Part 6 (2/2)

This being our proposition, it is then necessary to discover whether, given permanent residence on pieces of land, it is still possible to develop anything like a community sense. I do not now propose to discuss this question at any length, but merely to call attention to a few ways in which I think the neighborhood life of the open country may be very distinctly improved.

In this discussion, I purposely omit reference to public utilities and governmental action, because they are outside my present range. The farmer will share with all the people any needful improvement that may be made in regulation of transportation and transportation rates, in control of corporations, in equalizing of taxation, in providing new means of credit, in extending means of communication, in revising tariffs, in reforming the currency, and in perfecting the mail service.

To work out the means of neighborhood cooperation, there should be sufficient and attractive meeting places. The rural schoolhouse is seldom adapted to this purpose. The Grange hall does not represent all the people. The church is not a public inst.i.tution. Libraries are yet insufficient. Town halls are few, and usually as unattractive as possible. There is now considerable discussion of community halls.

Several of them have been built in different parts of the country to meet the new needs, and the practice should grow.

1. The mere _increase of population_ will necessarily bring people closer together, and by that much it will tend to social solidarity.

2. The natural _dividing up of large farms_, which is coming both as a result of the extension of population and from the failure of certain very large estates to be profitable, will also bring country people closer together. The so-called ”bonanza farms” are unwieldy and ineffective economic units; and many farmers are ”land poor.”

3. We shall also _a.s.semble farms_. The increasing population on the land will not always result in smaller farms. Most of the richer and more profitable lands will gradually be divided because, with our increased knowledge and skill, persons can make a living from smaller areas. The remoter and less productive lands will naturally be combined into larger farm areas, however, because a large proportion of such lands cannot make a sufficient profit, when divided into ordinary farm areas, to support and educate a present-day family (page 38). Contiguous areas of the better lands will be combined with them, in order to make a good business unit. As several farms come together under one general owners.h.i.+p, this owner will naturally gather about him a considerable population to work his lands.

The probability is that, under thoroughly skillful single management, a given area of remote or low-productive lands will sustain a larger population than they are now able to sustain under the many indifferent or incompetent owners.h.i.+ps. It is to be hoped that some of these amalgamated areas will develop a share-working or a.s.sociative farming of a kind that is now practically unknown.

4. The _re-creative life_ of the country community greatly needs to be stimulated. Not only games and recreation days need to be encouraged, but the spirit of release from continuous and deadening toil must be encouraged. The country population needs to be livened up. This will come about through the extension of education and the work of ministers, teachers, and organizations. All persons can come together on a recreation basis (pp. 173, 211).

The good farmer will have one day a week for recreation, vacation, and study.

5. _Local politics_ ought to further the entire neighborhood life, rather than to divide the community into hostile camps. All movements, as direct nominations, that stimulate local initiative and develop the sense of responsibility in the people will help toward this end.

6. _Rural government_ is commonly ineffective. It needs awakening by men and women who have arrived at some degree of mastery over their conditions. We talk much of the need of improving munic.i.p.al government, but very little about rural government; yet government in rural communities is inert and dead, as compared with what it might be, and there is probably as much machine politics in it, in proportion to the opportunities, as in city government. Very much of the lack of gumption in the open country is due to the want of a perfectly free and able administration of the public affairs.[3]

[3] See ”The Training of Farmers,” pp. 26-28, and ”The State and the Farmer,” p. 125.

The whole political organization of rural communities needs new attention, and perhaps radical overhauling. As I write these sentences, I have before me a newspaper in which a progressive surgeon expresses his opinion (which he has verified for me) on the question of supervision of health in a rural county in an Eastern state. He found the statistics too inaccurate and too indefinite to enable him to draw exact conclusions, but these are approximately the facts:

”No towns.h.i.+p seems to have deliberately paid its health officer, and but one town deliberately paid its poor physician. The others paid various bills for 'quarantine' and 'fumigating' and 'fees' and other misleading items. There was no way in which to distinguish between the care of the poor and the sick-poor except to guess and to figure on what I happened to know about. A----, the richest and largest towns.h.i.+p, has no health officers, and spent $200 for the poor in a population of 4000 people living in an area of 93 square miles. B----, the poorest towns.h.i.+p, with a population of 1000, and an area of 36 square miles, paid her health officer $28 and her poor physician $23.

”One towns.h.i.+p has 2170 inhabitants living in 51 square miles of territory, worth one and one-eighth million dollars. Its supervisor is paid $352.95 a year for a few days' work; its officers are paid $612.95.

It costs $274.79 each year to elect these officers, and I understand each towns.h.i.+p is to spend about $5000 for good roads. The health officer that cares for these 2000 people over 51 miles of territory gets $42.53 a year, and the poor physician $34; while the sick-poor get helped to the munificent sum of $59.36, or two and one-half cents from each citizen. The health officers get almost exactly two cents a head for caring for the inhabitants over 51 square miles of land. The supervisor gets out of each inhabitant seventeen cents a year, the officers get thirty cents, while the sick-poor take from each citizen almost three cents. The discrepancy is too glaring to need comment. A community a.s.sessed a million dollars and probably worth two millions spends $40 a year on public health, and $60 a year on one-sixteenth of its population for sickness.”

The physician proposes a county commission to take the place of the board of supervisors. He declares that the members of the board have outgrown their usefulness. ”They should be junked along with other stagecoaches and a nice, new 60 h. p. county commission put in their place. The fact is that the system is wrong. Our 'government' is a survival of early times, and our science is up to date. They do not fit.

You cannot expect supervisors who were useful in the time of Adam, when there were no cities, no problems, no roads, to serve in the twentieth century with its surgical treatment of degenerates, its germs and prophylactics, its preventive medicine and its scientific spirit.

Supervisors could look after noxious plants and animals in the old days, and they could paper the court-house and eat fat dinners at the poor-house. They did fairly well at settling line fences, drinking sweet cider, and blarneying with insurgents. But they are out of place when it is a question of constructing roads of macadam, of building a tuberculosis hospital for an $18,000,000 county, and especially they are out of place when it is a question of dozens of defectives in the jails and thousands outside who ought to be in hospitals.”

7. A _community program for health_[4] is much needed. The farmer lives by himself in his own house, on his own place. If a disease arises in his neighbor's family, it is not likely to spread to his family.

Therefore, disease has seemed to him to be a personal rather than a neighborhood matter. There is the greatest need that the farmer possess a community sense in respect to disease and sanitary conditions. If the city is the center of enlightenment, it should help the country to get hold of this problem.

[4] Another discussion of rural health will be found in my ”Training of Farmers,” pp. 46-68. The Century Co.

We should have a thoroughgoing system of health supervision and inspection for the open country as well as in the city. Health inspection should run out from the cities and towns into all the adjoining regions, maintaining proper connections with state departments of health. It should be continuous. It should include inspection of animals as well as of human beings. In other words, the whole region is a unit, one part depending on the other. The remarks of the physician, just quoted, indicate how great is the need of an organized health supervision for country communities.

We need meat inspection laws for meat killed and sold within the states, to supplement the inter-state law. We need community slaughter-houses in which all slaughtering of animals shall be under proper inspection. We need state milk inspection programs. It is not right that any large city should be compelled to inspect the milk throughout the state in order to protect itself. It is not right to the farming districts that such inspection should center in the city.

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