Chapters in Rural ProgressButterfield, Kenyon L. (Kenyon Leech)
Science
Chapters in Rural Progress
Butterfield, Kenyon L. (Kenyon Leech)
Agriculture -- United States
The really great lesson that farmers are rapidly learning is to work
together. They have been the last class to organize, and jealousy,
distrust, and isolation have made such organizations as they have had
comparatively ineffective. But gradually they are learning to
compromise, to work in harmony, to sink merely personal views, to trust
their own leaders, to keep troth in financially co-operative projects.
There will be no Farmers' Party organized; but the higher politics is
gaining among farmers, and more and more independent voting may be
expected from the rural precincts. Farmers are learning to pool such of
their interests as can be furthered by legislation.
It is also true that the whole aspect of social life in the country is
undergoing a profound evolutionary movement. Farmers are meeting one
another more frequently than they used to. They have more picnics and
holidays. They travel more. They go sight-seeing. They take advantage of
excursions. Their social life is more mobile than formerly. Farmers
have more comforts and luxuries than ever before. They dress better
than they did. More of them ride in carriages than formerly. They buy
neater and better furniture. The newer houses are prettier and more
comfortable than their predecessors. Bicycles and cameras are not
uncommon in the rural home. Rural telephone exchanges are relatively a
new thing, but the near future will see the telephone a part of the
ordinary furniture of the rural household; while electric car lines
promise to be the final link in the chain of advantages that is rapidly
transforming rural life--robbing it of its isolation, giving it balance
and poise, softening its hard outlines, and in general achieving its
thorough regeneration.
This sketch is no fancy tale. The movement described is genuine and
powerful. The busy city world may not note the signs of progress.
Well-minded philanthropists may feel that the rural districts are in
special need of their services. Even to the watchers on the walls there
is much of discouragement in the advancement that _isn't_ being made.
Yet it needs no prophet's eye to see that a vast change for the better
in rural life and conditions is now in progress.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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