"Nothing could be more encouraging than the service which the railroads are beginning to render in the better distribution of population over the land, by putting a premium on good farming and encouraging the young to find careers for themselves in rural industries."
12. Local institutions of all kinds must have a powerful effect in evolving a good community sense. This is true in a superlative degree of the school, the church, the fair, and the rural library. These institutions will bring into the community the best thought of the world and will use it in the development of the people in the locality.
Such institutions must do an extension work. The church, from the nature of its organization, could readily extend itself beyond its regular and essential gospel work. The high-school will hold winter-courses and will take itself out to its constituency. The library ought to occupy its whole territory [(page 92)].
Similarly, village improvement societies should organize country and town together, extending tree-care, better roads, lawn improvement, and other good work throughout the entire community contributory to the city. Civic societies, fraternal orders, hospital associations, business organizations [(page 119)], women's clubs and federations, could do the same.
13. The local rural press ought to have a powerful influence in furthering community action. Many small rural newspapers are meeting their local needs, and are to be considered among the agents that make for an improved country life. In proportion as the support of the country newspaper is provided by political organizations, hack politicians, and patent medicine advertisements, will its power as a public organ remain small and undeveloped.
14. The influence of the many kinds of extension teaching is bound to be marked. Reading-courses, itinerant lectures, the organizing of boys' and girls' clubs, demonstration farms, the inspections of dairies, orchards, and other farms, and of irrigation supplies, the organization of such educational societies as cow-testing societies, and the like, touch the very core of the rural problem. The influence of the traveling teacher is already beginning to be felt, and it will increase greatly in the immediate future. I mean by the traveling teacher the person who goes out from the agricultural college, the experiment station, the state or national department of agriculture, or other similar institutions, to impart agricultural information, and to set the people right toward their own problems.
15. The modern extension of all kinds of communication will unite the people, even though it does not result in making them move their residences. I have in mind good highways, telephones, rural free deliveries, and the like. The automobile is already beginning to have its effect in certain rural communities, but we have yet scarcely begun to develop the type of auto-vehicle which is destined, I think, to make a very great change in country affairs. The improvement of highways on a regular plan will itself tend to organize the rural districts. We must add to all this a thoroughly developed system of parcels post, not only that the farmer may receive mail, but that he may also have greater facilities and freedom to transact his business with the world [(page 118)].
16. Economic or business coöperation must be extended. There is much coöperation of this kind among American farmers, more than most persons are aware. Some of it is very effective, but much of it is coöperative only in name. It takes the form of milk organizations, creameries, fruit associations, poultry societies, farmers' grain elevators, unions for buying and selling, and the like, some of which are of great extent.
A really coöperating association is one in which all members take active part in government and control, and share in their just proportions in the results. It is properly a society, rather than a company. Many so-called coöperative units are really stock companies, in which a few persons control, and the remainder become patrons; and others are mere shareholding organizations.
Business coöperation in agriculture is of three kinds: (1) coöperative production; (2) coöperative buying; (3) coöperative selling. The last two are extensively practiced in many regions. Coöperative production of animals and crops is practically unknown in the rural communities in the United States, and we are not to expect it to arise in those communities to any extent under the present organization of society. Colonies organized on a coöperative basis may practice it within their membership, but it is doubtful whether persons who are well equipped to be farmers will enter such organizations for this purpose so long as it is so easy to make a financial success at independent farming.