Part 4 (1/2)

”The church was organized in June, 1855, in a stone schoolhouse. The present house of wors.h.i.+p was erected and dedicated in 1861. Five ministers served the church as supplies until 1865, when the Rev. J. S.

Braddock, D. D., became the pastor and carried on a splendid work for forty-two years, when he laid down his pastorate in 1907, at the age of ninety.”

”This community was settled by homesteaders and pioneers in the early days of the West. Many of them came from Pennsylvania and some of them were of Scotch descent. The history of the community has been but the history of the development of a fertile Western Prairie country. It was settled by strong Presbyterian men, and their descendants are now the backbone of the community. There has been little change, but steady growth.”

The second element in the community of husbandmen is mutual support.

Professor Gillin of the University of Iowa has described to me the community of Dunkers whom he has studied,[16] being deeply impressed with their communal solidarity. Whenever a farm is for sale these farmers at the meeting-house confer and decide at once upon a buyer within their own religious fellows.h.i.+p. In the week following the minister or a church member writes back to Pennsylvania and the correspondence is pressed, until a family comes out from the older settlements in the Keystone State to purchase this farm in Iowa and to extend the colony of his fellow Dunkers. Reference is made elsewhere to the communal support given to their own members who suffer economic hards.h.i.+p. The serious tillage of the soil necessarily involves mutual support and the husbandman's life is in his community.

The third factor in communal husbandry is progress. Everyone testifies to the leaders.h.i.+p 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.

Leaders.h.i.+p 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 leaders.h.i.+p 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 scholars.h.i.+p 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 cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.ses 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 leaders.h.i.+p. 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 const.i.tute sanct.i.ty. 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.