The Country-Life Movement in the United StatesBailey, L. H. (Liberty Hyde)
History
The Country-Life Movement in the United States
Bailey, L. H. (Liberty Hyde)
Country life
A new social order must be evolved in the open country, and every farmer
of the new time must lend a strong hand to produce it. We have been
training our youth merely to be better farmers; this, of course, is the
first thing to do, but the man is only half trained when this is done.
What to do with the school, the church, the rural organizations, the
combinations of trade, the highways, the architecture, the library, the
beauty of the landscape, the country store, the rousing of a fine
community helpfulness to take the place of the old selfish
individualism, and a hundred other activities, is enough to fire the
imagination and to strengthen the arm of any young man or woman.
The farmer is to contribute his share to the evolution of an industrial
democracy.
(2) _The fighting edge._
Theodore Roosevelt, with his power to discern essentials, has given us a
good rallying phrase in "the fighting edge." When man ceases to be a
conqueror, he will lose his virility and begin to retrograde. As
localism gives way to brotherhood, militarism will pass out; but this
does not mean that mankind will cease to contend.
The best example I have seen of the development of determination and
fine social brotherhood is in the making of the Panama Canal. The making
of the Canal is in every sense a conquest. It is a new civilization that
the 40,000 or 50,000 folk are constructing down there, and every man,
whether he is employed in the commissariat, the sanitary department, in
an office, on a steam shovel, or with a construction gang, will tell you
that he is building the Canal. All these people are giving a good
account of themselves because they are doing the work under the flag and
because they are contending with vast difficulties.
We have scarcely begun even the physical conquest of the earth. It is
not yet all explored. The earth is an island, and it is only two years
ago that we got to one end of it. There are mountains to pierce,
sea-shores to reclaim, vast stretches of submerged land to drain,
millions of acres to irrigate and many more millions to utilize by
dry-farming, rivers to canalize, the whole open country to organize and
subdue by means of local engineering work, and a thousand other great
pieces of construction to accomplish, all calling for the finest spirit
of conquest and all contributing to the training of men and women. There
is no necessity that the race become flabby.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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