Part 5

In the background is the countryman; and how is the countryman to make use of the rain and the abounding soil, and the varied wonder of plant and animal amidst which he lives, that he may arrive at kinship? We are teaching him how to bring some of these things under the dominion of his hands, how to measure and to weigh and to judge. This will give him the essential physical mastery. But beyond this, how shall he take them into himself, how shall he make them to be of his spirit, how shall he complete his dominion? How shall he become the man that his natural position requires of him? This will come slowly, ah, yes!--slowly. The people--the great striving self-absorbed throng of the people--they do not know what we mean when we talk like this, they hear only so many fine words. The naturist knows that the time will come slowly,--not yet are we ready for fulfilment; he knows that we cannot regulate the cosmos, or even the natural history of the people, by enactments. Slowly: by removing handicaps here and there; by selection of the folk in a natural process, to eliminate the unresponsive; by teaching, by suggestion; by a public recognition of the problem, even though not one of us sees the end of it.

I hope my reader now sees where I am leading him. He sees that I am not thinking merely of instructing the young in the names and habits of birds and flowers and other pleasant knowledge, although this works strongly toward the desired end; nor of any movement merely to have gardens, or to own farms, although this is desirable provided one is qualified to own a farm; nor of rhapsodies on the beauties of nature. Nor am I thinking of any new plan or any novel kind of institution or any new agency; rather shall we do better to escape some of the excessive institutionalism and organization. We are so accustomed to think in terms of organized politics and education and religion and philanthropies that when we detach ourselves we are said to lack definiteness. It is the personal satisfaction in the earth to which we are born, and the quickened responsibility, the whole relation, broadly developed, of the man and of all men,--it is this attitude that we are to discuss.

The years pass and they grow into centuries. We see more clearly. We are to take a new hold.

The brotherhood relation

A constructive and careful handling of the resources of the earth is impossible except on a basis of large co-operation and of association for mutual welfare. The great inventions and discoveries of recent time have extensive social significance.

Yet we have other relations than with the physical and static materials. We are parts in a living sensitive creation. The theme of evolution has overturned our attitude toward this creation. The living creation is not exclusively man-centred: it is bio-centric. We perceive the essential continuity in nature, arising from within rather than from without, the forms of life proceeding upwardly and onwardly in something very like a mighty plan of sequence, man being one part in the process. We have genetic relation with all living things, and our aristocracy is the aristocracy of nature. We can claim no gross superiority and no isolated self-importance. The creation, and not man, is the norm. Even now do we begin to guide our practises and our speech by our studies of what we still call the lower creation. We gain a good perspective on ourselves.

If we are parts in the evolution, and if the universe, or even the earth, is not made merely as a footstool, or as a theatre for man, so do we lose our cosmic selfishness and we find our place in the plan of things. We are emancipated from ignorance and superstition and small philosophies. The present wide-spread growth of the feeling of brotherhood would have been impossible in a self-centred creation: the way has been prepared by the discussion of evolution, which is the major biological contribution to human welfare and progress. This is the philosophy of the oneness in nature and the unity in living things.

The farmer's relation

The surface of the earth is particularly within the care of the farmer. He keeps it for his own sustenance and gain, but his gain is also the gain of all the rest of us. At the best, he accumulates little to himself. The successful farmer is the one who produces more than he needs for his support; and the overplus he does not keep; and, moreover, his own needs are easily satisfied. It is of the utmost consequence that the man next the earth shall lead a fair and simple life; for in riotous living he might halt many good supplies that now go to his fellows.

It is a public duty so to train the farmer that he shall appreciate his guardianship. He is engaged in a quasi-public business. He really does not even own his land. He does not take his land with him, but only the personal development that he gains from it. He cannot annihilate his land, as another might destroy all his belongings. He is the agent or the representative of society to guard and to subdue the surface of the earth; and he is the agent of the divinity that made it. He must exercise his dominion with due regard to all these obligations. He is a trustee. The productiveness of the earth must increase from generation to generation: this also is his obligation. He must handle all his materials, remembering man and remembering God. A man cannot be a good farmer unless he is a religious man.

If the farmer is engaged in a quasi-public business, shall we undertake to regulate him? This relationship carries a vast significance to the social order, and it must color our attitude toward the man on the land. We are now in that epoch of social development when we desire to regulate by law everything that is regulatable and the other things besides. It is recently proposed that the Congress shall pass a law regulating the cropping scheme of the farmer for the protection of soil fertility. This follows the precedent of the regulation, by enactment, of trusts and public utilities. It is fortunate that such a law cannot be passed, and could not be enforced if it were passed; but this and related proposals are crude expressions of the growing feeling that the farmer owes an obligation to society, and that this obligation must be enforced and the tiller of the soil be held to account.

We shall produce a much better and safer man when we make him self-controlling by developing his sense of responsibility than when we regulate him by exterior enactments.

In the realm of control of the farming occupation we shall invoke other than legal means, and perhaps these means will be suggestive for other situations. These means may be somewhat indefinite in the law-book sense, but they may attain to a better human result. We shall reach the question by surer ways than the crudities of legislation. We shall reach the man, in this field, rather than his business. We have begun it by accepting it as one part of our duty to the race to provide liberally at public expense for the special education of the man on the land. This is the reason, even if we have not formulated it to ourselves, why society is willing to go farther in the education of the farming people than in the popular education of other ranges of the people. This, of course, is the fundamental way; and if there are any governments that attempt to safeguard this range directly by laws rather than by education, then they have not arrived at a long view of the situation.

We invoke regulatory law for the control of the corporate activities; but we must not forget the other kinds of activities contributing to the making of society, nor attempt to apply to them the same methods of correction.

Into this secular and more or less technical education we are now to introduce the element of moral obligation, that the man may understand his peculiar contribution and responsibility to society; but this result cannot be attained until the farmer and every one of us recognize the holiness of the earth.

The farmer and every one of us: every citizen should be put right toward the planet, should be quicked to his relationship to his natural background. The whole body of public sentiment should be sympathetic with the man who works and administers the land for us; and this requires understanding. We have heard much about the "marginal man," but the first concern of society should be for the bottom man.

If this philosophy should really be translated into action, the farmer would nowhere be a peasant, forming merely a caste, and that a low one, among his fellows. He would be an independent co-operating citizen partaking fully of the fruits of his labor, enjoying the social rewards of his essential position, being sustained and protected by a body of responsive public opinion. The farmer cannot keep the earth for us without an enlightened and very active support from every other person, and without adequate safeguards from exploitation and from unessential commercial pressure.

This social support requires a ready response on the part of the farmer; and he must also be developed into his position by a kind of training that will make him quickly and naturally responsive to it. The social fascination of the town will always be greater than that of the open country. The movements are more rapid, more picturesque, have more color and more vivacity. It is not to be expected that we can overcome this fascination and safeguard the country boy and girl merely by introducing more showy or active enterprises into the open country. We must develop a new background for the country youth, establish new standards, and arouse a new point of view. The farmer will not need all the things that the city man thinks the farmer needs. We must stimulate his moral response, his appreciation of the worthiness of the things in which he lives, and increase his knowledge of all the objects and affairs amongst which he moves. The backbone of the rural question is at the bottom a moral problem.

We do not yet know whether the race can permanently endure urban life, or whether it must be constantly renewed from the vitalities in the rear. We know that the farms and the back spaces have been the mother of the race. We know that the exigencies and frugalities of life in these backgrounds beget men and women to be serious and steady and to know the value of every hour and of every coin that they earn; and whenever they are properly trained, these folk recognize the holiness of the earth.

For some years I have had the satisfaction to speak to rural folk in many places on the holy earth and to make some of the necessary applications. Everywhere I have met the heartiest assent from these people. Specially do they respond to the suggestion that if the earth is hallowed, so are the native products of the earth hallowed; and they like to have the mystery--which is the essential sentiment--of these things brought home to them with frequency. I will here let my reader have a letter that one of these persons wrote me, and I print it without change. On inquiry, the writer of it told me that he is a farmer, has never followed any other occupation, was brought up "in the woods," and has had practically no education. I did not ask him, but I judge from the narrative style that he has been a reader or a hearer of the Old Testament; and here is the letter:

As you say, too many people confound farming, with that sordid, selfish, money-getting game, called "business," whereas, the farmer's position is administrative, being in a way a dispenser of the "Mysteries of God," for they are mysteries. Every apple is a mystery, and every potato is a mystery, and every ear of corn is a mystery, and every pound of butter is a mystery, and when a "farmer" is not able to understand these things he is out of place.

The farmer uses the soil and the rains and the snows and the frosts and the winds and the sun; these are also the implements of the Almighty, the only tools He uses, and while you were talking that day, it brought to mind the recollection of an account I once read of an occurrence which took place in the vicinity of Carlsruhe, in Germany, about thirty years ago, and I want to tell you about it. An old man and his two sons, who were laborers on a large farm there, went out one morning to mow peas, with scythes, as was the method in use at that time, and soon after they began work, they noticed a large active man coming along a pathway which bordered the field on one side, and when he came to where they were, he spoke to them, very pleasantly, and asked them some questions about their work and taking the scythe from the hands of the older man he mowed some with it and finally returned it and went his way. After a time when the owner of the farm came out to oversee the work they told him of the occurrence, and asked him if he could tell who the stranger might be, and he told them that he was Prince Bismarck, the Chancellor of the empire, who was staying at his country home at Carlsruhe, and was out for his morning walk, and they were astonished, and the old man was filled with a great pride, and he felt himself elevated above all his fellows, and he wouldn't have sold his scythe for half the money in Germany, and his descendants to this day boast of the fact that their father and Bismarck mowed with the same scythe. Now if it was sufficient to stimulate the pride of this old laborer, if it was sufficient to create for him a private aristocracy, if it was sufficient to convert that old rusty scythe into a priceless heirloom to be treasured up and transmitted from father to son, if it was sufficient for all these things that he had once held a momentarily unimportant association with the man of "blood and iron," how much more inconceivably and immeasurably high and exalted is the station of the farmer who is, in a measure, a fellow craftsman of the God of Nature, of the great First Cause of all things, and people don't know it. No wonder the boys leave the farm!

The underlying training of a people

This, then, is the landsman's obligation, and his joyful privilege. But it must not be supposed that he alone bears the responsibility to maintain the holiness of the divine earth. It is the obligation also of all of us, since every one is born to the earth and lives upon it, and since every one must react to it to the extent of his place and capabilities. This being so, then it is a primary need that we shall place at the use of the people a kind of education that shall quicken these attachments.

Certainly all means of education are useful, and every means should be developed to its best; and it is not to be expected that all the people shall pursue a single means: but to the nation and to the race a fundamental training must be provided.

We are now in the time of developing a technical education in agriculture, to the end that we may produce our land supplies. Already this education is assuming broad aspects, and we begin to see that it has very important bearing on public policies. It is a new form of exercise in natural science,--the old education in this great realm having become so specialized and departmentalized as to lose much of its value as a means of popular training.

It is a happy augury that in North America so many public men and administrators have taken the large view of education by means of agriculture, desiring, while training farmers or those who would be farmers, to make it a means of bringing the understanding of the people back to the land. The Americans are making a very remarkable contribution here, in a spirit of real statesmanship. In the long run, this procedure will produce a spirit in the people that will have far-reaching importance in the development of national character, and in a relation to the backgrounds of which very few of us yet have vision.

It will be fortunate if we can escape the formalizing and professionalizing of this education, that has cast such a blight on most of the older means of training the young, and if we can keep it democratic and free in spirit.