[2] The Commission consisted of L. H. Bailey, of the New York State College of Agriculture at Cornell University (chairman); Henry Wallace, editor of Wallace's Farmer, Des Moines, Iowa; Kenyon L. Butterfield, President of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, Amherst, Massachusetts; Walter H. Page, editor of The World's Work, New York City; Gifford Pinchot, United States Forester, and Chairman of the National Conservation Commission; C. S. Barrett, President of the Farmers' Co-operative and Educational Union of America, Union City, Georgia; W. A. Beard, of the Great West Magazine, Sacramento, California.
CHAPTER III
THE ORIGIN AND CONSEQUENCES OF RURAL NEGLECT
The most radical economic change which history records set in during the last half of the eighteenth century in England, as the result of that remarkable achievement of modern civilisation, the Industrial Revolution. Mechanical inventions changed all industry, setting up the factories of the town instead of the scattered home production of the country and its villages. In the wake of the new inventions economic science stepped in, and, scrupulously obeying its own law of demand and supply, told the then predominant middle classes just what they wished to be told. Adam Smith had made the wonderful discovery that money and wealth were not the same thing. Then Ricardo, and after him the Manchester School of economists, made division of labour the cardinal virtue in the new gospel of wealth. In order to give full play to this economic principle all workers in mechanical industries were huddled together in the towns. There they were to be transformed from capricious, undisciplined humans into mechanical attachments, and restricted to such functions as steam-driven automata had not yet learned to perform. That was the first stage of the Industrial Revolution, with its chief consequences, the rural exodus and urban overcrowding. It is a hideous nightmare to look back upon from these more enlightened days. Well might the angels weep over the flight of all that was best from the God-made country to the man-made town.
Before the middle of the last century the clouds began to lift. For a while the good Lord Shaftesbury seemed to be crying in the wilderness of middle-class plutocracy, but it was not long before the crying of the children in their factories stirred the national conscience. The health of nations was allowed to be considered as well as their wealth. Social and political science rose up in protest against both the economists and the manufacturers. There followed a period of beneficent social changes, no less radical than those which the new mechanical inventions had produced in the economics of industry. The factory town of to-day presents a strange contrast to that which sacrificed humanity to material aggrandisement. What with its shortened hours of labour, superior artisan dwellings, improved sanitation, parks, open spaces and playgrounds, free instruction and cheap entertainment for old and young, hospitals and charities, rapid transportation, a popular Press, and full political freedom, the modern hive of industry stands as a monument of what, under liberal laws, can be done by education and organisation to realise the higher aspirations of a people.
During this second period, another economic development produced upon the attitude of the urban mind towards the rural population an effect to which, I think, has not been given the consideration it deserves. Better and cheaper transportation, with the consequent establishment of what the economists call the world-market, completely changed the relationship between the townsman and the farmer. A sketch of their former mutual relations will make my meaning clear. Within the last century every town relied largely for its food supply on the produce of the fields around its walls. The countrymen coming into the weekly market were the chief customers for the wares of the town craftsmen. In this primitive state of trade, townsmen could not but realise the importance to themselves of a prosperous country population around them. But this simple exchange, as we all know, has developed into the complex commercial operations of modern times. To-day most large towns derive their household stuff from the food-growing tracts of the whole world, and I doubt whether any are dependent on the neighbouring farmers, or feel themselves specially concerned for their welfare. I do not think the general truth of this picture will be questioned, and I hope some consideration may be given to the conclusions I now draw.
In the transition we are considering, the reciprocity between the producers of food and the raw material of clothes on the one hand, and manufacturers and general traders of the towns on the other, has not ceased; it has actually increased since the days of steam and electricity. But it has become national, and even international, rather than local. Town consumers are still dependent upon agricultural producers, who, in turn, are much larger consumers than formerly of all kinds of commodities made in towns. Forty-two per cent of materials used in manufacture in the United States are from the farm, which also contributes seventy per cent of the country's exports. But in the complexity of these trade developments townsmen have been cut off more and more from personal contact with the country, and in this way have lost their sense of its importance. My point is that the shifting of the trade relationship of town and country from its former local to its present national and international basis in reality increases their interdependence. And I hold most strongly that until in this matter the obligations of a common citizenship are realised by the town, we cannot hope for any lasting National progress.