Read Ebook: The Country-Life Movement in the United States by Bailey L H Liberty Hyde

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Let me say further that irrigation is properly not a practice of arid countries alone. Irrigation is for two purposes: to reclaim land and make it usable; to mitigate the drought in rainfall regions. As yet the popular imagination runs only to reclamation-irrigation. This form of irrigation is properly regulated by the federal government.

Now and then a forehanded farmer in the humid region, growing high-class crops, installs an irrigation plant to carry him through the dry spells. As our agriculture becomes more developed, we shall greatly extend this practice. We shall find that even in humid countries we cannot afford to lose the rainfall from hills and in floods, and we shall hold at least some of it against the time of drought as well as for cities and for power. We have not yet learned how to irrigate in humid regions, but we certainly shall apply water as well as manures to supplement the usual agricultural practices.

We must learn to reckon with drought as completely as we reckon with winter or with lessening productiveness. We probably lose far more from dry spells than from all the bugs and pests.

But even though we should recognize a national reclamation movement to include all these phases and others, it may not be necessary or advisable in the interest of all the people, that every last acre in the national domain be opened for exploitation or settlement in this decade or even in this century. The nation may well have untouched reserves. No one knows what our necessities will be a hundred years hence. Land that has never been despoiled will be immeasurably more valuable to society then than now; and society holds the larger interest.

When the pressure of population comes, we shall fall back on our reserves. The rain-belt states will fall back on their wet lands, their uplands, and their hills. These hills are much more usable than those of the arid and semi-arid West can ever be. The Eastern and old Southern states have immense reserves, even though the titles may be largely in private ownership. New York is still nearly half in woods and swamps and waste, but practically all of it is usable. New York is an undeveloped country, agriculturally. The same is true of New England and Pennsylvania and great regions southwards. Forests and sward grow profusely to the summits of the mountains and hills. Vast areas eastward are undeveloped and unexploited. Even the regions of the so-called "abandoned farms" are yet practically untouched of their potential wealth.

I have no regret that these countries are still unsettled. There is no need of haste. When the great arid West has brought every one of its available acres into irrigation, and when population increases, the Eastern quarter of the country will take up the slack. It is by no means inconceivable that at that time the Eastern lands, newly awakened from the sleep of a century, will be the fresh lands, and the older regions will again become the new.

We should be careful not to repeat, even on a small scale, the recklessness and haste with which we have disposed of our reserves before their time.

WHAT IS TO BE THE OUTCOME OF OUR INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION?

We know that the whole basis of civilization is changing. Industry of every kind is taking the place of the older order. Its most significant note is that it brings the people of the world together in consultation and in trade. We are escaping our localism, and we look on all problems in their relation to all mankind. Brotherhood has become a real power in the world.

But what does industry in itself, including all forms of land-culture, offer as an ultimate goal to civilized man? What are to be the man's ideals toward which he should lead his thoughts?

I am not one of those who consider a sordid and commercial end to be the necessary result of industrialism. We must develop the ideals in an industrial civilization, that they may lead us into the highest personal endeavor; and everywhere it should be possible for a man to make the most of himself. There must be something in every business beyond the financial gain if it is to make any final contribution to civilization. Finding this ultimate, industrial society will grow into perfect flower.

So far as agriculture is concerned, I see two points of high endeavor within the business, lying beyond the making of a good living, and toward which the coming countryman may set his imagination.

A new social order must be evolved in the open country, and every farmer of the new time must lend a strong hand to produce it. We have been training our youth merely to be better farmers; this, of course, is the first thing to do, but the man is only half trained when this is done. What to do with the school, the church, the rural organizations, the combinations of trade, the highways, the architecture, the library, the beauty of the landscape, the country store, the rousing of a fine community helpfulness to take the place of the old selfish individualism, and a hundred other activities, is enough to fire the imagination and to strengthen the arm of any young man or woman.

The farmer is to contribute his share to the evolution of an industrial democracy.

Theodore Roosevelt, with his power to discern essentials, has given us a good rallying phrase in "the fighting edge." When man ceases to be a conqueror, he will lose his virility and begin to retrograde. As localism gives way to brotherhood, militarism will pass out; but this does not mean that mankind will cease to contend.

The best example I have seen of the development of determination and fine social brotherhood is in the making of the Panama Canal. The making of the Canal is in every sense a conquest. It is a new civilization that the 40,000 or 50,000 folk are constructing down there, and every man, whether he is employed in the commissariat, the sanitary department, in an office, on a steam shovel, or with a construction gang, will tell you that he is building the Canal. All these people are giving a good account of themselves because they are doing the work under the flag and because they are contending with vast difficulties.

We have scarcely begun even the physical conquest of the earth. It is not yet all explored. The earth is an island, and it is only two years ago that we got to one end of it. There are mountains to pierce, sea-shores to reclaim, vast stretches of submerged land to drain, millions of acres to irrigate and many more millions to utilize by dry-farming, rivers to canalize, the whole open country to organize and subdue by means of local engineering work, and a thousand other great pieces of construction to accomplish, all calling for the finest spirit of conquest and all contributing to the training of men and women. There is no necessity that the race become flabby.

Now, my point is that the prime high endeavor laid before every farmer is to conquer his farm, and this means contest with storm and flood and frost, with blight and bug and pest, and with all the other barriers that nature has put against the man that tills the land. We have made a tremendous mistake, in my estimation, in trying to portray farming merely as an easy business. The sulky-plow has been too much emphasized. We are giving the young men more means and tools by which to wage the contest, but the contest can never stop. In the nature of things, farming cannot be an easy and simple business, and this is why it has produced a virile lot of men and women, and why it will continue to do so. It is a question whether, if our civilization is ever evened up, we shall not look again to the open country for strong working classes, for the course of much of our city industrialism is to make dependent men and managed men, and we need to exercise every precaution that it does not make clock-watchers and irresponsible gang-servers .

Farming will attract folk with the feeling of mastery in them, even more in the future than in the past, because the hopelessness, blind resignation, and fatalism will be taken out of it. Those who are not masterful cannot conquer a farm. The man weighing one hundred and fifty pounds who is afraid of a San Jos? bug would better go to the city, where he can find some one to help him fight his battles. The farmer will learn how to adapt his scheme to nature, and how to conquer the things that are conquerable; and this should make it worth his while to be a farmer.

THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION IN AMERICAN COUNTRY LIFE

How to make country life what it is capable of becoming is the question before us; and while we know that the means is not single or simple, we ought to be able to pick out the first and most fundamental thing that needs now to be done.

It is perfectly apparent that the fundamental need is to place effectively educated men and women into the open country. All else depends on this. No formal means can be of any permanent avail until men and women of vision and with trained minds are at hand to work out the plans in an orderly way.

And yet it is frequently said that the first necessity is to provide more income for the farmer; but this is the result of a process, not the beginning of it. And again it is said that organization is the first necessity, even to make it possible to use the education. If organization is necessary to make the best use of education, then it assumes education as its basis. Educated men will make organization possible and effective, but economic organization will not insure education except remotely, as it becomes a means of consolidating an unorganic society.

But there is no longer any need to emphasize the value of education. It would now be difficult to find an American farmer who requires convincing on this point. Yet I have desired to say that there is no other agency, using education in its broad sense, that can by any possibility be placed ahead of it.

Agriculture is now a school subject. It is recognized to be such by state syllabi, in the minds of the people, and in the minds of most school men. It is finding its way into high-schools and other schools here and there.

There is no longer much need to propagate the idea that agriculture is a school subject. It is now our part to define the subject, organize it, and actually to place it in the schools.

We must understand that the introduction of agriculture into the schools is not a concession to farming or to farmers. It is a school subject by right.

It is the obligation of a school to do more than merely to train the minds of its students. The school cannot escape its social responsibilities; it carries these obligations from the very fact that it is a school supported by public money.

The schools, if they are to be really effective, must represent the civilization of their time and place. This does not mean that every school is to introduce all the subjects that engage men's attention, or that are capable of being put into educational form; it means that it must express the main activities, progress, and outlook of its people. Agriculture is not a technical profession or merely an industry, but a civilization. It is concerned not only with the production of materials, but with the distribution and selling of them, and with the making of homes directly on the land that produces the material. There cannot be effective homes without the development of a social structure.

Agriculture therefore becomes naturally a part of a public-school system when the system meets its obligation. It is introduced into the schools for the good of the schools themselves. It needs no apology and no justification; but it may need explanation in order that the people may understand the situation.

If agriculture represents a civilization, then the home-making phase of country life is as important as the field farming phase . As is the home, so is the farm; and as is the farm, so is the home. Some of the subjects that are usually included under the current name of home economics, therefore, are by right as much a part of school work as any other subjects; they will be a part of city schools as much as of country schools if the city schools meet their obligations. They are not to be introduced merely as concessions to women or only as a means of satisfying popular demand; they are not to be tolerated: they are essential to a public-school program.

The American college-of-agriculture phase of education is now well established. It is the most highly developed agricultural education in the world. It is founded on the democratic principle that the man who actually tills the soil must be reached,--an idea that may not obtain in other countries.

We are now attempting to extend this democratic education by means of agriculture to all ages of our people, and there is promise that we shall go farther in this process than any people has yet gone; and this fact, together with the absence of a peasantry, with the right of personal land-holding, and with a voice in the affairs of government, should give to the people of the United States the best country life that has yet been produced.

America's contribution to the country-life situation is a new purpose and method in education, which is larger and freer than anything that has yet been developed elsewhere, and which it is difficult for the Old World fully to comprehend.

The founding of the great line of public-maintained colleges and experiment stations means the application of science to the reconstruction of a society; and it is probably destined to be the most extensive and important application of the scientific method to social problems that is now anywhere under way.

It is not to extol our education experiment that I am making this discussion, but to measure the situation; and I think that there are perils ahead of us, which we should now recognize.

There are two grave dangers in the organization of the present situation: the danger that we shall not develop a harmonious plan, and thereby shall introduce competition rather than co?peration between agencies; the danger that the newer agencies will not profit fully by our long experience in agriculture-teaching.

An internal danger is the giving of instruction in colleges of agriculture that is not founded on good preparation of the student or is not organized on a sound educational basis. Winter-course and special students may be admitted, and extension work must be done; but the first responsibility of a college of agriculture is to give a good educational course: it deals with education rather than with agriculture, and its success in the end will depend on the reputation it makes with school men.

There is also danger that new institutions will begin their extension work in advance of their academic educational work; whereas, extension and propaganda can really succeed only when there is a good background of real accomplishment at home.

There is necessity that we now reorganize much of our peripatetic teaching. It is no longer sufficient to call persons together and exhort them and talk to them. We have come about to the end of agricultural propaganda. All field and itinerant effort should have a follow-up system with the purpose to set every man to work on his own place with problems that will test him. We have been testing soils and crops and fertilizers and live-stock and machines: it is now time to test the man.

There is also danger that we consolidate too many rural schools in towns. If it is true that the best country life is developed when persons live actually on their farms, then we should be cautious of all movements that tend to centralize their interests too far from home, and particularly to centralize them in a town or in a village. The good things should come to the farm rather than that the farm should be obliged to go to the good things.

We must first understand what our institutions of education are. The extension of agriculture-education in institutions in the United States is in four lines: as a part of the regular public-school work; in unattached schools of agriculture publicly maintained; in departments attached to other colleges or universities; in private schools. The last category may be eliminated from the present discussion.

The separate or special-school method is well worked out in Wisconsin , in Alabama and Georgia , Minnesota , with other adaptations in Louisiana, Oklahoma, Michigan, Maryland, and elsewhere.

In New York, the movement for special schools has taken an entirely new direction. Two schools are connected with existing institutions of higher learning of long-established reputation and one is unattached; none of them has a defined region or territory. These institutions are established on a more liberal financial plan than the special schools of other states, standing somewhat between those schools and the agricultural college type.

While much publicity has been given to the unattached-school plan, the main movement is the adding of agriculture-education to the existing public-school systems. Only eight or ten of the states have entered into any regular development of separate or unattached schools, whereas in every state the movement for agriculture in the public schools is well under way. The public schools are of definite plan; the unattached schools are of several plans, or of no plan; and in some states an intermediate course is developing by the establishing of public high-schools in which instruction in agriculture and household subjects is highly perfected.

Aside from the foregoing particular institutions, many general colleges and universities are introducing agricultural work in order to meet the increasing demand and to keep up with educational progress.

Agricultural work is proceeding in nearly all the states under the auspices of the United States Department of Agriculture, some of it distinctly educational in character; and there is agitation for the passage of a national bill to further secondary or special agriculture-education in the states.

State departments of agriculture, the indispensable experiment stations, veterinary colleges, departments of public instruction, farmers' institutes, voluntary societies, are all attacking the country-life problem in their own ways; and the powerful work of the agricultural press, although not coming within the scope of this paper, should not be overlooked as an educational agency.

In the meantime, the colleges of agriculture are growing rapidly and are approaching the subject from every side, and are assuming natural and inevitable leadership.

There is no doubt that all these agencies are contributing greatly to the solution of the rural problem, and there is now probably very little inharmony and little duplication of effort. In the newness and enthusiasm of the effort, good fellowship holds the work together in all the states or at least keeps it from collision. But the situation is inherently weak, because there is no plan or system, and no united discussion of the grounds on which the work rests. I have been in correspondence on this question with public men in every state in the Union, and I find a general feeling that the present situation is fraught with danger, and that there is great need of organization or at least of federation of the forces within each state; and ultimately there must be federation on a national basis. The work should be co?perative rather than competitive.

What is to be the policy of the state in agriculture-education? Where is the headship to lie? What are to be the spheres of the different institutions and agencies? What board or agency is to correlate and unify all the parts, to insure a progressive and well-proportioned program?

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