for supplies and necessary equipment; or had he better rent, and start even? This depends to a large extent upon the individual. A successful country life does not depend upon owning the land in fee simple. Here is a picture of what may be called “a country gentleman” ([Fig. 3]). He, his father and his grandfather, all have been renters of the same farm. He has a competence and an assured income. This hue and cry about renting has no terrors for those who have been renters and have found that this is often the most satisfactory way to start when capital is limited. The merchant of limited means invariably rents the building in which he does business, because it is safer and usually more economical to rent than to purchase the business block.
Fig. 3. A farmer and a renter.
In an old city of 12,000 inhabitants, it was found that 84 per cent of the business was carried on in rented rooms. The trouble in renting farms in the United States lies chiefly in the fact that there are no well digested laws or old customs which help to guide the renter and rentee. A few simple laws would provide for adjusting the value of betterments removed from or put upon the farm at any time. Long leases, with inducements to long occupancy, would give the rentee a permanent occupier. The renter has quite as good a chance of finally securing a home in fee simple as has the man who purchases and mortgages heavily. The possession of a valuable farm and an assured income, especially in a new country, is often most surely and easily secured by renting for a series of years. Good farming pays liberal profits even on rented land. If there is failure, it is the man and not the occupation which causes it. The fault will not be “in the moon,” but in ourselves if we fail or become underlings.
CHAPTER III
EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY ON THE FARM
More and more we are coming to believe that the rural district schools offer but few opportunities for educating the farmers’ children. Various schemes have been recommended for providing better and more convenient educational facilities. One proposition is first to improve the principal highways. This, it is thought, will make it possible to run ’buses or carriages twice daily to transport the children to and from some centrally located graded school. Such schemes are usually proposed by some one who has seldom seen a country school-house and who is totally unacquainted with the conditions which prevail in rural communities.
Admitting, for the sake of comparison, that teacher and pupil in the country are not so far advanced in book-lore as they are in the city, how does it happen that the country youths are able to maintain themselves on an educational level with the pupils of the graded schools when they meet them in the academy and college? Is it not quite possible that the wide opportunities enjoyed by the country youth for becoming acquainted with natural objects of use and beauty are a full offset, so far as training is concerned, for the more systematic instruction given in the city schools?
I can but look with some degree of solicitude on the effect on civilization and on the home, of palatial hotels, and great school buildings, filled with heterogeneous masses of children, in which love, solicitude and sacrifices, each for all, have little opportunity for growth and development. The family seems to be the sacred unit of civilization and morality. A full and sufficient reason must be given for massing men, much more children, in a single great structure, thereby destroying the quiet and breaking the sacred ties of the home. What good reasons can be offered for massing children between the ages of six and twelve in an uncomfortable school-room? Children do not study; they learn little except when they read the lesson in the immediate presence of the teacher who is able to amplify and explain the lesson in hand. Sending these little ones to school is a relic of the primeval days, when, by reason of large families, lack of training and excessive toil of the parents, there was no other way but to make nursery maids of the school-teachers.