The third factor in communal husbandry is progress. Everyone testifies to the leadership of the "best families" in the transformation of the older modes of the tillage of the soil to the newer. It is impossible for the scientific agriculturist to make much improvement upon a country community until the more progressive spirits and the more open minds have been enlisted. Thereafter the better farming problem is solved. There can be no modern agriculture in a community in which all are equal. The communities of husbandmen will be as sharply differenced from one another, so far as I can see, as men are in the great cities. Leadership is the essential of progress. Gabriel Tarde has clearly demonstrated that only those who are at the top of the social scale can initiate social and economic enterprises. The cultivation of the soil for generations to come must be highly progressive. To recover what we have lost and to restore what has been wasted will exhaust the resources of science and will tax the intelligence of the leaders among husbandmen.

For this reason the ministers, teachers, and social workers in the country should be not discouraged, but hopeful, when confronted with rural landlords and capitalists. The business of the community leader is to enlist in the common task those persons whose privileges are superior and inspire them with a progressive spirit. Without their leadership the community cannot progress. Without their privileges, wealth and superior education, no progress is possible in the country.

If these pages tell the truth, then agriculture is a mode of life fertile in religious and ethical values. But it must be husbandry, not exploitation. Religious farming is a lifelong agriculture, indeed it involves generations, and its serious, devoted spirit waits for the reward, which was planted by the diligent father or grandfather, to be reaped by the son or grandson. Men will not so consecrate themselves to their children's good without the steadying influence of religion. So that agriculture and religion are each the cause, and each the effect, of the other.

If this is true, then the country church should promote the husbandry of the soil. The agricultural college should be brought into the country parish, for the church's sake. Indeed the minister would do well if his scholarship be the learning of the husbandman. No other science has such religious values. No other books have such immediate relation to the well-being of the people. The minister is not ashamed to teach Greek, or Latin,—dead languages. Why should he think it beneath him "to teach the farmer how to farm," provided he can teach the farmer anything? If he be a true scholar, the farmer, who is a practical man, needs his learned co-operation in the most religious of occupations, that the land may be holy.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 12: Rural Economics, by Prof. Thos. Nixon Carver.]

[Footnote 13: "The Country-Life Movement," by L. H. Bailey.]

[Footnote 14: "Ireland in the New Century," by Sir Horace Plunkett.]

[Footnote 15: Professor Thomas Nixon Carver.]

[Footnote 16: See Chapter V.]



V

EXCEPTIONAL COMMUNITIES

Most of this volume is devoted to the average conditions which prevail throughout the United States. The attempt is made to deal with those causes which are generally operative. It is the writer's opinion that the causes dealt with in other chapters are the prevailing causes of religious and social experience in the most of the United States. As soon as the community, after its early settlement, becomes mature, these causes show the effects here described. But there are exceptions which should be noted and the cause of their different life made clear. These exceptions are represented in the Mormons, the Scottish Presbyterians and the Pennsylvania Germans.

"The best farmers in the country are the Mormons, the Scotch Presbyterians and Pennsylvania Germans." This sentence expresses a general observation of Prof. Carver of Harvard, speaking as an economist. The churches among these three classes of exceptionally prosperous farmers show great tenacity and are free from the weakness which otherwise prevails in the country church. There is a group of causes underlying this exceptional character of the three classes of farmers.

These exceptional farmers are organized in the interest of agriculture. The Mormons represent this organization in the highest degree. Perhaps no other so large or so powerful a body of united farmers is found in the whole country. They have approached the economic questions of farming with determination to till the soil. They distrust city life and condemn it. They teach their children and they discipline themselves to love the country, to appreciate its advantages and to recognize that their own welfare is bound up in their success as farmers, and in the continuance of their farming communities. This agricultural organization centers about their country churches. They have turned the force of religion into a community making power, and from the highest to the lowest of their church officers the Mormon people are devoted to agriculture as a mode of living.

This principle of organizing the community consciously for agriculture results in the second condition of the life of these three exceptional peoples.

They build agricultural communities. The Mormons are organized by an idea and by the power of leadership. They have recruited their population through preachers and missionaries. This new population is woven at once into the fabric of the community. They are not merely employed in the community: they are married to the community. The organization on which the Mormon community is based becomes embodied at once in a society, with its own modes of religious, family, and moral feeling and thought.

These two principles are discovered in the Pennsylvania Germans. For more than two centuries they have continued their settlements in Pennsylvania. They are today a chain of societies loosely related to one another through religious sympathy and a common tradition, but united only in the possession of certain characteristics. They also are an organization for agricultural life, though not so consciously organized as the Mormons. Their societies are older and they have replaced with instinctive processes that which is among the Mormons a matter of logic and shrewd application of principles.

The life of the Pennsylvania Germans is expressed in the community. They have as much aversion to other people as they have fondness for their own. Their religion consists of a set of customs in which to them the character of the Christian is embodied. These customs can be expressed and embodied only in the life of common people working on the land. They make plainness, industry, and patience, austerity of life and other agricultural virtues constitute sanctity. It is impossible to believe sincerely in their mode of life and not be a farmer. It is easy to believe the Pennsylvania Germans' code, if one is a farmer, and it is profitable as well.

The Scotch and the Scotch Irish Presbyterians represent a third principle of agricultural success. Their churches are tenacious and their country communities outlive those of the average type. In them is represented in the highest degree the principle of austerity. By this I mean, as defined by an economist, the custom of living so as to produce much and consume little. These people look upon life with severity. They have little sympathy with the expansive and exuberant life of the young. The men of the community, who are the producers, occupy a relatively greater position than the women, who are the consumers. They exemplify to a slight degree the conscious organization for agriculture, and in a high degree the resultant social life which we have noted among the Mormons and the Pennsylvania Germans; but to the highest degree the Scottish Presbyterians represent this self-denial and rigidity of life—which appears in the others also—and they embody it in their creed. This austerity gives to them a forbidding character, and robs them of some of the esthetic interest attaching to the other two, but it is possible that they are more nearly the ideal type of American farmer because of certain other traits possessed by them.

The Scotch farmer has not in the United States settled in communities or colonies, as he has in Canada, but the typical farming community of this stock is Scotch Irish. As Prof. R. E. Thompson has shown,[17] the emigrants from the North of Ireland, who are themselves of Scotch extraction, have colonized extensively. That is, they have settled their populations so as to cover a territory and possess it for themselves. But the Scotch, from whom they derive many characteristics, have settled no colony in the world except in the North of Ireland.[18] The peculiarity of these Scotch Irish farming settlements, as shown especially in Pennsylvania, is their capacity to produce leaders in sympathy with the whole of American life. The Mormons produce leaders, but their influence is compromised by religious prejudices. The Pennsylvania Germans have produced no leaders whom they can call their own, and very few writers or educators. The Scotch Irish, on the other hand, considered as farmers, have contributed an extraordinary proportion of the leadership of the United States. They have been able to maintain their own communities in the country and to find for these communities a sufficient leadership, and they have sent forth into the general population a multitude of men for leadership in the army, in the legislatures, in the colleges and universities, and above all, in the pulpit.

In these three types of successful farmers religion is an essential factor. No history can be written of the Mormons, of the "Pennsylvania Dutch" or of the Scotch Presbyterian without recording their religious devotion, their obedience to leaders, to customs and to creed. One cannot live among them without feeling the peculiar religious atmosphere which belongs to each of them. They are admirable or obnoxious, according as one likes or dislikes this religious character of theirs, but it pervades the whole life of the community. If it be true that there is no type of farmer—except the scientific farmer of the past few years—who has succeeded as these three types have succeeded, and there is no country community so tenacious as their communities are, and if it be true that these farmers more uniformly than other farmers are religiously organized, then it follows that there is an essential relation so far as American agriculture goes, between successful and permanent agriculture and a religious life. The country church becomes the expression of a permanent and abiding rural prosperity. Agriculture is shown by its very nature to require a religious motive. An element of piety appears to be necessary in the makeup of the successful farmer.

In these three types of successful farmer there appears another principle which is common to them all. They are not only organized for farming, but they are organized as a mutual prosperity association, based on their consciousness of kind. Prof. Gillin has called attention to the habit of the Dunkers in Iowa, who are of the Pennsylvania German sects, by which they extend their farming communities.

"The thing that is needed is to make the church the center of the social life of the community. That is easier where there is but one church than where there are several, but federation is not essential. Thought must be taken by the leaders to make the church central in every interest of life. I know of a community where that has been done. It is the community located south of Waterloo, Ia., in Orange Township. It is composed of an up-to-date community of Pennsylvania Dutch Dunkers. From the very first they have made the church central. When these great changes of which I have spoken began to occur, the leaders of that community began to take measures to checkmate the attractions of the towns for their young people. For example, Fourth of July was made a day of celebration at the church. When the people of other communities were flocking to town by hundreds, the youth of that community were gathering, in response to plans well thought out beforehand, to the church grounds where patriotic songs were sung, games were played, a picnic dinner was served, and a general good time was provided for the young. They have also arranged that their young people have a place to come to on Sunday nights where they can meet their friends. The elders look to it that provisions are made for the gatherings of the young people on Sunday so that they shall 'have a good time,' with due arrangements for the boys and girls to get together under proper conditions for their love-making. Even their church 'love feasts' held twice a year, are also neighborhood gatherings for the young people. The church is the center of everything. Is a farmers' institute to be held in the community, or a teachers' institute? The church until very recently was open to it. Is a farm to rent or for sale? At once the leaders get busy with the mail, and soon a family from the East is on their way to take it. This country church has not remained strong and dominant in the country just by accident or even by federation. It has survived because it had wise leaders who have met the changes with new devices to attract the interest of the community and make the church serve the community in all its affairs, but especially on the social side. Such thought takes account of the 'marginal man' too. The hired man and the hired girl, the foreigner and the tramp are welcome there. No difference is made. There is pure democracy. With the growth of the class spirit I do not know how that can survive. These hirelings are not talked down to; they are considered one with the rest. They will some day get enough to buy a farm and become leaders in the community, perhaps. The church is theirs as much as anyone's else. It looks after their interest, not only for the hereafter, but here and now. Under its fostering care they form their life attachments, it provides for their social pleasures, it is the center to which they come to discuss their farming affairs or whatever interests them. And in spite of the fact that the preaching has little contact with life and its interests, so strong is the social spirit that the preaching can be left out of account. What could be accomplished were the preaching as consciously directed to forwarding the social interests of the community one can only speculate."[19]

Thus they work for the propagation and extension of their own community. The Scotch Presbyterians in like manner favor their own kindred and their kindred in the faith, though, I think, in a lesser degree. The Mormons are consolidated both by formal organization and by instinctive preference for their own in a multitude of co-operating habits, through which they build up their communities and contend with one another against their economic and religious opponents. It is not enough to say that this is clannishness; it is a mingling of kinship and religious preferences. It constitutes the strongest form of agricultural co-operation to be found in the United States.

A Quaker community represents ideal community life. There is none poor. The margin of the community is well cared for by the conscious and deliberate service of the central and leading spirits in the community.

At Quaker Hill, New York, there has been for almost two centuries a community of Friends. The Meeting has now been "laid down" but the customs and manners by which these peculiar people maintain their community life have been wrought into the social texture of the present population of Quaker Hill. During two centuries this community has cared for its own members in need. It was not beneath the dignity of the Meeting to raise money and purchase a cow, early in the eighteenth century, to "loan to the widow Irish," and at the close of the nineteenth century, the few Quakers and the many Irish and other "world's people" took part more than once in subscriptions by which the burden was borne, which had fallen upon some workingman or poorer neighbor through the death of horse or cow, or even to bear the expense incidental to the death of his child.

These Quakers co-operated in their business life. They made themselves responsible that no member of their Meeting should be long in debt. From 1740 for 100 years and more, the records of the Meeting show that marriage was made impossible and other vital experiences were forbidden by the Meeting, unless the individual Quaker paid his debts and maintained his business on a level dictated by the common opinion of the Quaker body.[20]

In 1767, Oblong Meeting of Quaker Hill, New York, began the legislative opposition of the Society of Friends to the institution of slavery. This great economic movement expressed the degree to which the Quaker discipline merged the religious life in the economic life. This consolidation of religious and economic life was essential in the community building of the Quakers.

It is surprising to many to discover that the "Pennsylvania Dutch" were part of the same movement of population which brought the Quakers into Pennsylvania. William Penn spoke German as well as English. His mother was a German. When he inherited his father's claim against the British Crown, and received from Charles the Second the grant of that extensive territory in America on which he launched his Holy Experiment, he began to advertise and to seek for settlers on the Continent as well as in England.

William Penn was a Quaker, and on the Continent he found immediate response in the greatest number of cases among the various branches of Mennonites, Anabaptist, and other sects, who shared a common group of beliefs and experienced at this time a common persecution. William Penn, therefore, reaped a harvest of responses in the territory between the mouth of the Rhine and the Alps. His proposal made its own selection, and brought to America a population calculated like the Quaker population for the building of communities. The largest single contribution was made by the Palatinates, who were at that period undergoing extreme persecution.

The communities founded within the first century after the opening of Pennsylvania have remained to the present day, and the earliest establishments of Mennonites and Quaker communities in Pennsylvania have been duplicated in the westward stream of immigration, especially in Ohio and in Iowa. These people are roughly called the "Pennsylvania Dutch." Even when one meets them in Michigan, Iowa or Minnesota, this name clings to them, and the form of social organization which they elaborated in Eastern Pennsylvania still persists.

This social organization has varying characteristics. It is somewhat difficult to analyze the intricate windings and entanglements of doctrinal and practical belief in custom among the Mennonites, Amish and Dunkers. Old school and new school have been formed in almost every one of these sects. Eccentric and peculiar principles of belief in organization have formed the lesser and the least permanent groups; but there is a common principle in them all. Their ability to form communities in the midst of hostile populations and adverse conditions has been due to the co-operation between their religious and their economic habits.

The "Pennsylvania Dutch" have simple doctrinal characteristics. They have never worked out in detail the logic of their beliefs. They put the weight of their organization upon practical customs, as the Quakers did. In some cases, this applied to clothing; in some or all of these sects to the manner of speech; to family customs; but, the one peculiar principle in it all, which has been vital to the success, to the persistence, to the wide extension of these sectarian groups has been that the religious life has penetrated the economic life. They have not permitted members of their community to be poor. They have turned the attention of their religious sympathies to the economic margin of the community. They have enforced the payment of debts, and they have governed and controlled marriage conditions. By subtle enforcement of custom having the power of laws, they have governed the community in its vital relations, and perfected the system by which the poorest man shall make his living and by which the richest man shall make his fortune.

Recently, I was in Lancaster, Penn., and passing through a market I was told by a resident that all the truck farming of the market for that city had come into the hands of the Amish, and my friend added, "If you go at an early hour to buy, and ask the price of certain vegetables, you will probably be told, 'We do not know the price yet; we will have to wait until all the farmers come in.'" That is, after two hundred and more years of living as farmers in this section of Pennsylvania, these sectarians maintain their community life, co-operate in the monopolizing of an industry, and in fixing the price of the monopolized product in the markets of a Pennsylvania city.

This survey of community-building peoples in America may throw light upon the recommendations of Sir Horace Plunkett for the organization of country life upon an economic basis. The present writer heartily agrees with him that the center of the community must be economic. He says that "Better business must come first" in constructive policies for American country life, but "by failing to combine, American and British farmers persistently disobey an accepted law."

Social division is the impending danger which threatens the future of the American community in the country. For if the analysis of agricultural success in this chapter is correct, then the farmer is exceedingly dependent upon his neighbor, and the permanence of rural populations depends upon the social unity of the farmers in the community. The highest expression of this social unity is in the farmer's religion. Worship thus becomes a symbol of agricultural prosperity. The writers and the orators have then truly spoken who symbolized the beauty of rural life in the church steeple. The farmer himself seems to recognize, in the church spire rising above the roofs of the hamlet, the symbol of prosperous and satisfactory life in the country.

As the tillers of the soil come to the necessity of co-operation in the new order of life in the country, as the old isolation passes away and the modern farmer comes to recognize his necessary dependence upon other farmers in the community, a common place of worship will become necessary to the community. One church will of necessity express the life of the community and the periodic meeting of all the people in one house of worship will be the highest and most essential symbol of the feeling and the thought and the aspirations of that community after true prosperity and permanence.

The purpose of this chapter has been to present the general characteristics of the most exceptional communities in the country. These are Mormon, Scotch Presbyterian and Pennsylvania German. By their very names they indicate religious organization of the community and "birthright membership" associations. They are grouped under the one principle, that in them the religious organization is an expression of their social economy. Their social and economic life is under the domination of their religion.

These farmers are organized in the interest of agriculture. The resultant social life constitutes a most intense organization in which voluntary and conscious combination matures in instinctive union embodied in blood relationship, neighborliness and economic union. These populations show the correspondence between economic and religious austerity. Thrift takes the form of dogmatic repression and finally their organization and their relationship express themselves in organized efforts for the well-being of the community. They deliberately as well as instinctively co-operate.

It is the writer's belief that these exceptional communities exhibit the principles on which American life must be organized, if the farmer is to be a success, if his schools are to progress, his churches to be maintained, and if the country community is to be a good place to live in. None of these populations can be imitated. It would be impossible for a community to take over their modes any more than it could imbibe their motives. The study of them throws light upon the problem of country life in America. Above all things it illustrates the especial union of the country church with the social economy of the farmer and his household. It shows that the life of country people is co-operative, that it is undermined by division and disunion and that in the open country where man is least seen his society is most evident. The dependence of each man upon his neighbor is increased in modern times by the thinning out of the rural population and the increased economic burden laid upon the farmer.

Finally, the exceptional populations present an exceptional victory over economic and natural forces. They abolish poverty within their own bounds. Every one of the communities just described turns the power of its common organization upon the problem of maintaining the lower margin of the community. They who are in danger of falling behind are sustained and carried on. None in these communities is permitted to fall into pauperism. The workingman without capital, whether he be in their meetings or only employed on their farms, is kept from want. The widow with her little house and one cow is insured against the loss of any feature of her small property. This seems to me to be the greatest triumph of these communities. It is the test, I am convinced, of their organizations and of their success. In this they demonstrate one of the greatest possibilities of country life. They show that in the open country it is possible for men to live without the suffering and degradation of poverty.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 17: History of American Presbyterianism, by R. E. Thompson.]

[Footnote 18: An exception to this statement must be noted, in the Scotch settlements in Canada and Nova Scotia.]

[Footnote 19: Professor John L. Gillin, in American Journal of Sociology, March, 1911.]

[Footnote 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.

I believe that this economic motive is religious. It is the quest of what a man has not, but feels to be his. It engages his utmost efforts. It is labor for his wife and children and for all his group fellows, and therefore is involved in his holiest, most self-forgetting feelings. It takes him back to his parents and reminds him constantly of his ancestors. He forms his ideas of justice in his economic experiences. His ultimate conviction as to the goodness or the badness of the world are the outgrowth of his experience in getting a living. Therefore his economic life is his wrestle with nature and with society. It generates in him all the religion he has.

I suppose it was for this reason that Jesus said "I am come that they may have life, and that they may have it abundantly." Probably his meaning was economic, in part, in the saying, "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." The quest of a living is a satisfaction of successive economic wants, of which bread is but the first. Every truth that mankind knows involves men in an economic want. Education is one of the most general wants. It comes in the series somewhat later than bread. The love of music is an economic want, which comes generally later than education. But both are a part of a living. I believe that the quest of education and the love of music are religious, just as much as the desire for daily bread. One might enumerate the whole series of economic wants, to satisfy which is to live, but religion is the total of the reflections, and the complex of customs which result from the lifelong quest for a living among common folk. At its highest it is expressed by St. Augustine, "O God, thou hast made us for thyself, and our souls are not at rest until we find ourselves in thee." Bread is the first economic want, and God is the greatest and the last.

Economic wants among common folk are usually the source of religious feeling. Few people desire to be rich; a lesser number strive to get wealth; and very few attain a fortune. The most of men seek and get a living. The best of men, and the most religious, are those whose economic experience brings them a series of satisfactions, beginning with bread, clothing, shelter, education in the essentials, music and a little aesthetic culture, and gradually extending into higher forms of human enjoyment. The simplest religious craving is for economic assurance of supply. "The Lord is my Shepherd: I shall not want," is on the most thumbed page of the Bible. The play of these economic aspirations among poor people results in all the simpler and most general religious feelings. With the rise of the aspirations of the individual, and the ideals of the group, toward higher satisfactions, the religious experiences should become nobler, more refined. The penniless college student who prays for an education should be a nobler worshipper than the fisherman who asks his mud-divinity for a good catch. The group of Oberammergau players who present the Passion Play, a highly complex satisfaction of wants, should be nobler believers and worshippers than herdsmen who out on the hills pray for the increase of their flocks and for a better price for wool.

Communities differ from one another according to the living which they supply, or the wants which they satisfy. Modern men will not live in a community that does not satisfy a pretty long series of wants. For instance, a graduate of the American common schools will desire bread, clothing, shelter—all of comfortable quality—and education for his children better than his own, musical enjoyment, aesthetic culture, the possession of some books, access to many magazines and the reading of a daily paper; and varied opportunities for the exercise of the play spirit. The country community satisfies, in most of the United States, only the first of these. It is a place for securing food, clothing and shelter of a comfortable sort. Country people have in the past ten years secured also a better supply of reading matter. Almost all the rest of the series is lacking. The reason for the rural exodus is in the most of cases the quest of education and of music, the craving for aesthetic culture, and the desire for recreation. Country towns and small cities therefore have come to be centers of education, of amusement and of "culture." They are the first step upward on the series of economic satisfaction. Men who have made some money on the farm "move into town," for the satisfaction of the later wants in the series.

None of these wants is itself sinful, for all of them make up life. They are the steps on the way from bread to God. The business of the teacher and preacher of religion is to know the wants of his people: study those which are satisfied in his community, and so to build the community that for most of its people and for the most desirable people, all the vital necessities of life shall be satisfied, in the community in which the desire for bread is satisfied. The problem of amusement exhibits these principles clearly. Farming is austere, and few farming communities have recreation adequate to the demand of the young people and the working people who live on the farms. Agriculture is becoming more systematic and more exacting in its demands: and systematic work creates a demand for organized play. As this demand is not satisfied in the country—indeed it is less generally satisfied now than in former times—the youth and workingman from farming communities go to the towns and larger villages for amusement. These centers of population have a disproportionate burden therefore of cheap vaudeville shows, saloons, professional baseball games, and moving-pictures.

These amusements are, to a degree, abnormal in character because those who enjoy them are away from their home community, and are suffering a reaction from pent-up desires. Just as the lumberman or cowboy or sailor when he comes to town "tears loose and paints the town red," so, in a milder degree, the farmer's son or hired man, because he has at home no recreations supplied by his church or school, patronizes in the town or small city a cheaper and nastier theatre than one would expect to find either in that town, or in his home community. The remedy is to make the country community adequate to the wants of those who live there. The church should promote recreation. The public school should supply entertainment of a high standard, both to satisfy the play instinct and to elevate the youth's ideals of amusement. The community which works should be dependent on no other community for play.

Common-school education is a function which country communities have surrendered to the centers of population. The one-room country school has long been inadequate; but the farmer has not improved it, preferring to rely upon the town schools to which he will remove his family after he has made enough money on the farm. I am told that about Crete, Nebraska, a recent census revealed that half the normal child population is missing from the country districts; and double the normal child population is found in Crete. The quest of adequate schooling explains the condition, which speaks ill for the country community of Nebraska.

In all these cases religious service consists in completing the community. The supply of wants, which are widely and keenly felt, is a religious act. This has been the reason for the success of the Du Page Presbyterian Church in Illinois.[22] The minister, Mr. McNutt, in a religious spirit so well supplied the recreative life needed in the community, that the community has been made whole. Just as Jesus made sick or maimed men whole, as a religious act, so the community builder who supplies to working farmers something besides labor on the land, is making the community whole.

The perfecting of the common school system in McNabb, by Mr. John Swaney and other Friends, and in Rock Creek by Mr. R. E. Bone and other Presbyterians, was a religious act for their communities in Illinois. The farmers who have money can move to the town, but to complete the country community is to satisfy the economic wants of the poor. The wants of the poor are always of religious value.

Moreover, the satisfaction of all wants in the community itself is a moral gain. If individuals live this life in the bounds to which their group and family associations are confined, the steadying influence of society is at its greatest. Jacob Riis[23] noted among immigrants the working of a lower sense of obligation due to absence from accustomed home associations. Communities are compacted of the strongest moral bonds. If churches would make men righteous they cannot do better than to complete the community, especially in the country, as a place to live in: making it a place for education as well as profit: of play as well as work, of worship as well as of material comfort.

Unfortunately churches in the country are too often recruiting stations for the cities and colleges. The ministers are respectable pullers-in for the city show. Nothing rejoices them so much as to help their young men and women find a position in the city; unless it be to have a bright lad or girl go off to college. When a country minister was reminded that all these departures weakened the country community, and that very few of them benefitted the lad or girl who goes to the city, he replied "you cannot blame them; there is nothing here to keep them."

"The rural exodus" has had its Moses in the rural college student, its Aaron in the country minister, and its Miriam in the country school teacher. These three have led a generation out of the country to perish in the wilderness. For only a pitiful few of those who leave the country come to prominence in the city. The most gain but a poor living there, and very many go to ruin. The church should be the savior of the community, as her Master is of the soul.

It seems to me that this is done in a church in Ottumwa, Iowa, of which Dr. W. H. Hormell is minister. It is in a stock-yards district, and the daily occupation of many of the members is unclean, of some revolting. But the church is a dynamo of spiritual forces. It supplies the experiences most opposite to those of the slaughter-house. A half-dozen chapels in surrounding neighborhoods, most of them in the country, are outposts of the church, for each of which a superintendent is responsible: and thus a man who is an underling at the slaughter-house is a leader in the quest of eternal life. The whole company of workers with the pastor, constitute a spiritual cabinet of the district. It is not surprising that this church fascinates men. The minister cannot be persuaded away, and a like devotion pervades his group of workers. The intensity of the industrial labor is matched by the intensity of Bible study, prayer and evangelism. The degradation and repulsion of the leading industry of the place are equalled by the unworldly nobility and optimism of the leading church. This church does not attempt to mend the community—which might be found impossible—but only to serve the community by supplying the satisfaction for spiritual wants.

According to the law of diminishing returns, the first satisfactions of any want have infinite value. What does this mean but that they have religious value? The first drink of water to a famished man calls forth a fervent "Thank, God." The first book printed is a Bible. The first landing on American soil was a solemn religious occasion—and still is for the immigrant. So the first gains of money are of religious value to the poor. The first hundred dollars to a mechanic's family is invested in a dozen benefits. The first thousand dollars which a working farmer saves go into a home, a piano or books, or an education for a child. It is all moral and spiritual good. Later thousands have diminishing moral and spiritual values. Most of the churches and homes in America were paid for out of the tithes of men and women who owned at the time a margin of less than a thousand dollars.

This is the reason for the religious character of economic life. The most of people spend their lives with less than a thousand dollars. They are poor, and money does them good, not harm. They need to know how to use it. But the getting of their living is a process prolific in religious feeling, because economic matters have to them the infinite value of first satisfactions of all the simplest wants of life.

The salvation of the community will be accomplished in satisfying the higher wants of those whose lower wants are satisfied. For those who "have made money" supply schools; for those who work supply recreation; for the sick hospitals; for the invalid build sanitariums; and for all men supply social life, the greatest need of human life on earth. For those who are thus united to the community, and to one another in the intricate network of associations, the opportunity of worship together, and of sharing common spiritual interests becomes the highest economic want.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 21: "I come that they may have life, and may have it abundantly."—Jesus, in John 10:10.]

[Footnote 22: "Modern Methods in the Country Church," by Matthew Brown McNutt.]

[Footnote 23: "The Making of an American," by Jacob Riis.]



VII

THE COMMUNITY

The country community is defined by the team haul. People in the country think of the community as that territory, with its people, which lies within the team haul of a given center. Very often at this center is a church, a school and a store, though not always, but always the country community has a character of its own.[24] Social customs do not proceed farther than the team haul. Imitation, which is an accepted mode of social organization, does not go any farther in the country than the customary drive with a horse and wagon. The influence of leading rural personalities does not extend indefinitely in the country, but disappears at the boundary of the next community. Intimate knowledge of personalities is confined to the community and does not pass beyond the team haul radius. Within this radius all the affairs or any individual are known in minute detail; nobody hopes to live a life apart from the knowledge of his neighbors; but beyond the community, so defined, this knowledge quickly disappears.

Men's lives are housed and their reputations are encircled by the boundary of the team haul.

The reason for this is economic and social. The life of the countryman is lived within the round of barter and of marketing his products. The team haul which defines the community is the radius within which men buy and sell. It is also the radius within which a young man becomes acquainted with the woman he is to marry. It is the radius of social intercourse. Within this radius of the team haul families are accustomed to visit with ten times the frequency with which they pass outside this radius. Indeed, for most of them, one might say that social intercourse is a hundred times as frequent within the team haul as without it.

The average man would define the community as "the place where we live." This definition contains every essential element, locality, personal and social relations, and vital experiences. The community is that complex of economic and social processes in which individuals find the satisfactions not supplied in their homes. The community is the larger social whole outside the household; a population complete in itself for the needs of its residents from birth to death. It is a man's home town.

This conception of the community as a vital common possession explains the relation of religious, educational, ethical, economic institutions to one another. The community is the clearing-house of all these influences. It is the medium by which they exchange with one another, in the interest of human life. The perfection of this exchange and the abundance of communal influences makes the community good and desirable, or poor and undesirable.

Sometimes one says that the community is "a good place to live in." When it is ample for the needs of individual lives men move into it, and the average man finds there a contented and satisfied life. The decay of the community is indicated by the departure of individuals and of families in quest of a better centre for the supply of vital human needs. Some go to make more money elsewhere, some depart for educational advantages and some move away because social life is lacking or religious privileges are not suitable. But these four vital essentials, economic, ethical, educational and religious, make up the elements in the community's service to the individual.

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.

The departure of many persons from country communities is due to the lack of social life: and the fascination of the city for bright and energetic young men and women is due to the variety of recreation and interest which it provides to those who expect to work and are willing to work. Regular work means regular play. This fact cannot be too well learned by those who study the religious and moral life of modern men. The need of play is as real as the need of food or of sleep.

This recreational life is highly ethical. The craving of the young and of working-people for common places of recreation is a normal craving due to the development of conscience as well as to weariness of body. The exactions of modern labor create a craving for free and voluntary movement. Those who are hired to work, and those who if they are employers are bound to the routine of the desk or of the bench, seek to breathe deeply the air of happy and self-expressive action. The result is that play, especially team work, is highly moral. It is not only personal and self-expressive, but it involves co-operation, self-surrender, obedience and the correlation of one's own life with other lives in a glorious complex of experiences, unexampled elsewhere in modern life for their ethical value in developing adolescent minds in the common humanities and moralities. The playground is an essential field in the preparation of good citizens and it is not to be wondered at that in country communities, where all provision of recreation is difficult, and no public provision of playgrounds is thought of by those in authority, that young people and working people, indeed all classes of the population, tend to move away.

The religious attraction of the community has just as real a value for the satisfaction of individual life as the economic or ethical or the educational. "Mankind is incurably religious," and the life from birth to death cannot be complete in average cases without religious experience. Indeed the conscious testimony of men to the community's religious value for them is greater than any of the others. Religious experience is indeed a form of community conscience. To many men the church and the community are one. We cannot within our definition grant this; but the testimony to the religious character of the country community is a classic in American thought. The early days of every community are hopeful and optimistic. The tendency has been therefore for each religious communion to establish its own church. These early Protestant churches were expressions of the community sense on behalf of these people. The average American can best think of the community in terms of a church and a school. For building up the community, therefore, the maintenance of religious institutions is essential.

We are concerned in these chapters most of all with the American community in the country. Not because it is more important, but because it is easier to understand and affords a better model for interpreting other communities more complex and highly organized. In it one may see the processes which affect the town and city communities; shifting of population, economic changes, educational improvement or retrogression and the processes of social life which express themselves in moral conditions. The community is the field in which may be observed the prosperity of the people as a whole. It is the local exhibit in which the average man shows what has come to pass throughout the commonwealth as a whole.

American rural communities have been under the influence of swift and sudden changes during the years of railroad development. This is exhibited in the country community very clearly. There almost all the causes which are at work in the city are seen and their operation is easier to observe and to measure than in a city community. It is the general impression that the country community has suffered greatly though the loss of population. This is probably due to the diminishing agricultural activity of the country. Thirty-four counties in Ohio are producing less than the same counties were producing before the Civil War. It is natural that the population of these counties should be on the whole smaller than at that time. But it is more probable that the social, educational and moral life of the people of these counties who stayed in the country is slacker and less vigorous than in 1860. Sometimes the population of a community remains stationary but the economic weakness expresses itself in a retarded social, ethical and religious life.

There is high authority for the statement that the sifting of the country community in recent years has on the whole improved it. Wilbert L. Anderson says, "If this emigration of the best were the whole story, it would be impossible to refute the charge of degeneracy. There is, however, another aspect of the matter. The industrial revolution has put a pressure upon rural life that is more important even than the attraction of cities. That pressure has aggravated the severity of the struggle for existence, and this grinding of the mill of evolution has crushed the weaker strata of the population. Among those who have gone are laborers and their families, the owners and occupants of the poorest lands—the famous abandoned farms, and the weaklings and dependents. Many of these have swollen the crowds of the factory towns; others have supplied unskilled labor to the cities; in not a few cases they have gone to their destruction in the slums, where residues of decadent folk finally disappear. The human material that was most susceptible to alcohol has gone into the mills of the gods. When all is summed up, the clearance at the bottom is not less significant than the loss at the top of the social scale. Natural selection works as effectually in toning up the species by weeding out the worst as 'natural selection reversed' works for degeneracy through the removal of the best. This purgation has been overlooked; whether it offsets the injury in the highest stratum is a fair question, but obviously no man is wise enough to answer it. The opinion may be hazarded that when the two influences are compounded, it will be found that the average child has moved but a little way up or down the scale. This is a local question to which there are as many answers as communities. The net result of these changes is a gain in homogeneousness; in the country town the dream of equality is nearer realization to-day than ever before."[28]

It is the writer's belief that, allowing for local variation, this statement is the best generalization of the condition throughout the country. The rural population has been specialized. The country community is finding its own kind of people. It has not yet, through suitable institutions, learned to cultivate its problems and to train its own leaders. That is precisely what will be accomplished through the building up of the country community with which we are here concerned. But already the country population is homogeneous and is selected with a view to fitness for the environment of the rural community. As the city is breeding its own stock, who are possessed with the problem of city life and devoted to the interests of the city, so the country in the shifting of modern populations is coming to have its own kind of people; among whom the problems of the country community are beginning to be discussed and the interests of the country community are being provided for by suitable organizations.

The building of communities, therefore, will provide the positive agencies requisite for the needs of the present population in the country. The purpose of those who serve the country population shall be the construction of suitable institutions by which country life shall be made worth while. These institutions must be economic, for the securing of prosperity to country people, social institutions which shall build up their moral character and life, educational institutions whereby the problems of country life shall be understood in the light of all human life, and religious institutions which shall crown the life of country people with hope and animate the individual with the spirit of self-sacrifice on behalf of all the people of the community and of the world.

The church should be a community center. There may be other centers of the community where other functions are assembled, but the church should lift up her eyes to the horizon in which she lives and comprehend all the people in her service and affection. This does not mean that they shall all be members of that church. The community spirit is itself growing. Frequently the country community has attained a unity which the churches ignore. For the church to become a community center means that it represents in itself the united life of the people. Whatever be their common interest that interest dwells in the church.

In Hernando, Mississippi, the people are united. The interest of one is the concern of all. Under the leadership of the families of old land-owners the whole community responds to common impulses and is organized under common ideals. No poor child of either a white or a negro household is neglected or is overlooked. Yet in this community churches have no federation and ministers have no regular means of working together. A charity organization was recently formed in this community as an organ by which the community should care for its poorer members. This society was formed outside of the churches, no one of which had the right to be a center for the community. It is true that ministers and members of these churches were leaders in this community enterprise, but the churches as organizations were not a part of it, although its purposes are purely Christian.

Prof. Alva Agee insists that "The country church does not serve the community's needs as the community sees those needs." His meaning is that when a community enterprise is to be launched the promoter of it finds it necessary in the country to avoid the churches, lest his enterprise be entangled in their differences. He is embarrassed also by their lack of a community spirit. Frequently the same persons who to the church contribute no community spirit are in the community itself leaders of common enterprises.

In contrast to these conditions the instance of Du Page Church at Plainfield, Illinois, of which Rev. Matthew B. McNutt was recently the minister, exhibits the power of a country church to make itself the center of a whole community. This church, which in a year became famous throughout the land, has earned its repute by ten years of devoted service of its minister and the growing affection and union of its people. The church serves so well the social needs of the community that a social hall once popular has been closed and three granges in succession have attempted to organize in the community and have failed. Yet Du Page Church is passionately devotional and intensely missionary. Its social life is but a legitimate expression of its community sense. The minister and his people have had the power to see and to inspire a common life among the people in the countryside.

This chapter has been intended as a definition of the country community. Its radius is the team haul, because the horse has been the means of transportation in the country. The community is the round of life in which the individual in the country passes his days: it is his larger home. The definition of this greater household of the country must be flexible, but however it be defined, it is the characteristic unit of social organization among country people. The map of the United States outside the great cities is made up of little societies bordering sharply upon one another, differing from one another socially and religiously. These little societies are the proper fields in which the life of the church and the school is lived. Of these small societies the church and the school are the expressions. In church and school the country community has its highest life.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 24: The author expresses his indebtedness for this definition to Dr. Willet M. Hays of the Department of Agriculture at Washington.]

[Footnote 25: Quaker Hill, by Warren H. Wilson.]

[Footnote 26: Professor C. J. Galpin of University of Wisconsin has done precise work of great value, in defining the country community, as it centers in the village. See his pamphlet, "A Method of Making a Social Survey of the Rural Community," a bulletin of the Agricultural Experiment Station of the University of Wisconsin.]

[Footnote 27: "The American Rural School," by Harold W. Foght.]

[Footnote 28: "The Country Town," by Wilbert L. Anderson, D.D.]



VIII

THE MARGIN OF THE COMMUNITY

The change of ethical consciousness among church people in recent years takes the form of a transference of interest from the individual to the community. The literature of religious and ethical thought is full of appeal to "serve the community." The working out of any religious or ethical force in modern society is guided by the closely compacted and highly organic character of present-day social life.

In the old times in America, which have so recently gone, men were of one class; the community was homogeneous; universal acquaintance prevailed.

The unit of value in American life until recent years was the successful man, because we faced a continent unexplored. Unpossessed commercial resources were before the people. The standard of the time of Horace Greeley was the standard of individual success, of initial utility. The town boasted of the man it had "turned out." The church measured its value by the rich and benevolent farmer or merchant, and by the individuals whose piety or literary success seemed to express the life of the church. There was an opportunity for all, because crude resources, numberless openings offered themselves to every one who had character, industry and brains.

Within a decade the American people have become conscious that their resources are numbered. The free lands of the West are assigned. The tons of coal under the ground are estimated. The amount of timber, of copper and of iron still unexploited is known, and public discussion is centered upon the limits to the growth of the American population, and the possibilities of more economical organization of life. We can no longer waste as once we could. The problem is now a problem of economy. Instead of the standards of a time of plenty we are confronted with problems of bare subsistence.

In times of plenty, when resources are not yet exhausted, men's lives diverge and the individual is the unit of thought and feeling. The natural result of a time of plenty is the development and the endowment of personality. But in times when a bare subsistence is the condition with which many are confronted, men are drawn together and the community becomes the unit of thought and feeling. Industry as it matures brings men together. It becomes evident that they depend upon one another.

Men who in a time of plenty would seek an independent fortune, under conditions of bare subsistence are contented to secure employment and to become dependent upon others. The problems of subsistence open opportunities for exploitation and the stronger become related to great numbers of weaker members of the community. Thus men's lives are intensified, and the conditions out of which thought and feeling arise are social conditions rather than individual.

The country community under these circumstances rises into new significance. In the early pioneer days the country community for a similar reason was much in thought and feeling, because then men were seeking a bare subsistence in the contest with nature. This consciousness was lost as soon as the pioneer days were past and the abundance of nature began to enrich mankind instead of antagonizing him. Now, again, the country community has come into prominence because men are confronted with a struggle to maintain an acceptable standard of living.

In dealing with a social whole, to accomplish certain purposes one must deal with it in social terms. Social service is not quantitative, but qualitative. Ministry to a community is not uniformly applied to all the members. In social service there is no such thing as equality of all the population. The differing values of men in a social population are determined, as other values are measured, by the working of the law of diminishing returns.

Roughly stated, this law is that successive additions of any valued thing bring ever diminished returns. The first quantity of anything is of infinite value. For later increments the value is measurable, and ever less with the increase. The application of this law in economics is stated as follows by Professor John Bates Clark:

"Labor, as thus applied to land, is subject to a law of diminishing returns. Put one man on a quarter section of land, containing prairie and forest, and he will get a rich return. Two laborers on the same ground will get less per man; three will get still less; and, if you enlarge the force to ten, it may be that the last man will get wages only."

"Modern studies of value, show that doses of consumer's goods, given in a series to the same person have less and less utility per dose. The final utility theory of value rests on the same principle as does the theory of diminishing returns from agriculture; and this principle has a far wider range of new applications."

"We have undertaken to generalize the law that is at the basis of the theory of value. In reality, it is all-comprehensive. The first generalization to be made consists in applying the law, not to single articles, but to consumers' wealth in all its forms. The richer man becomes, the less can his wealth do for him. Not only a series of goods that are all alike, but a succession of units of wealth itself, with no such limitation, on its forms, becomes less and less useful per unit. Give to a man not coats, but 'dollars,' one after another, and the utility of the last will still be less than that of any other. The early dollars feed, clothe and shelter the man, but the last one finds it hard to do anything for him."[29]

By this law successive deposits of immigrants and successive gains in the American population are reducing the valuation of men for religious, moral and educational use. The first man in any historic experience is of infinite value. The first American, Columbus, will be famous forever, but not because of any talents or enterprises of his. As a matter of fact he blundered in discovering America and died ignorant of the feat he had actually accomplished. But because he was the first white man on a new continent he had infinite historical value. When the early Europeans were increased to ten or to one thousand each of them entered into fame, though men like John Smith were commonplace enough in their performances. Their fame is measurable, but still great. When the number of Americans was increased to eight millions everyone thought himself a great citizen, the founder of a family and a potential millionaire. Those were still the days of exceptional personality. The type of man in those times was the landowner, the pioneer and the statesman. But now there are ninety million Americans, all the valuable lands are assigned, all the best positions are filled, every job is taken, and ten million of the population are concerned about the problem of daily bread. These ten million people are the marginal Americans. They are breadwinners, and the breadwinner is the unit of value on whom the standard of American social and religious life is measured. So far as there can be an American type on whom policies in public life are measured, that type is today the breadwinner. In the city the breadwinner is a working man or an immigrant. In the country the marginal man is the tenant farmer; or a working farmer, though he be the owner. The marginal man represents the value of all men in the community.

The law of diminishing returns works in the factory for fixing the wages in any scale which prevails throughout a level of pay. It is equally efficient in leveling men in the community. The employer does not pay the working man on any level of wages in accordance with the value of the few brilliant, trusty or inventive men in that group, but he pays each man just that wage which he must offer to the last man he hires. The marginal man standardizes the wage. The religious values of men are standardized not upon the brilliant or saintly or accomplished, not upon the well-to-do members of the community, but upon the poor who are just able to stand and maintain themselves in the life of that community.

The working of this law is not a matter of persuasion. It is the inflexible condition with which religious and ethical institutions are confronted. Churches should therefore estimate their policies by the responses of the marginal people of the community. Religious standards of value should be measured by final utility, not initial utility. The complaint against the church today is reducible to this: that she standardizes her ideals and her policies in accordance with the prosperous and well-to-do. The eloquence and the character of her ministers, the kind of music with which God is worshipped, the comfortable pews, the carpets on the floor, are all of them unlike the public hall which is supported by the dues of the poor. The taste expressed in church matters is rather literary and aesthetic than popular. The church which would appeal to the whole community must standardize her work upon the poor man, and make her appeal to him.

This principle is not only scientifically correct, but it works out in practise. A minister who came into a well organized country community, where there were a few land-holders, many tenants and numbers of farm lands, found that the only appeal by which the whole community could be reached was an appeal directed to the marginal people in the community. When he sought the tenant farmer, he secured with him the land-holder, and when he went after the hired man on the farm, he secured the farmer who employed him. When he gained the adherence of the boys and girls he secured the support of their parents, and when he rendered service to little children, he could safely rely upon the gratitude and loyalty of their mothers and fathers.

This was the kind of work which Jesus did. He frankly made a selection of the people to whom he should minister.[30] He knew no phrases about all men being equal, and he made no profession of impartiality such as today causes many ministers to loiter among the well-to-do, who care not for them. Jesus said he had no time to spend with well people, because he was sent to the sick. But the philosophy of his action was seen in the fact that when he ministered to the sick he himself helped the well. He "preached the gospel to the poor," but not because he had any prejudice against the rich. By ministering to the poor he applied his gospel to the margin of the community. That gospel has been of equal value to the rich man, because the spiritual experiences of the poor are the experience also of the rich. The modern minister who goes after rich men specifically, or who goes after them with the same vigor with which he seeks the poor, will receive but a grudging welcome. But if he awakens the gratitude and support of the poor, he will find himself sought by the rich, and sustained by their abundant gifts.

Mr. Gilbert K. Chesterton, the English critic, has somewhere finely said that the Master in his words to Simon Peter, "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church," clearly recognized that Peter was a shuffler and a weakling and a coward and it was upon just such common material that the church was founded. It was not to be an aristocratic organization. Its foundations were not laid upon skill and genius in human character, but upon the weaker and commonplace traits, which universal mankind possesses.

So definite was the appeal of Jesus to the marginal people of his time, that he has been twice criticized unjustly; once in his own time by the Pharisees, and again in our time by the Socialists. The latter have claimed that Jesus was "class conscious," that he was a partisan of the poor, a proletarian radical. The unscientific character of Socialism is displayed in this comment upon Jesus. His appeal was to the whole community, as through Christian history his message has come uniformly to men of all degrees, rich and poor, ignorant and learned, bad and good. The religious genius of Jesus is shown in the fact that he recognized what the Socialist does not, that to appeal to the whole community a prophet must address his plea to the people on the margin of the community. His measure of value must be final utility.

One may go at large into this tempting field in illustrations. The artistic experience of mankind is abundant in illustration of it. There is no beauty of the ocean save in its shores—the margin of the boundless expanse. Literary descriptions of the experiences of human love are made up of descriptions of the margins of love. Married life is depicted in courtship, and the sentiments of affection are described in scenes of parting and meeting, which are the margins of companionship.

This principle should be fundamental in all policies of reconstruction of religious and ethical institutions. In the training of men for religious service and for ethical leadership they should be accustomed to think in terms of communal wholes, and this thinking will use as its units of measure the characteristics of the marginal life. It is for this reason that temperance reform in America has been so influential within the past two decades. It is a communal form of ethics. It demands that the community should act together in safeguarding the weaker members of the community, the young men, and the working people. The old temperance propaganda was individualistist. It recorded its results in the number of persons who signed the pledge. Its results were almost as gratifying if the pledges were signed by well-doing and orderly people as if they were signed by drunkards. The modern temperance movement draws its influence from its proposed effect upon the agricultural laborer.

The theological seminary of the past has been a literary institution. During the period of its development the typical Christian was the bright and aspiring young man in a community of boundless resources. To such a man books are the interpreters of life. But in the modern period with the congested population and close social organization, human fellowship is an experience of greater value to most men than books. Since the time of the invention of printing successive quantities of literature have been given to the world, and under the law of diminishing returns literature has come to have for many very small returns. At the time of the Protestant Reformation the value of books in the hands of the common people was infinite. For several generations along with the extension of universal education this infinite value of books continued for the people on the margin of the educated world. But nowadays everybody in American progressive communities can read and write: and in a universally educated population we arrive at the final utility of books in human use. Great masses of poor people and also many people of means use books within narrow limits only. They do not buy them, they do not read them, they do not think in literary terms. Yet they have access to books and they turn from them with a clear sense of intelligent preference for other human values. Books are to them but an alphabet and social life is the story.

My own impression is that the life of the marginal man is social rather than literary. His religion will be a social religion rather than a biblical religion. The weakness of Protestantism is that it stubbornly insists upon literary interpretation of God and upon a biblical ministry, while the population around these Protestant churches exemplifies the diminished value of literature for spiritual uses.

The religious and ethical service of the days to come must interpret the social life of the people. The great mass of the people care as little for wealth as they do for books. The same argument as to the diminished returns of literature may be repeated to describe the diminished returns of private property. The economic revolution since feudal days has exhausted the values of private property in satisfying human need. The time was when property had an infinite value for expressing personality. In days to come private property will still have this value for many individuals. But among common folks generally private property does not seem to have boundless value for human satisfaction. Working men as I have known them do not take pains to get rich. They know the way to wealth by economy and accumulation, but they do not take it. They have a vast preference for the social intercourse, friendly interchanges and mutual dependence by which their life is refreshed, strengthened and sustained. Ethical policies of the future while using literature and private property as efficient implements must interpret social life itself as a flowing spring of religion and morality.

The training of religious and ethical leaders should be undertaken in the theological seminary and in the university in such manner as to standardize the influence of these institutions, by the life not of the exceptional man, but of the common man. The influence of educated men must be used to reconstruct churches and societies upon the standards not of the wealthy, the learned, the genius and the well-to-do, but by the experiences of the poor, the workingman and the immigrant. The standard in all religious and ethical institutions which profess to represent the community is today graded up to the professional and exceptional. The reconstruction necessary is to grade down so that the appeal shall be to the poor and struggling man whose condition is in jeopardy, and whose status in the community is as yet undetermined. Institutions which appeal to the community as a whole must standardize their policy to the level of the margin of the community.

The reconstruction of the theological seminaries is necessary, if they are to fit men for service in communities. They render now a service which is so valuable that one cannot pass over them lightly. They train the candidate for the ministry by a process which develops and engages his piety. Other university courses either ignore his religious feeling, or if they develop it, do not harness it to the task of social improvement. The theological seminary lays the yoke of service upon the neck of prayer. This alone justifies its existence as a servant of the church in the community. However, the instruction in the seminary is rigidly grouped around courses in dead languages; which are jealous of instruction in a living tongue. The history of discarded doctrines and of discredited teachers is minutely taught through months, to the exclusion of courses upon modern, living people, whose religious experience is rich and striking. The purpose of seminary instruction is personal culture instead of efficiency. It is the theory of the teachers wherein they disagree with all other professional teachers, that "We do not make preachers: the Lord makes them." They try therefore to impart culture and personal distinction.

The seminaries need first of all flexibility of courses. The whole traditional schedule should be made elective. The demands of the time would then have free course in the seminary, and would rearrange the instruction according to actual present need. The cultivation of practical piety should receive more attention. The social life of the students, in close association with their professors and under religious stimuli, should be made a more powerful force than it usually is, in creating a common ideal of service to which the seminary should commit itself. Above all, the seminary of theology should teach sociology and economics, as a religious interpretation. Students should after a year's class-room work be made to investigate and report upon actual conditions, should be delegated to study social movements, report upon them, and to lead in discussing them. They should be trained in the use of statistics, in graphic display of conditions, and in the use of public reports. In the senior year they should be employed definitely in practical work for populations, under instructors. After graduation the young minister should, more generally than now, be employed as an assistant to an older minister, in a large organization.

The influence of such social training would itself reform seminary instruction. Thrust into a present-day curriculum, social science is a foreign and alien intruder; but its value would soon be demonstrated and other courses would be made over in new harmony with it. If some courses be dropped, even if whole chairs be abandoned, it is better than that the whole theological seminary be abandoned by students—which is the apparent fate hanging over certain seminaries! What has here been said is true of the schools of theology in all denominations, and applies alike to both the conservative and the liberal.

In conclusion, the writer believes that the church's future is with the self-respecting poor. Jesus and nearly every leader of a great religious movement was of the poor and labored with the poor. The sources of religion are those named in the Beatitudes: poverty, meekness, sorrow, hunger, ostracism; and those are all social experiences. The service of the church should be to these; and in serving the marginal people, whose life is composed of the Beatitudes, the church will serve all men.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 29: "The Distribution of Wealth," by John Bates Clark.]

[Footnote 30: Luke, 6:20 ff; 15:1 ff.]



IX

NEWCOMERS IN THE COMMUNITY

One general cause is bringing new people into the average country community. The exploitation of land expresses the transition from the period of the land farmer to that of the scientific farmer or husbandman. The signs of this exploitation are the retirement of farmers from the land, the incoming of new owners in some numbers and of tenant farmers in a large degree, into the country community. The influence of the absentee landlord begins to be felt in communities in which the landowner was until 1890 the only type. In most of the older states immigration from foreign lands has not greatly affected the country community. In Wisconsin, Minnesota and other states of the Northwest substantial sections of the community are invaded by people of sturdy Germanic and Norse extraction. In New England the Poles, French, Portuguese and some Jews are settling in the country. But throughout the states of the Union as a whole the population, both the newcomers and older stock, are American.

The dates of this exploitation of land are, generally, from 1890 onward. Reference is made elsewhere to the description of this process in the Middle West.[31]

Independent of these causes the same process has appeared in the South, in Georgia, Mississippi and in West Tennessee, as well as other states. In sections in which the values of land have not been doubled, as in Illinois and in Indiana they have, the same exodus from the farm and invasion of the country community by new people has taken place.

One cause of this exploitation of land is the shrinkage in size of the older families. Everywhere the exploitation of land is the greatest where the soil is the richest and the farmers the most prosperous. Even in the exceptional populations such as the Scotch Presbyterians and Pennsylvania Germans, this effect of agricultural prosperity is slowly at work.

In Chester County, Pennsylvania, and in Washington County, where the most substantial farmers in the country are found, the families in the present generation are small. Many of the older stock have no children. Families which have retained the title of their land for eight generations are losing their hold upon the soil, by the fact that they have none to inherit after them.

Another cause of this exploitation of land is the increasing number of small farms in certain regions. This means that in certain sections the farming population has a new element, for the holders of these small farms are many of them new to the community.

The process, which is made clear by the census of 1910, is this. The earlier retirement from the farms was by sale, the farmer taking money instead of land. The second stage of retirement from the farm was through absentee landlordism and the placing of tenants on the farm. This process has come to an end in many sections of the Middle West, with the return of the sons of the landlord to the family acres in the country, so that there is a sort of rhythm in the flow of population from the country into the town and backward to the land. In this process there is no invasion by new people, except the temporary residence of the tenant farmer in the country, and some of these have in the process gained a footing by ownership of land. But this ebb and flow of population out of the country community and back again has weakened and strained the country church and school and has not yet begun to strengthen them. There is every evidence that with a pleasant and agreeable country life the country community can retain the best elements of this population, which comes and goes. The country church and school ought to take measures to retain the best of the country population through these changes.

Through all these causes the presence of a large proportion of aliens in the community who are American born, but locally unattached by birth or ownership, has effected great changes in the country church, and other community institutions. The State of Illinois, which has a tenant farmer population of more than 50 per cent in its richest sections, has suffered severely through the loss of many country churches. There is no precise measure of this loss, but a sociological survey recently made in Illinois indicates that in the past twenty years more than fifteen hundred country churches have been abandoned in the State. This statement must be accepted as approximate, but the number is likely to be greater rather than less. This abandonment of country churches has come in the same period in which the proportion of tenant farmers has greatly increased. Reference is made elsewhere to a similar condition in the State of Delaware, in which the churches of the old land-owners have been abandoned and replaced at heavy expense with poorer churches built by the incoming tenant farmers.

Everywhere in the United States this process has in some measure affected the country. It does not much matter whether the proportion of tenants is increasing or decreasing, the present effect is one of instability. In New England where in the past ten years tenantry has been diminished ten per cent, the country churches are weakened as elsewhere. The churches have not yet had time to recover while the population is in a state of change.

The old order in the country is crumbling. The church is an expression of stability. The people on whom the church always depends for its audiences, its enthusiasm and its largest accessions, are marginal people, working men, adolescent youths and those who are coming to a position in the community. The exodus of these from the country community, or the incoming of persons in these classes into the country community, has been unfavorable to the country church at the present time.

It may be said at this point that a state of transition is for the time being unfavorable to ethical and moral growth. Moral conditions are sustained by custom, and where customs are in change, moral standards must themselves be in transition. The country community is moral so far as adhering to the standards of the past is concerned. But the population themselves who have to do with the country are undergoing extraordinary moral change, with incidental loss, and many of the problems of the United States as a whole are made more acute by the waste of the country community. Among these should be cited the amusement question in the small town, the decadence of the theatre in the cheaper vaudeville, the white slave traffic and the social disorders peculiar to unskilled laborers, many of whom come from country communities of the United States and Europe.

It must be remembered, too, that the rural free delivery and the telephone have entered the country community in the past twenty years and their effect has not yet been recorded. It has probably been in the direction of chilling instead of warming the social life of the country. The old acquaintance and the intimate social relations of the country community have not been helped by the telephone: and along with the presence of aliens in the community, one-fourth or one-half or three-fourths of the population, the telephone has had the effect of lowering the standards of intimacy and separating the households in the country one from another. The rural free delivery has put country people into the general world economy and for the time being has loosened the bonds of community life.

In those states in which the trolley system has been extended into the country, for instance Ohio and Indiana, the process of weakening the country population has been hastened. Sunday becomes for country people a day of visiting the town and in great numbers they gather at the inter-urban stations. The city and town on Sunday is filled with careless, hurrying groups of visitors, sight-seers and callers, who have no such fixed interest as that to be expressed in church-going or in substantial social processes. For the time being inter-urban trolley lines have dissipated the life of the country communities.

The duty of the church in the country under these conditions can be accomplished only under a widened horizon. The minister and the leaders of the church must lift up their eyes. They need not be discouraged if for the time being they accomplish little, for the period of exploitation must come to an end normally with the exhaustion of its forces, before the better day can come. But this period is one of enlargement. The units of social life will be spaced farther apart. The country community will advance as soldiers say, "in open order." This is true for the family life, in which the father, the mother and the children have greater freedom from one another; as well as in the community, in which neighbors become less intimately dependent on one another. The church must therefore preach the world idea. At this time of transition the country church should undertake its foreign missionary service. The great causes of the Kingdom which are world-wide should be presented to country people when they are lifting up their eyes from local confines to look at the world and the city and the nation. As the daily paper comes into the farmer's household the farmer's church should interpret the history of the time in missionary terms. The literature of the great missionary agencies should be distributed in the farm household. Wherever the catalogue of the big store in Chicago or New York is found on the center table, beside it should be placed a modern book expressive of missionary evangelism. As the mind of the countryman develops to comprehend the world in his daily thought under the impetus of a daily newspaper, his conscience and his religious experience should be expanded correspondingly.

In a time of exploitation of land the country church should regenerate its financial system. The system of barter passes away in the day of speculation in farm land; and the country church which can find means to endure the period of exploitation must put its financial system on a new basis. The tenant farmer is crudely striving through problems of scientific agriculture. He may, indeed, be a soil robber, but by his waste of economic values he and other men are learning to conserve. The financial system of the church should be placed at this time on a basis of weekly contribution, for with the tenant farmer comes system, cash payments, regular commercial processes. The business administration of the church must be made to correspond.