Every one knows that city populations are increasing more rapidly than country populations. By some persons, this of itself is considered to be a cause for much alarm. But the relative size of the populations is not so disturbing as the economic and social relations existing between these two phases of civilization.
Some contrasts of town folk and country folk.
We know that farming is the primitive and underlying business of mankind. As human desires have arisen, other occupations have developed to satisfy the increasing needs and aspirations, the products of the earth have been assembled and changed by manufacture into a thousand forms, and these departures have resulted in more refined products, a more resourceful civilization, and a more sensitive people.
Complex developments have been taken out of and away from agriculture, and have left it with the simple and undifferentiated products and the elemental contact with nature. The farmer is largely a residuary force in society; this explains his conservatism.
If we have very highly developed persons in the city, we have very rugged persons in the country. If the sense of brotherhood is highly evolved in the city, individualism is strongly expressed in the country. If the world-movement appeals to men in the city, local attachments have great power with men in the country. If commercial consolidation and organization are characteristic of the city, the economic separateness of the man or family is highly marked in the country. The more marked progress of the city is due to its greater number of leaders and to its consolidated interests; country people are personally as progressive as city people of equal intellectual groups, but they have not been able to attract as much attention or perhaps to make as much headway.
Comparisons of town and country affairs.
Civilization oscillates between two poles. At the one extreme is the so-called laboring class, and at the other are the syndicated and corporate and monopolized interests. Both these elements or phases tend to go to extremes. Many efforts are being made to weld them into some sort of share-earning or commonness of interest, but without very great results. Between these two poles is the great agricultural class, which is the natural balance-force or the middle-wheel of society. These people are steady, conservative, abiding by the law, and are to a greater extent than we recognize a controlling element in our social structure.
The man on the farm has the opportunity to found a dynasty. City properties may come and go, rented houses may be removed, stocks and bonds may rise and fall, but the land still remains; and a man can remain on the land and subsist with it so long as he knows how to handle it properly. It is largely, therefore, a question of education as to how long any family can establish itself on a piece of land.
In the accelerating mobility of our civilization it is increasingly important that we have many anchoring places; and these anchoring places are the farms.
These two phases of society produce marked results in ways of doing business. The great centers invite combinations, and, because society has not kept pace with guiding and correcting measures, immense abuses have arisen and the few have tended to fatten on the many. There are two general modes of correcting, or at least of modifying, these abuses,—by doing what we can to make men personally honest and responsible, and by evening up society so that all men may have something like a natural opportunity.