[19] Professor John L. Gillin, in American Journal of Sociology, March, 1911.
[20] Quaker Hill, by Warren H. Wilson.
VI
GETTING A LIVING
The core of a community must be economic. The main business of life is to get a living.[21] The reason for existence of any community is found in the living which it supplies its residents. Men are attracted to a community by the increases in their living furnished by that community. The first element in the getting of a living is the securing of daily bread, shelter, clothing and the satisfaction of physical needs. It is a mistake to think of the community as beginning in religious institutions—narrowly understood—or in social gatherings or in educational service. The initial human experience is the finding of food.
But the getting of a living is a long process. A living is more than bread, and a roof and a coat. In quest of a living men go from the country to the town and from the town to the city. They migrate from the small city to the large. In each of these moves they secure a further element in their living. Each of these communities is characterized by the increase which it contributes to the living of its citizens, but in every community the initial experience is the securing of daily bread, shelter, clothing and material economic gains. Whatever is done, therefore, for the community in a service to all the people must have initial concern with the purely economic welfare of the people.
Sir Horace Plunkett's book, "The Rural Life Problem of the United States," develops this principle very clearly. He shows that in the Country Life Movement in Ireland it was necessary to go into the very heart of the people's aspirations, and organize their economic needs.
It is necessary to understand the word "economic" if one would read these pages aright. Economic matters are not those of mere money. The word has a greater meaning than has the word finance. It connotes poverty as truly as wealth, and is greater than both. The economic motive animates men in the quest of those vital satisfactions which the individual craves, and the social group requires. Professor John Bates Clark has somewhere described this motive as the desire to preserve the present status, with slight improvement, for oneself and one's children after him; the desire to live on the same economic standard in one's own generation; and to be reasonably assured of the same security for one's children. This is not the desire to get rich, though in individual cases it is changed into a desire for wealth. But it is a far more general, indeed a universal aspiration, which inspires most of the work of the world. Industry is based on it. Civilization is propelled by it. It is the desire to get a living and the quest of a living.