The Challenge of the Country: A Study of Country Life Opportunity. Fiske George Walter
the farm offers the best opportunity for the ideal home. I believe that farming is the farthest removed of any business from the blind struggle after money, and that the farmer with a modest capital can be rich in independence, contentment and happiness.”
A variety of other significant reasons have been collected by Director Bailey from boys who are loyal to their country homes. Many speak of the profitableness of scientific farming, but the majority are thinking of other privileges in rural life which outweigh financial rewards, such as the fact that the farmer is really producing wealth first-hand and is serving the primary needs of society. “I expect to make a business of breeding live-stock. I like to work out of doors, where the sun shines and the wind blows, where I can look up from my work and not be obliged to look at a wall. I dislike to use a pen as a business. I want to make new things and create new wealth, not to collect to myself the money earned by others. I cannot feel the sympathy which makes me a part of nature, unless I can be nearer to it than office or university life allows. I like to create things. Had I been dexterous with my hands, I might have been an artist; but I have found that I can make use of as high ideals, use as much patience, and be of as much use in the world by modeling in flesh and bone as I can by modeling in marble.”
In spite of the common notion of the farm boys who shirk country life, there is a great attraction now in the fact that farming really requires brains of a high order, offers infinite opportunity for broad and deep study, a chance for developing technical skill and personal initiative in quite a variety of lines of work, all of which means a growing, broadening life and increasing self-respect and satisfaction.
The Partnership With Nature
Any briefest mention of the attractiveness of country life would be incomplete without reference to the nearness to nature and the privilege of her inspiring comradeship. Not only is the farmer’s sense of partnership with nature a mighty impulse which tends to make him an elemental man; but every dweller in the country with any fineness of perception cannot fail to respond to the subtle appeal of the beautiful in the natural life about him. As Washington Irving wrote, in describing rural life in England, “In rural occupation there is nothing mean and debasing. It leads a man forth among scenes of natural grandeur and beauty; it leaves him to the working of his own mind, operated upon by the purest and most elevating of external influences. Such a man may be simple and rough, but he cannot be vulgar.”
As young Bryant wrote among the beautiful Berkshire hills, “To him who in the love of nature holds communion with her visible forms, she speaks a various language.” Without an interpreter, sometimes the message to the soul is heard as in a foreign tongue; but the message is voiced again like the music of perennial springs, and others hear it with ear and heart, and it brings peace and comfort and God’s love. In his beautiful chapter on this topic Dr. W. L. Anderson writes: “By a subtle potency the rural environment comes to be not the obtrusive masses of earth, nor the monotonous acres of grass, nor the dazzling stress of endless flowers, nor the disturbing chatter of the birds; but instead of these, hills that speak of freedom, a sky that brings the infinite near, meadows verdant with beauty, air vocal with song. Beauty, sublimity, music, freedom, are in the soul.”14 Surely the uplifting influence of nature is a wonderful gift to those who are fortunate enough to live in the country. It takes the petty and sordid out of life. It transfigures common things with beauty and fresh meaning, with the cycle of the seasons and ever freshness of the days. It brings to those who listen a quiet message of content.
Rural Sincerity and Real Neighborliness
Among the country privileges not often mentioned is the chance one has to live with real folks. There is a genuineness about country people that is not often found in crowded towns where conventionalities of life veneer even the ways of friends, and where custom dictates and fashion rules and the very breadth of social opportunity makes superficial people, flitting from friend to friend, not pausing to find the depths in the eye or the gold in the character.
With fine simplicity, sometimes with blunt speech to be sure, our rural friends pierce through the artificial and find us where we are; honoring only what is worthy, caring nothing for titles or baubles, slow to welcome or woo or even to approve; but quick to befriend when real need appears, and having once befriended, steady and true in friendship, awkward in expression, maybe, but true as steel. To live with such country folks is to know the joy of real neighbors. To work with them takes patience, honest effort to overcome inborn conservatism, and a brother’s sincere spirit; but when cooperation is once promised, your goal is gained. They will say what they mean. They will do as they say.
The Challenge of the Difficult in Rural Life
Since the invention of the sulky plow, the mowing machine and the riding harrow, et cetera, an American humorist remarked that farming is rapidly becoming a sedentary occupation! Drudgery has so largely been removed that it is probably true that there is no more “hack-work” or dull routine in agriculture than in other lines of business. But plenty of hard work remains the farmer’s task. There is enough of the difficult left to challenge the strong and to frighten the weakling, and in this very fact is a bit of rural optimism. It applies not merely to farming but to country life in general.
Our pioneer days certainly developed a sturdy race of men. They lived a strenuous life with plenty of hardship, toil and danger, but it put iron into the blood of their children and made wonderful physiques, clear intellects, strong characters. This heroic training nurtured a remarkable race of continent conquerors fitted for colossal tasks and undaunted by difficulties. The rise of great commonwealths, developing rapidly now into rich agricultural empires, has rewarded the pioneers’ faith and sacrifice.
All are thankful that the rigor of those heroic days is gone with the conquest of the wilderness. But few discern in the luxurious comfort of hyper-civilized life a peculiar peril. Our fathers, with a fine scorn for the weather, braved the wintry storms with a courage which brought its own rewards in toughened fiber and lungs full of ozone. To-day in our super-heated houses we defy the winter to do us any good. We have reduced comfort to a fine art. Even heaven has lost its attractiveness to our generation. Luxury has become a national habit if not a national vice.
Our food is not coarse enough to maintain good digestion. Our desk-ridden thousands are losing the vigor that comes only from out-of-door life. Exercise for most men has become a lost art; they smoke instead! What with electric cars for the poor man and motor cars for the near rich, walking is losing out fast with the city multitudes. Our base ball we take by proxy, sitting on the bleachers; our recreation is done for us by professional entertainers in theater, club and opera. In a score of ways the creature comforts of a luxury loving age are surely enervating those who yield to them. Our modern flats equipped with every conceivable convenience to lure a man and a woman into losing the work habit and reducing to the minimum the expenditure of energy, are doing their share to take effort out of life and to make us merely effete products of civilization!
Modern city life, for the comfortably situated, is too luxurious to be good for the body, the mind or the morals. It dulls the “fighting edge”; it kills ambition with complacency; it often takes the best incentives out of life; it makes subtle assault upon early ideals and insidiously undermines the moral standards. We are fast losing the zest for the climbing life. We need the challenge of the difficult to spur us on to real conquests and to fit us for larger tasks.
It is the glory of country life that it is by no means enervated or over-civilized. Enough of the rough still remains for all practical purposes. Farm homes are comfortable usually but not luxurious. Rural life is full of the physical zest that keeps men young and vigorous. As Dr. F. E. Clark suggests, farming furnishes an ideal “moral equivalent of war.” The annual conquest of farm difficulties makes splendid fighting. There are plenty of natural enemies which must be fought to keep a man’s fighting edge keen and to keep him physically and mentally alert. What with the weeds and the weather, the cut-worms, the gypsy, and the codling moths, the lice, the maggots, the caterpillars, the San Jose scale and the scurvy, the borers, the blight and the gorger, the peach yellows and the deadly curculio, the man behind the bug gun and the sprayer finds plenty of exercise for ingenuity and a royal chance to fight the good fight. Effeminacy is not a rural trait. Country life is great for making men; men of robust health and mental resources
“The Country Town,” p. 185.