I have now stated the broad principles which must govern any effective scheme for correcting the present harmful subordination of rural life to a civilisation too exclusively urban. Before I bring forward my definite proposal for a remedy calculated to meet the needs of the situation, I must anticipate a line of criticism which may occur to the mind of any social worker who does not happen to be very familiar with the conditions of country life.
I can well imagine readers who have patiently followed my arguments wishing to interrogate me in some such terms as these: "Assuming," they may say, "that we accept all you tell us about the neglect of the rural population, and agree as to the grave consequences which must follow if it be continued, what on earth can we do? Of course the welfare of the rural population is a matter of paramount importance to the city and to the nation at large; but may we remind you that you said the evil and the consequences can be removed and averted only by those immediately concerned—the actual farmers—and that the remedy for the rural backwardness was to be sought for in the rural mind? 'Canst thou minister to a mind diseased?' Must not the patient 'minister' to himself?"
Fair questions these, and altogether to the point. I answer at once that the patient ought to minister to himself, but he won't. He has acquired the habit of sending for the physician of the town, whose physic but aggravates the disease. Dropping metaphor, the farmer does not think for himself. In rural communities, there is as great a lack of collective thought as of coöperative action. All progress is conditional on public opinion, and this, even in the country, is a very much town-made thing.
So I am, then, in this difficulty. My subject is rural, my audience urban. I have to commend to the statesmen and the philanthropists of the town the somewhat incongruous proposal that they should take the initiative in rural reform. Neither the thought nor the influence which can set in motion what in agricultural communities is no less than an economic revolution are to be found in the open country. To the townsmen I now address my appeal and submit a plan.
FOOTNOTE:
[8] Message to the Fifty-eighth Congress (1903).