The Evolution of the Country Community / A Study in Religious Sociology

by Warren H. Wilson

The community is sometimes corrupted by vicious principles in its construction; and then its members are in proportion defective. It produces in excessive degree idiots, blind, deformed, neurotic, insane or criminal individuals.

The community, thus defined, is normally furnished with certain institutions essential to the life of the people. In earlier days the community was sufficient unto itself. Very little was imported. Everything for use in the community was raised therein and manufactured in the households. A system of exchange gradually was effected through the country store. The country store of 1770 in Duchess County, New York, had an amazing relation to a wide population. The radius of the life dependent upon it was the same as the radius around the Quaker Meeting, beside which this store was placed, and all the goods used in the community with few exceptions were produced and manufactured in this radius of the team haul of ten miles.[25]

Nowadays the country community has normally a store, a blacksmith shop, a church and a school. In the recent past certain classes of peddlers regularly visited the country community, though their place in the rural economy is diminishing. The country store in many communities is already closed and its maintenance is surrounded with increasing difficulty. So long, however, as the horse drawn vehicle is the type of transportation in the country, the elements of the country community must remain substantially the same.[26]

The economic life of the community is necessarily a part of the general economic life of the population as a whole. The world economy has in the past hundred years, with the perfection of the means of transportation, taken the place of the communal economy. In [1810] every country community was obliged to manufacture its own raw products so far as possible within its own limits. In 1910 it was no longer profitable for even a country community to do so. The result is that the economic life of the community is usually expressed in a specified industry to which the whole community is primarily devoted. If it be a rural community this organization takes the form of a "money crop." In the corn belt there are other products raised from the soil besides corn, but the world economy assigns to that fertile section the producing of corn as the most profitable and the simplest task. In the coal region it tends to the highest efficiency for the labor of the region to be concentrated upon the supply of this fuel, although in addition the surface of the soil may be cultivated and in the larger population centers other industries are coming in to exploit the superfluous labor. None of these competes with the primacy of the coal industry, which the world economy assigns to that community.

It is essential that in every community there should be one or more industries by which men may live. It tends to the highest well-being of the community, that is, to its possession of a maximum of vital attraction for individuals, that this industry should supply a variety of sources of income; that is, wages, profits and interest. If the community can retain in its own bounds the owners of its industries, at least in some numbers, and the capitalists whose wealth is invested in these industries, it is of great service. If it can make life attractive for wage-earners in these industries, the completeness of that community has its testimonial in this variety and wealth of attraction. The weakness of many American communities is shown in their inability to retain within their bounds the owners of the businesses and the employers of labor. The ideal character of some communities in Massachusetts is due to the fact that in the same streets there daily meet capitalists, superintendents, foremen and wage-earners who are alike interested in the local industries.

This power of the community to attract and hold individual lives, supplying them with the vital necessities for which the individual craves, is dependent in America upon educational institutions more than upon any other factor. The French philosopher Desmoulin has said that the Anglo-Saxon supremacy is due to the Anglo-Saxon love of the land and of education. The American represents these two passions, and of the two the love of education is at present, the stronger. The community which is weak in its schools will not hold its people. The generation who at present are the largest owners of American wealth are eager for educational advantage: and the incoming stream of immigration promises that in the days to come this craving for education will not diminish, but will increase.

The country community has been peculiarly weak in its educational facilities, by a strange dullness and inertia due to the economic prostration of the farming industry. For the two decades following 1880 the country schools have failed to keep pace with the city schools. Prof. Foght says, "While the public attention has been centered on work and plans for the improvement of the city schools a great factor for or against the public weal has been sadly neglected. This is the rural school. One-half of our entire school population attend the rural schools, which are still in the formative stage. The country youth is entitled to just as thorough a preparation for thoughtful and intelligent membership in the body politic as is the city youth. The State, if it is wise, will not discriminate in favor of the one as against the other, but will adjust its bounties in a manner equitable to the needs of both. Heretofore the rural schools have received very little attention from organized educational authority."[27]

The effect of this neglect of the country school in the face of the constructive statesmanship which has led in perfecting the city school is seen in the exodus from the country community of very large numbers of the most successful farmers. Evidences are abundant that this exodus from the country community is primarily a quest of educational advantage. Not in every case would the departing family confess that they were seeking better schools: but it is probable that the majority of them while giving a variety of primary reasons for moving would assign the desire for education as the uniform secondary reason for departing from the country community.

It is impossible for the country church to retain its best ministers. Many reasons enter into this, but always at the top of the list is the desire for better educational opportunities for the ministers' children. The advice has become proverbial in theological seminaries, "Go to the country for five years." It is said that in New England there are three classes of country ministers and the first of them is the bright young man who will not long be in the country.

The ethical, sometimes called the social factor in the community's life, is no less essential. Organized work requires organized recreation. Every community which has a systematic economy by which its residents get their living is found to have a systematic though usually informal and unrecognized provision for recreation. Somewhere in the bounds of every working town in America is a playground. It is not the result of "the playground movement," but of the play necessity in human nature. The open lots where the town is not built up, the railroad yard, the yard of a factory or the town common are used by common consent by the young people and the working-people of the town as a playground.