The Country-Life Movement in the United States

by L. H. Bailey

In contradistinction to the exclusive hamlet system of living together, I would emphasize the necessity that a first-rate good man must live on the farm if he is to make the most of it. Farming by proxy or by any absentee method is just as inefficient and as disastrous in the long run as the doing of any other business by proxy; in fact, it is likely to be even more disastrous in the end because it usually results in the depletion of the fertility of the land, or in the using up of the capital stock; and this becomes a national disaster. I hold that it is essential that the very best kind of people live actually on the land. The business is conducted on the land. The crops are there. The live-stock is there. The machinery is there. All the investment is in the place itself. If this business is to be most effective, a good man must constantly be with it and manage it. A farm is not like a store or a factory, that is shut up at night and on Sunday.

The more difficult and complex the farming business becomes, the greater will be the necessity that a good man remain with it.

We must remember also that if the landowner or the farmer lives in a village or hamlet and another man lives on his farm, a social division at once results, and we have a stratification into two classes of society; and this works directly against any community of interest. It is not likely that the farmer who has retired to town and the hired man who works his farm under orders will develop any very close personal relation. The farmer becomes an extraneous element injected into the town, and has little interest in its welfare, and he has taken his personality, enterprise, and influence out of the country. He is in a very real sense "a man without a country." The increase of his living expenses in town is likely to cause him to raise the rent on his farm, or, if the tenant works for wages, to reduce the improvements on the place to the lowest extent compatible with profit. We need above all things to produce such a rural condition as will satisfy the farmer to live permanently in the country rather than to move to town when the farm has given him a competence.

I am not to be understood as saying that farmers ought never to live in town. There will always be shifting both ways between town and country. In some cases, small-area farming develops around a village; or a village grows up because the farms are small and are intensively handled. In irrigation regions, the whole community may be practically a hamlet or village. In parts of the Eastern states, small farmers sometimes live in the village and go to the farm each day, to work it themselves. But all these are special adaptations, and do not constitute a broad agricultural system.

In time we probably shall develop a new kind of rural settlement, one that will be the result of coöperative units or organizations, and not a consolidation about the present kinds of business places; but it is a question whether these will be villages or hamlets in the sense in which we now use these words.

The category of agencies.

My position, therefore, is that we must evolve our social rural community directly from the land itself, and mostly by means of the resident forces that now are there.

This being our proposition, it is then necessary to discover whether, given permanent residence on pieces of land, it is still possible to develop anything like a community sense. I do not now propose to discuss this question at any length, but merely to call attention to a few ways in which I think the neighborhood life of the open country may be very distinctly improved.

In this discussion, I purposely omit reference to public utilities and governmental action, because they are outside my present range. The farmer will share with all the people any needful improvement that may be made in regulation of transportation and transportation rates, in control of corporations, in equalizing of taxation, in providing new means of credit, in extending means of communication, in revising tariffs, in reforming the currency, and in perfecting the mail service.

To work out the means of neighborhood coöperation, there should be sufficient and attractive meeting places. The rural schoolhouse is seldom adapted to this purpose. The Grange hall does not represent all the people. The church is not a public institution. Libraries are yet insufficient. Town halls are few, and usually as unattractive as possible. There is now considerable discussion of community halls. Several of them have been built in different parts of the country to meet the new needs, and the practice should grow.