It is true of course that the automobile makes it possible for people to
go to the larger towns and other village centers, and to visit their
particular friends and relatives in neighboring communities, and thus
seems to furnish means for breaking down and stratifying community life.
These tendencies exist, but they will not seriously injure the community
which has anything worth while for its people. Better transportation
simply makes possible a more highly organized community life, and any
complex organization is the more easily deranged; a complex machine or a
high-bred animal is more susceptible to injury than a simple tool or
scrub. Many ministers have railed against the automobile, while others
have used it to fill their pews. We cannot get away from that oldest of
paradoxes, first learned by Father Adam, that every new good has
possibilities of evil. A certain type of mind has always enjoyed
condemning every new invention as "of the Devil," and yet the world wags
on and no one who knows them would go back to "the good old days."
The automobile has brought new ideas both to the community and to the
farm and home. Farmers and their wives are traveling by auto much more
than they ever did by train, and it is impossible not to pick up new
ideas. One of the most effective educational devices is the farm tour in
which a group of Farm Bureau members travel from one farm to another
studying the methods of farming, and the women have adopted the idea for
an inspection of farm homes.
To discuss all the effects of automotive vehicles--cycle, car, truck,
bus, and tractor--on farm life would fill a book in itself: space
forbids except for incidental mention in the following chapters.
Turning to the mechanisms for the transmission of ideas, we appreciate
the even more wonderful inventions which have brought the whole world to
the farmer's door.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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