Society: Its Origin and Development

93. Social Characteristics Illustrated by the Family.—A study of the family such as has been made illustrates the characteristics of social life that were noted in the introductory chapter. There is activity in the performance of every domestic, economic, and social function. There is association in various ways for various purposes between all members of the family. Control is exercised by paternal authority, family custom, and personal and family interest. The history of the family shows gradual changes that have produced varieties of organization, and the present situation discloses weaknesses that are precipitating upon society very serious problems. Present characteristics largely determine future processes; always in planning for the future it is necessary to take into consideration the forces that produce and alter social characteristics. Specific measures meet with much scepticism, and enthusiastic reformers must always reckon with inertia, frequent reactions, and slow social development. In the face of sexualism, divorce, and selfish individualism, it requires patience and optimism to believe that the family will continue to exist and the home be maintained.

94. Principles of Family Reform.—It is probably impossible to restore the home life of the past, as it is impossible to turn back the tide of urban migration and growth. But it is possible on the basis of certain fundamental principles to improve the conditions of family life by means of methods that lie at hand. The first principle is that the home must function properly. There must be domestic and economic satisfactions. Without the satisfaction of the sexual and parental instincts and an atmosphere of comfort and freedom from anxiety, the home is emptied of its attractions. The second principle is that social sympathy and service rather than individual independence shall be the controlling motive in the home. As long as every member of the family consults first his own pleasure and comfort and contributes only half-heartedly to create a home atmosphere and to perform his part of the home functions, there can be no real gain in family life. The home is built on love; it can survive on nothing less than mutual consideration.

95. The Method of Economic Adjustment.—The first method by which these principles can be worked out is economic adjustment. It is becoming imperative that the family income and the family requirements shall be fitted together. Less extravagance and waste of expenditure and a living wage to meet legitimate needs, are both demanded by students of economic reform. It is not according to the principles of social righteousness that any family should suffer from cold or hunger, nor is it right that any social group should be wasteful of the portion of economic goods that has come to it. There is great need, also, that the expense of living should be reduced while the standards of living shall not be lowered. The business world has been trying to secure economies in production; there is even greater need of economies in distribution. Millions are wasted in advertising and in the profits of middlemen. Some method of co-operative buying and selling will have to be devised to stop this economic leakage. It would relieve the housewife from some of the worries of housekeeping and lighten the heart of the man who pays the bills. A third adjustment is that of the household employee to the remainder of the household. The servant problem is first an economic problem, and questions of wages, hours, and privileges must be based on economic principles; but it is also a social problem. The servant bears a social relation to the family. The family home is her home, and she must have a certain share in home comforts and privileges. A fourth reform is better housing and equipment. Attractive and comfortable houses in a wholesome environment of light, air, and sunshine, built for economical and easy housekeeping, are not only desirable but essential for a permanent and happy family life.

96. The Method of Social Education.—A second general method by which the principles of home life may be carried out is social education. Given the material accessories, there must be the education of the family in their use. Children in the home need to know the fundamentals of personal and sex hygiene and the principles of eugenics. In home and in school the emphasis in education should be upon social rather than economic values, on the significance of social relationships and the opportunities of social intercourse in the home and the community, on the personal and social advantages of intellectual culture, on the importance of moral progress in the elimination of drunkenness, sexualism, poverty, crime, and war, if there is to be future social development, and on the value of such social institutions as the home, the school, the church, and the state as agencies for individual happiness and group progress. Especially should there be impressed upon the child mind the transcendent importance of affectionate co-operation in the home circle, parents sacrificing personal preferences and anticipations of personal enjoyment for the good of children, and children having consideration for the wishes and convictions of their elders, and recognizing their own responsibility in rendering service for the common good. Sanctioned by law, by the custom of long tradition, by economic and social valuations, the home calls for personal devotion of will and purpose from every individual for the welfare of the group of which he is a privileged member. The family tie is the most sacred bond that links individuals in human society; to strengthen it is one of the noblest aspirations of human endeavor.

READING REFERENCES

PART III—SOCIAL LIFE IN THE RURAL COMMUNITY

CHAPTER XIIIToC

THE COMMUNITY AND ITS HISTORY

97. Broadening the Horizon.—Out of the kindergarten of the home the child graduates into the larger school of the community. Thus far through his early years the child's environment has been restricted almost entirely to the four walls of the home or the limits of the farm. His horizon has been bounded by garden, pasture, and orchard, except as he has enjoyed an occasional visit to the village centre or has found playmates on neighboring farms. He has shared in the isolation of the farm. The home of the nearest neighbor is very likely out of sight beyond the hill, or too far away for children's feet to travel the intervening distance; on the prairie the next door may be over the edge of the horizon. The home has been his social world. It has supplied for him a social group, persons to talk with, to play with, to work with. Inevitably he takes on their characteristics, and his life will continue to be narrow and to grow conservative and hard, unless he enlarges his experience, broadens his horizon, tries new activities, enjoys new associations, tests new methods of social control, and lets the forces that produce social change play upon his own life.

Happy is he when he enters definitely into community life by taking his place in the district school. The schoolhouse may be at the village centre or it may stand aloof among the trees or stark on a barren hillside along the country road; physical environment is of small consequence as compared with the new social environment of the schoolroom itself. The child has come into contact with others of his kind in a permanent social institution outside the home, and this social contact has become a daily experience. Every child that goes to school is one of many representatives from the homes of the neighborhood. He brings with him the habits and ideas that he has gathered from his own home, and he finds that they do not agree or fuse easily with the ideas and habits of the other children. In the schoolroom and on the playground he repeats the process of social adjustments which the race has passed through. Conflicts for ascendancy are frequent. He must prove his physical prowess on the playground and his intellectual ability in the schoolroom. He must test his body of knowledge and the value of his mental processes by the mind of his teacher. He must have strength of conviction to defend his own opinions, but he must have an open mind to receive truths that are new to him. One of the great achievements of the school is to fuse dissimilar elements into common custom and opinion, and thus to socialize the independent units of community life.

98. Learning Social Values in the Community.—The school is the door to larger social opportunity than the home can provide, but it is not the only door. The child in passing to and from school comes into touch with other institutions and activities. He passes other homes than his own. He sees each in the midst of its own peculiar surroundings, and he makes comparisons of one with another and of each with his own. He estimates more or less consciously the value of that which he sees, not so much in terms of economic as of social worth, and congratulates or pities himself or his schoolmates, according to the judgments that he has made. He stops at the store, the mill, or the blacksmith shop, through frequent contact becomes familiar with their functions, and thinks in turn that he would like to be storekeeper, miller, and blacksmith. He sees the farmer on other farms than his own gathering his harvest in the fall, hauling wood in the winter, or ploughing his field in the spring, and he becomes conscious of common habits and occupations in this rural community. He gets acquainted with the variety of activities that enter into life in the country district in which his home is located, and he learns to appreciate the importance of the instruments upon which such activity depends for travel from place to place. By all these means the child is learning social values. After a little he comes to understand that the community, with its roads, its public buildings, and its established institutions, exists to satisfy certain economic and social needs that the single family cannot supply. By and by he learns that, like the family, it has grown out of the experience of relationships, and can be traced far back in history, and that as time passes it is slowly changing to adapt itself to the changing wants and wishes of its inhabitants. He becomes aware of a present tendency for the community to imitate the larger social life outside, to make its village centre a reproduction in miniature of the urban centres; later he realizes that the introduction of foreign elements into the population is working for the destruction of the simple, unified life of former days, and is introducing a certain flavor of cosmopolitanism.

It is this growth of social consciousness in a single child, multiplied by the number of children in the community, that constitutes the process of social education. A community with no dynamic influences impinging upon it reproduces itself in this way generation after generation, and at best seems to maintain but a static existence. In reality, few communities stand still. The principle of change that is characteristic of social life is continually working to build up or tear down the community structure and to modify community functioning. The causes of change and their methods of operation appear in the history of the rural community.

99. Rural History.—The history of the rural community falls into two periods—first, when the village was necessary to the life of the individual; second, when the individual pioneer pushed out into the forest or prairie, and the village followed as a convenient social institution. The community came into existence through the bond of kinship. Every clan formed a village group with its own peculiar customs. These were primitive, even among semi-civilized peoples. Among the ancient Hebrews the village elders sat by the gate to administer justice in the name of the clan; in China the old men still bask on a log in the sun and pronounce judgment in neighborly gossip. The village existed for sociability and safety. The mediæval Germans left about each village a broad strip of waste land called the mark, and over this no stranger could come as a friend without sounding a trumpet. Later the village was surrounded by a wall called a tun, and by a transfer of terms the village frequently came to be called a mark, or tun, later changed to town. Place names even in the United States are often survivals of such a custom, as Charlestown or Chilmark. The Indian village in colonial America was similarly protected with a palisade, and village dogs heralded the approach of a stranger, as they do still in the East.

100. The Mediæval Village.—The peasant village of the Middle Ages constitutes a distinct type of rural community. A consciousness of mutual dependence between the owner of the land and the peasants who were his serfs produced a feudal system in which the landlord undertook to furnish protection and to permit the peasant to use portions of his land in exchange for service. Strips of fertile soil were allotted to the village families for cultivation, while pasture-land, meadow, and forest were kept for community use. Even in the heart of the city Boston Common remains as a relic of the old custom. On the mediæval manor people lived and worked together, most of them on the same social level, the lord in his manor-house and the peasants in a hamlet or larger village on his land, huddling together in rude huts and in crude fashion performing the social and economic functions of a rural community. In the village church the miller or the blacksmith held his head a little higher than his neighbors, and sometimes the lord of the manor did not deign to worship in the common parish church, but the mass of the people were fellow serfs, owning a common master, working at the same tasks, by custom sowing and reaping the same kind of grain on the same kind of land in the same week of the year. They attended the court of the master, who exercised the functions of government. They worshipped side by side in the church. The same customs bound them and the same superstitions worried their waking hours. There was thus a community solidarity that less commonly exists under modern conditions.

There was no stimulus to progress on the manor itself. There were no schools for the peasant's children, and there was little social intelligence. The finer side of life was undeveloped, except as the love of music was stirred by the travelling bard, or martial fervor or the love of movement aroused the dance. There was no desire for religious independence or understanding of religious experience. The mass in the village church satisfied the religious instinct. There was no dynamic factor in the community itself. Besides all this, the community lived a self-centred life, because the people manufactured their own cloth and leather garments and most of the necessary tools, and, except for a few commodities like iron and salt, they were independent of trade. The result was that every stimulus of social exchange between villages was lacking.

The broadening influence of the Crusades with their stimulus to thought, their creation of new economic wants, and their contact of races and nationalities, set in motion great changes. Out of the manorial villages went ambitious individuals, making their way as industrial pioneers to the opportunity of the larger towns, as now young people push out from the country to the city. New towns were founded and new enterprises were begun. Trade routes were opened up. The feudal principality grew into the modern state. Cultural interests demanded their share of attention. Schools were founded, and art and literature began again to develop. Even law and religion, most conservative among social institutions, underwent change.

101. The Village in American History.—The spirit of enterprise and the disturbed political and religious conditions impelled many groups in western Europe to emigrate to new lands after the geographical discoveries that ushered in the sixteenth century. They were free to go, for serfdom was disappearing from most of the European countries. The village life of Europe was transplanted to America. In the South the mediæval feudal village became the agricultural plantation, where the planter lived on his own estate surrounded by the rude cabins of his dusky peasantry. The more democratic, homogeneous village life of middle-class Englishmen reproduced itself in New England, where the houses of the settlers clustered about the village meeting-house and schoolhouse, and where habits of industry, frugality, and sobriety characterized every local group. In this new village life there came to be a stronger feeling of self-respect, and under the hard conditions of life in a new continent there developed a self-reliance that was destined to work wonders in days to come. The New World bred a spirit of independence that suited well the individualistic philosophy and religion of the modern Englishman. All these qualities prophesied much of individual achievement. Yet this tendency toward individualism threatened the former social solidarity, though there was a recognition of mutual interests and a readiness to show neighborly kindness in time of stress, and a perception of the social value of democracy in church and state.

102. Individual Pioneering.—The pioneer American colonies were group settlements, but they produced a new race of individual pioneers for the West. Occasionally a whole community emigrated, but usually hardy, venturesome individuals pushed out into the wilderness, opening up the frontier continually farther toward the setting sun. By the brookside the pioneer made a clearing and erected his log house; later on the unbroken prairie he built a rude hut of sod. On the land that was his by squatter's right or government claim he planted and reaped his crops. About him grew up a brood of children, and as the years passed, others like himself followed in the path that he had made, single men to work for a time as hired laborers, families to break new ground, until the countryside became sparsely settled and the nucleus of a village was made.

Such pioneers were hard-working people, lonely and introspective. They knew little of the comforts and none of the refinements of life. They prescribed order and administered justice at the weapon's point. They were emotional in religion. They required the stimulus of abundant food and often of strong drink to goad them to their various tasks. Frontier pioneering in America reproduced many of the features of former ages of primitive life and compressed centuries into the space of a generation. It was distinctly individualistic, and needed socializing. The large farm or cattle-range kept men apart, the freedom of the open country attracted an unruly population, and in consequence frontier life tended to rough manners and lawlessness. Isolation and loneliness produced despondency and inertia, and tended to individual and group degeneration.

Even in a growing village men and women of this type had few social institutions. There was little time for schooling or recreation. A circuit-riding preacher held religious services once or twice a month, and in certain regions at a certain season religious enthusiasm found vent in a camp-meeting, but religion often had little effect on habits and morals. Local government and industry were home-made. The settlers brought with them customs and traditions which they cherished, but in the mingling of pioneers from different districts there was continual change and fusion, until the West became the most enterprising and progressive part of the nation, continually open to new ideas and new methods. There was a wholesome respect for church and school, and as villages grew the settlers did not neglect the organization and housing of such institutions; store, mill, and smithy found their place as farther east, and later the lawyer and physician came, but the pioneer could do without them for a time. Inventiveness and individual initiative were characteristics of the rural people, made necessary by their remoteness and isolation.

103. The Development of the West.—With increasing settlement the rural pioneer gave place to the farmer. It was no longer necessary for him to break new ground, for arable acres could be purchased; neither was it necessary to turn from one occupation to another to satisfy personal or household needs, for division of labor provided specialists. Hardship gave way to comfort, for the land was fertile and experience had taught its values for the cultivation of particular crops. Loneliness and isolation were felt less severely as neighbors became more frequent and travelled roads made communication easier. Group life expanded and institutions became fixed. Every neighborhood had its school-teacher, and even the academy and college began to dot the land. Churches of various denominations found root in rural soil, and a settled minister became more common. A general store and post-office found place at the cross-roads, and the permanent machinery of local government was set up. Out of the forest clearings and prairie settlements evolved the prosperous farm life that has been so characteristic of the Middle West.

But the prosperous life of these rural communities has not remained unchanged. Speculation in land has been creating a class of non-resident agricultural capitalists and tenant cultivators, and has been transforming the type of agricultural population over large sections of country. Soil exhaustion is leading to abandonment of the poorest land and is compelling methods of scientific agriculture on the remainder. These conditions are producing their own social problems for the rural community.

READING REFERENCES

CHAPTER XIVToC

THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE

104. Physical Types.—To understand the continually changing rural life of the present, it is necessary to examine into the physical characteristics of the country districts, the elements of the population, the functions of the rural community, and its social institutions.

The physical characteristics have a large part in determining occupations and in fashioning social life. A natural harbor, especially if it is at the mouth of a river, seems destined by nature for a centre of commerce, as the falls of a swift-flowing stream indicate the location of a manufacturing plant. A mineral-bearing mountain invites to mining, and miles of forest land summon the lumberman. Broad and well-watered plains seem designed for agriculture, and on them acres of grain slowly mature through the summer months to turn into golden harvests in the fall. The Mississippi valley and the Western plain into which it blends have become the granary of the American nation. The railroad-train that rushes day and night from the Great Lakes toward the setting sun moves hour after hour through the extensive rural districts that characterize the great West. There are the mammoth farms that are given to the one enormous crop of wheat or corn. Alongside the railroad loom the immense elevators where the grain is stored to be shipped to market. Here and there are the farm-buildings where the owner or tenant lives, but villages are small and scattered and community activity is slight.

Similarly, in the South before the Civil War there were large plantations of cotton and tobacco, dotted only here and there with the planter's mansion and clumps of negro cabins. Village life was not a characteristic of Southern society. The old South had its picturesque plantation life, and the aristocracy made its sociable visits from family to family, but that rural type disappeared with the war. With the breaking up of the old plantations there came a greater diversification of agriculture, which is going on at an accelerated pace, and social centres are increasing, but there is still much rural isolation. Among the remoter mountains lingers the most conservative American type of citizens in the arrested development of a century ago, with antique tools and ancient methods, scratching a few acres for a garden and corn-field, and living their backward, isolated life, without comfort or even peace, and almost without social institutions.

In the East the country is more broken. Large farms are few, and agriculture is carried on intensively as a business, or is united with another occupation or as a diversion from the cares and tasks of the town. Farms of a score to a few hundred acres, only part of which are cultivated, form rural communities among the hills or along a river valley. Here and there a few houses cluster in village or hamlet, where each house yard has its garden patch, but the inhabitants of the village depend on other means than agriculture for a living. On the farms dairy and poultry products share with agriculture in rural importance, and no one crop constitutes an agricultural staple. In New England the villages are comparatively near together, and social life needs only prodding to produce a healthy development.

105. Characteristics of Population.—Rural life feels in each region the reactions of nature. The narrow life of the hills, the open life of the plains, the peaceful life of the comfortable plantation with its lazy river and its delightful climate, each has its peculiar characteristics that are due in part at least to nature. But these features are complicated by social elements of population. The American rural community of to-day is composed of individuals who differ in age and fortune and kinship, and who vary in qualities and resemblances. There are old and young and middle-aged persons, men and women, married and single, persons with many relatives and others with few, native and foreign born, strong and weak, well and ill, good and bad, educated and illiterate. Yet there are certain characteristics that are typical.

In the first place, for example, there is a considerable uniformity of age in the population of a certain type of community. In those agricultural districts where individuals own their own homes, the number of elderly people is larger than it is in the city, and the young people are comparatively few, for the reason that their ambitions carry them to the city for its larger opportunities, and in the older States many a farm becomes abandoned on the death of the old people. In districts where tenant-farming is largely in vogue, gray hairs are much fewer. The tendency is for the original farmers who have been successful to sell or rent their property and move to town to enjoy its comforts and attractions, leaving the tenants and their families of children.

In the second place, it is characteristic of long-settled rural communities that there is an interlocking of family relationship, with a number of prevailing family names and a great preponderance of native Americans; but in portions of the West and in rural districts not very remote from the large cities of the East there is a large mixture, and in spots a predominance of the foreign element. In the third place, small means rather than wealth and a sluggish contentment rather than ambition is characteristic of the older rural sections; in newer districts ambition to push ahead is more common, and prosperity and an air of opulence are not unusual.

106. The Composition of Rural Communities.—In an analysis of population it is proper to consider its composition and its manner of growth. In making a survey or taking a census of a community there are included at least statistics as to age, sex, number and size of families, degree of kinship, race parentage, and occupations. Records of age, sex, and size of family show the tendencies of a community as to growth or race suicide; kinship and race parentage indicate whether population is homogeneous; and occupations indicate the place that agriculture holds in a particular section of country. By a comparative study of statistics it is easy to determine whether a community is advancing, retrograding, or standing still, and what its position is relative to its neighbors; also to find out whether or not its occupations and characteristics are changing.

107. Manner of Growth.—The manner of growth of a community is by natural excess of births over deaths, and by immigration of persons from outside. As long as the former condition obtains, population is homogeneous, and the community is conservative in customs and beliefs; when immigration is extensive, and more especially when it goes on at the same time with a declining birth-rate and a considerable emigration of the native element, the population is becoming heterogeneous, and the customs and interests of the people are growing continually more divergent. The immigration of an earlier day was from one American community to another, or from northern Europe, but rural communities East and West are feeling the effects of the large foreign immigration of the last decade from southern and eastern Europe and from Asia.

108. Decline of the Rural Population.—The rural exodus to the cities is even more impressive and more serious in its consequences than the foreign influx into the country, though both are dynamic in their effects. This exodus is partly a matter of numbers and partly of quality. A distinction must be made first between the relative loss and the actual loss. The rural population in places of less than twenty-five hundred persons is steadily falling behind in proportion to the urban population in the country at large. There are many localities where there is also an actual loss in population, and in the North and Middle West the States generally are making no rural gain. But the most disheartening element in the movement of population from the point of view of rural communities is the loss of the most substantial of the older citizens, who move to the city to enjoy the reward of years of toil, and of the most ambitious of the young people who hope to get on faster in the city. Loss of such as these means loss of competent, progressive leaders. Added to this is the loss of laborers needed to cultivate the farms to their capacity for urban as well as rural supply. The loss of labor is not a serious economic misfortune, for it can be remedied to a large extent by the introduction of more machinery and new methods, but the loss of population reproduces in a measure the isolation of earlier days, and so tends to social degeneration. It is idle to expect that the far-reaching causes that are contributing to city growth will stop working for the sake of the rural community, but it is possible to enrich community life so that there will be less relative attraction in the city, and so that those who remain may enjoy many of the advantages that hitherto have been associated with the city alone.

READING REFERENCES

CHAPTER XVToC

OCCUPATIONS

109. Rural Occupations.—An important part of the study of the rural community is its social functions. These do not differ greatly in name from the functions of the family, but they have wider scope. The domestic functions are confined almost entirely to the homes. The village usually includes a boarding-house or a country inn for the homeless few, and here and there an almshouse shelters the few derelicts whom the public must support.

Economic activities in the main are associated with the farm home. The common occupation in the country is agriculture. Individuals are born into country homes, learn the common occupation, and of necessity in most cases make it their means of livelihood. Rural people are accustomed to hard labor for long hours. There are seasons when comparative inactivity renders life dull; there are individuals who enjoy pensions or the income of inherited or accumulated funds, and so are not compelled to resort to manual labor, and there are directors of agricultural industry; there are always a shiftless few who are lazy and poor; but these are only exceptions to the general rule of active toil. Not all rural districts are agricultural. Some are frontier settlements where lumbering or mining are the chief interests. Even where agriculture prevails there are varieties such as corn-raising or fruit-growing regions; there are communities that are progressively making use of the latest results of scientific agriculture, and communities that are almost as antique in their methods as the ancient Hebrews. Also, even in homogeneous districts, like those devoted to cotton-growing or tobacco-culture, there are always individuals who choose or inherit an occupation that supplies a special want to the community, such as carpenters, blacksmiths, and masters of other crafts. Occupations indicate an attempt to gear personal energies to the opportunities or requirements of a physical or social environment.

All these occupations have more than economic value; they are fundamental to social prosperity. It is self-evident that the physician and the school-teacher render community service, but it is not so clear that the farmer who keeps his house well painted and his grounds in order, and who is improving his cattle and increasing the yield of his fields and woodland by scientific methods, and who organizes his neighbors for co-operative endeavor, is doing more than an economic service. Yet it is by means of inspiration, information, and co-operation that the community moves forward, and he who supplies these is a social benefactor.

110. Differentiation of Occupation.—If community life is to continue there must be the producers who farm or mine or manufacture; in rural districts they are farmers, hired laborers, woodcutters, threshers, and herdsmen. In the co-operation of village life there must be the craftsmen and tradesmen who finish and distribute the products that the others have secured, such as the miller, the carpenter, the teamster, and the storekeeper. For comfort and peace in the neighborhood there must be added the physician, the minister, the school-teacher, the justice of the peace, and such public functionaries as postmaster, mail-carrier, stage-driver, constable or sheriff, and other town or county officials. Without specific allotment of lands as on the feudal estate, or distribution of tasks as in a socialistic commonwealth, the community accomplishes a natural division of labor and diversification of industry, supports its own institutions by self-imposed taxes and voluntary contributions, and supplies its quota to the larger State of which it forms a democratic part. In spite of the constant exercise of individual independence and competition, there is at the foundation of every rural community the principle of co-operation and service as the only working formula for human life.

111. Co-operation.—One great advantage of community life over the home is the increased opportunity for co-operation. In new communities families work together to erect buildings, make roads, support schools, and organize and maintain a church. They aid each other in sickness, accident, and distress. Farmers find it profitable to unite for purposes of production, distribution, communication, transportation, and insurance. It may not seem worth while for a single farmer to buy an expensive piece of agricultural machinery for his own use, but it is well worth while for four or five to club together and buy it. The cost of an irrigation plant is much too high for one man, but a community can afford it when it will add materially to the production of all the farms in a district. In a region interested mainly in dairying a co-operative creamery can be made very profitable; in grain-producing sections co-operative elevator service makes possible the storage of grain until the demand increases values; in fruit-raising regions co-operation in selling has made the difference between success and failure. A co-operative telephone company has been the means of supplying several adjacent communities with easy communication. Co-operative banks are a convenient means of securing capital for agricultural use, and co-operative insurance companies have proved serviceable in carrying mutual risks.

The advantages of such co-operation are by no means confined to economic interests. The best result is the increasing realization of mutual dependence and common concern. Co-operation is an antidote to the evils of isolation and independence. A co-operative telephone company may not pay large dividends, and may eventually sell out to a larger corporation, but it has introduced people to one another, brightened circumscribed lives, and taught the people social understanding and sympathy. But aside from all such artificial forms of co-operation, the very custom of providing such common institutions as the school and the church is a valuable form of social service, entirely apart from the specific results that come from the exercises of the schoolroom and the meeting-house.

112. Why Co-operation May Fail.—Many co-operative enterprises fail, and this is not strange. There is always the natural conservatism and individualism of the American people to contend with; there is jealousy of the men who have been elected to responsible offices, and there is lack of experience and good judgment by those who undertake to engineer the active organization. Sometimes the method of organization or financing is faulty. Such enterprises work best among foreigners who have a good opinion of them, and know how to conduct them because they have seen them work well in Europe. Every successful attempt at economic co-operation is a distinct gain for rural community betterment, for upon co-operation depends the success of the efforts being put forth for rural improvement generally.

113. Competition Within the Group.—Co-operation is of greatest value when it includes within it a wholesome amount of individual competition for the sake of general as well as individual gain. Boys' agricultural clubs, organized in the South and West, have raised the standards of corn and tomato production by stimulating a friendly spirit of rivalry among boys, and as a result the fathers of the boys have adopted new and more scientific methods to increase their own production. Agricultural fairs may be made powerful agencies for a similar stimulus. At State and county fairs agricultural colleges and experiment stations find it worth while to exhibit their methods and processes with the results obtained; wide-awake farmers get new ideas, which they try out subsequently at home; young people are encouraged to try for the premiums offered the next year, and steadily the general level of excellence rises throughout the district.

READING REFERENCES

CHAPTER XVIToC

RECREATION

114. Recreation and Culture.—Besides the economic function the community has recreative and cultural functions to perform, and these need recognition and improvement. As the child in the home has a right to time and means for play, so the community, especially the young people, may lay claim to an opportunity for recreation; as the child has the right to learn in the home, so the people of the community should have cultural privileges. These demands are the more imperative, because the city has so much of this sort to offer, and the country community cannot hold its young people unless it provides a reasonable amount of attractions. It needs no particular institution to bring this about, but it needs a new spirit to recognize and enjoy the advantages that are possible even in thinly settled localities. Every opportunity for sociability strengthens just so much a natural instinct, increases the sense of social values, and enlarges the sphere of relationships.

In the community, as in the home, children have the first claim to consideration. The recreative impulse is strong in them. When they graduate from the home into the school they find opportunity for the expression of this impulse through their new associations. On the way to and from school and at recess they have opportunity to indulge their impulses and to use their powers of invention. Among the younger children the desire for muscular activity makes running games of all sorts popular; as boys grow older they imitate the primitive impulse to hit and run, so well provided for in games of ball; girls enjoy their recreation in a quieter way as they grow older, and show a tendency to association in pairs. Associations formed in play are not usually lasting ones, but the playground reveals individual temperament and personal qualities that are likely to determine popularity or unpopularity. These play associations develop qualities of leadership, loyalty, honesty, and co-operation that tend to label a child among his mates with a reputation that he carries into later life.

115. The Gang.—Since play is a natural instinct it is to be expected that children will seek a natural rather than an artificial way of expressing the instinct. Organization at best can only direct activities, giving recognition to the social inclinations of childhood. For example, it is not easy for a school-teacher to organize a boys' society and to direct it in such activities as appeal to him. The boys prefer to choose their own mates and their own chief, and the activities that appeal to them are not the same as those that seem to their elders to be most suitable. Between the ages of ten and sixteen the boy tends to gang life. He may work on the farm all day, but evenings and Sundays, if he is permitted to amuse himself, he joins a gang. Obviously the characteristics of the gang are seen best in the city, but they are not materially different in the country. Hunting and fishing may be enjoyed at odd times of leisure by the boy without companions, but the delights of the swimming-hole can be enjoyed thoroughly only as he has the companionship of other boys, and skating gains in virtue as a sport with the possibility of hockey on the ice. This liking for companionship exhibits itself in the habitual association of boys of a certain district for mutual enjoyment. On every possible opportunity they get together in the woods, pretend they are Indians, hunt, fish, and fight in company, build their own camps and plunder the camps of other gangs, and practise other activities characteristic of the savage age through which they are passing. Gangs exhibit a love of cruelty to those whom they may plague, a fondness for appropriating property which does not belong to them, and if possible provoking chase for the sake of the thrill that comes from the attempt to get away. Group athletics of various sorts are popular. Six out of seven gangs have physical activities as the purpose of their organization. The boys do not necessarily adopt any particular organization or choose a leader; on the contrary, they are a natural group, tacitly acknowledging the leadership of the most masterly and versatile individual, finding their own headquarters and adopting the forms of activity that appeal most to the group, according to the season and the opportunities of the region of country where they belong.

116. Leadership of Boys.—The gang is but one expression of the group instinct. It is often a nursery of bad habits that sometimes lead to crime and degeneracy, but it is capable of being used for the good of boyhood. The gang develops the virtues of loyalty to the group and loyalty to the group principles. It stimulates self-sacrifice and co-operation, honor and courage. These virtues can be cultivated by the man who aspires to boy leadership and directed into channels of usefulness as the boy passes on toward manhood. But there must be a frank recognition of the place of the gang in boy life, and not only a remembrance of one's own boyhood days, but also an appreciation of them. One of the best ways that has been devised for securing adult leadership without loss of the gang spirit and characteristics is the Boy Scout movement. It transforms the unorganized gang into the organized patrol, and affiliates it with other patrols in a wide organization, adopts the natural activities of boys as a part of its programme, and adds others of absorbing interest. Obedience is added to the boy's other virtues, and social education is acquired rapidly.

117. Varieties of Boys' Clubs.—The gang is one of the few natural groups of the community, and should be related to other institutions. It should not be hampered by them, but should receive the encouragement and assistance of home, school, and church. The Boy Scout movement has been associated with the churches; other boys' organizations have been connected with the Sunday-schools; the home and the day-school may well provide resources or quarters for the gang, and recognize its activities. But the gang is not the only organization suited to the boys of a community. There are special interests provided for in more artificial groups, such as athletic, debating, agricultural, or natural history clubs. These attract like-minded individuals from all parts of the community, and help to balance the clan spirit developed by the gang. These clubs may centre in school or meeting-house or have quarters of their own. One provision that is needed for the satisfaction of boy life in the rural community is the field or green where two rival gangs may contend legitimately for supremacy in sport, or clubs from different neighborhoods may test their prowess and arouse local pride and enthusiasm. The green needs little or no equipment, but it gains recognition as the boys' own training-field and serves as a safeguard to the health and morals of the youth of the community. The gang and the green are the proper social institutions of boy life in the rural community.

118. Girls' Clubs.—The instinct of the girl is not the same as that of the boy. She has other interests that require different organization. Her disposition is less active, and she does not so readily form a group organization. She associates with other girls in a set that is less democratic than her brother's gang. It has its rivalries and enmities, but hateful thoughts, angry words, and slighting attitudes take the place of the active warfare of the boys. Girls enjoy clubs that are adapted to their interests. Reading clubs, cooking clubs, sewing clubs, musical organizations, and philanthropic societies are useful forms of neighborhood association, and their activities may be correlated with the work of the home, the school, and the church more easily than those of their brothers.

In the country girls' organizations are very properly based on the interests of the farm, with which they are so closely related. They combine, as their brothers do, on the economic principle, organizing their poultry clubs, preserving clubs, or knitting clubs, but the social purpose is not lost sight of in the particular economic concern. An hour of sociability properly follows an hour of economic discussion or activity. Schoolgirls are very willing to accept the leadership of their teacher in a nature or culture club which will broaden their interests and stimulate their ambitions. One of the organizations that has sprung into existence on the model of the Boy Scout movement is the organization of Camp-Fire Girls. It is designed to meet the demand for companionship in a wholesome, pleasant way, and by its incentives to healthy activity and womanly virtue it helps to build character.

119. Recreation in the Country.—The recreative instinct is not confined to children. For the adult labor is lightened, worries banished, and carking care is less corroding, if now and then an evening of diversion interrupts the monotony of rural life, or a day off is devoted to a picnic or neighborhood frolic. There is the same interest in the country that there is in the city in methods of entertainment that satisfy primitive instincts. The instinct for human society enters into all of them. Other specific causes produce a fondness for the various forms of diversion indulged in. Among uncultured people especially an evening gathering soon proves dull unless there is something to do. Cards occupy the mind and hands and create a mild excitement that banishes troublesome thoughts and anxieties. Dancing breaks up the stiffness of a party, brings the sexes together, and provides the exhilaration of rhythmic motion. Barn frolics at maple-sugar or harvest time accomplish the same end, only less satisfactorily. Musicales and amateur theatricals provide an exhibition of skill, cultivate the æsthetic nature, gratify the dramatic instinct, and furnish opportunity for mutual acquaintance among the people of the community, who meet all too seldom in social gatherings, and at the same time they furnish wholesome entertainment for the community at small expense. The proceeds are used for local advantage, instead of being carried out of town. The passing show and moving pictures are less desirable. They are often cheap and degrading, though the kinetoscope can be made valuable for education.

The out-of-door gatherings that occur when the countryside is not too busy to plan or enjoy them are a helpful means of cultivating a community spirit. Athletic contests on the boys' own field readily become a community affair, with a speech and refreshments afterward, and the award of a prize or pennant to the victorious individual or team. The old-fashioned picnic to lake or woods or hilltop is one of the best means for forming and strengthening friendships and for giving persons of all ages a good time. Friendly contests of various sorts all come into play to add to the pleasure of the day. Fourth of July, Arbor Day, Old Home Week, and other occasions, give opportunity for recreation and the cultivation of neighborhood interests.

120. A Community Centre.—Aside from the natural isolation and lack of energy and social interest among country people, the lack of efficient leadership is the most serious handicap to organized sociability. Added to these is the want of a neighborhood centre both convenient and suitable. A community building, tasteful in architecture and equipped for community use, is a great desideratum, but is not often available. There seems to be no good reason why the schoolhouse should not be such a social centre as the community needs, but most school buildings are not adapted to such use. In the absence of any other provision it is the privilege of the rural church to furnish the opportunity for neighborhood gatherings, and there is a growing conviction that this is one of the opportunities of the church to ally itself to general community interests. The church represents, or should represent, the whole community of men, women, young people, and children. It has all their interests at heart. It makes provision for them in Sunday-school, young people's societies, and other groups. It recognizes the social interests in festivals and sociables. It may usefully add to its functions that of raising the standards of community recreation, if no other proper provision for it exists; it is under obligation to find wholesome substitutes for the abuses that exist in the field of amusement which it commonly condemns.