1. The mere increase of population will nec essarily bring people closer together, and by that much it will tend to social solidarity.
2. The natural dividing up of large farms, which is coming both as a result of the extension of population and from the failure of certain very large estates to be profitable, will also bring country people closer together. The so-called "bonanza farms" are unwieldy and ineffective economic units; and many farmers are "land poor."
3. We shall also assemble farms. The increasing population on the land will not always result in smaller farms. Most of the richer and more profitable lands will gradually be divided because, with our increased knowledge and skill, persons can make a living from smaller areas. The remoter and less productive lands will naturally be combined into larger farm areas, however, because a large proportion of such lands cannot make a sufficient profit, when divided into ordinary farm areas, to support and educate a present-day family [(page 38)]. Contiguous areas of the better lands will be combined with them, in order to make a good business unit. As several farms come together under one general ownership, this owner will naturally gather about him a considerable population to work his lands.
The probability is that, under thoroughly skillful single management, a given area of remote or low-productive lands will sustain a larger population than they are now able to sustain under the many indifferent or incompetent ownerships. It is to be hoped that some of these amalgamated areas will develop a share-working or associative farming of a kind that is now practically unknown.
4. The re-creative life of the country community greatly needs to be stimulated. Not only games and recreation days need to be encouraged, but the spirit of release from continuous and deadening toil must be encouraged. The country population needs to be livened up. This will come about through the extension of education and the work of ministers, teachers, and organizations. All persons can come together on a recreation basis (pp. [173], [211]).
The good farmer will have one day a week for recreation, vacation, and study.
5. Local politics ought to further the entire neighborhood life, rather than to divide the community into hostile camps. All movements, as direct nominations, that stimulate local initiative and develop the sense of responsibility in the people will help toward this end.
6. Rural government is commonly ineffective. It needs awakening by men and women who have arrived at some degree of mastery over their conditions. We talk much of the need of improving municipal government, but very little about rural government; yet government in rural communities is inert and dead, as compared with what it might be, and there is probably as much machine politics in it, in proportion to the opportunities, as in city government. Very much of the lack of gumption in the open country is due to the want of a perfectly free and able administration of the public affairs.[3]
The whole political organization of rural communities needs new attention, and perhaps radical overhauling. As I write these sentences, I have before me a newspaper in which a progressive surgeon expresses his opinion (which he has verified for me) on the question of supervision of health in a rural county in an Eastern state. He found the statistics too inaccurate and too indefinite to enable him to draw exact conclusions, but these are approximately the facts:
"No township seems to have deliberately paid its health officer, and but one town deliberately paid its poor physician. The others paid various bills for 'quarantine' and 'fumigating' and 'fees' and other misleading items. There was no way in which to distinguish between the care of the poor and the sick-poor except to guess and to figure on what I happened to know about. A——, the richest and largest township, has no health officers, and spent $200 for the poor in a population of 4000 people living in an area of 93 square miles. B——, the poorest township, with a population of 1000, and an area of 36 square miles, paid her health officer $28 and her poor physician $23.