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

by Warren H. Wilson

The transition from farming to exploiting has brought out in full view the wastefulness of the farmer economy which is being succeeded by exploitation. The whole doctrine of conservation belongs in this transition. Economy means, literally, housekeeping. The same meaning appears in the word husbandry. It is a principle of saving. Its extraordinary value at the present time is due to our sudden sense of the wastefulness of farm life in recent years. Edward van Alstyne, an agricultural authority in New York, says, "We farmers think we are most economical, but we are the most wasteful of all men." The wastefulness of American farming begins in the tillage of too many acres. The farmer prefers wide fields even at the cost of poor crops.

The New York Central Railroad, which is carrying on a propaganda of husbandry, has appointed a man as expert farmer who increased the yield of potatoes on his land from sixty to three hundred bushels per acre. This brings out clearly that his neighbors are still producing sixty bushels per acre, wasting four-fifths of their land values. This waste is a wrong that should be denounced in the country church just as sternly as doctrinal sins, which have occupied the attention of country ministers in the past.

Expert farmers say that if corn-stalks for fodder are left out in the field until they are fed to the cattle they lose forty to fifty per cent of their food values. This waste is sinful, but the sin is visible only in the new economy of exploitation which counts all values in terms of cash. No sooner is the sinfulness of waste observed than its connections with moral delinquencies of country people becomes clear. In the improvement of rural morality due to the sifting of country people during the farmer period, it becomes evident that among a people so serious-minded some delinquencies still remain. The immoralities that still lurk and fester in the country are due very largely to waste. This waste of human things is parallel to the waste of economic values.

In a conference there was some difficulty in persuading a certain country minister to speak. When finally he arose he said, "I am not much interested in the scientific analysis of the country church. All I am interested in is sin." One wonders whether he was dealing with the sins of the country in their causes or in their effects, or was he simply concerned with the sins which consist in opposing the doctrines of his particular denomination, whatever it was. This wastefulness of the values in the soil enters into the social life of the country. Farmers care as little for the social values as for land values. Young men and women ignore the moral importance of little things. They are not taught that coarseness is wrong. They are not made to realize that cleanliness and courtesy and reverence for the human body are of vital importance in life.

Country people are prudish and they cover with a strict reserve all discussion of the moral relations of men and women. Yet in the same communities there is loose private conversation and coarse references are common. The strict standard of the household prevails within its limits. Books and magazines must not discuss, however seriously, the problems of life. But in the intercourse of the community there is not the same care. The moral life of country people requires cultivation of the leisure hours, the casual talk, the occasional meetings of men and women, and especially of young people.

The sale of votes in every election is a fixed quantity in the life of certain country towns. It is to be counted on each year. The number of votes for sale in each town is a known proportion of the whole, and through certain counties the selling of votes is the political factor everywhere present. These uniform facts point to a common cause. That cause is the degeneration of a proportion of the rural population into peasantry.

The growth of a peasant population in America is surely our greatest danger. A peasantry is a rural population whose moral and spiritual state are controlled by their material states. There may be rich peasants, though most peasants are poor. Peasants are a specialized class, incapable of self-government and controlled by some political masters who exercise for them essential rights of citizenship. The peasants in Europe are the last to receive the ballot. In America they are the first to surrender the ballot by selling their votes.

A young minister called to a country parish denounced the sale of votes, in his first year, and publicly fixed the whole blame on a prominent political leader of the town, who was there present in the church. His criticism was resented by the whole community. He was right, and so were they. It is well to denounce the purchase of votes, but the duty of the country church to Americanize the peasant class is the greater duty. The presence of such a class in a town infallibly leads to this iniquity. The sale of votes is as bad as the sale of woman's virtue, and both have an automatic tendency to degrade the population.

The danger sign of peasantry is a degraded standard of life. In this town there is one household in which nobody works but the mother. "How they live beats me," is the public comment of the neighbors. Through the winter into that house are crowded the father and mother, two sons and two daughters, the husband of one daughter and their two children, with three other small children, whose presence in the house is due to the loose good nature of the family. There is an indolent uncle of these children. None of the household follows any gainful occupation. The table is furnished with potatoes and pork. The attraction of the household is the easy, loose, good-nature of all its members. There is no one to complain of the indolence of the five grown men who lounge about through the winter days.

The presence of such a household in a town means degradation. Three of these men can be purchased for money to vote, though they cannot be hired for money to work. The daughters of the household are an equally dangerous factor in the countryside. The cause of this moral peril is the low grade of living to which the family has sunk. There is no known state of ill-health to account for their indolence. The first duty of the church in such a community is to regenerate such a household and to lift the standard of ambition of its members.