The Rural Life Problem of the United States: Notes of an Irish ObserverPlunkett, Horace Curzon, Sir
History
The Rural Life Problem of the United States: Notes of an Irish Observer
Plunkett, Horace Curzon, Sir
Farm life; Natural resources
legislative protection of the farmer's interests, and an organisation
fitted to further the business side of his industry. In fact, this need
is urgent, and a coöperative movement of National dimensions should be
established to meet it. Had such a movement been started after the War,
or even twenty years later, the American farmer would be in a far
stronger position to-day, and much misdirected effort would have been
saved.
I have now tried to explain the weak spot in American rural economy. It
may be regarded from a more general point of view. If we were
considering the life of some commercial or industrial community and
trying to forecast its future development, one of the first things we
should note would be its general business methods. No manufacturing
concern with a defective office administration and incompetent
travellers could survive, even if it had an Archimedes or an Edison in
supreme control. I cannot see any reason why an agricultural community
should expect to prosper while the industry by which its members live
retains its present business organisation. I have urged that as things
are, the farming interest is at a fatal disadvantage in the purchase of
agricultural requirements, in the sale of agricultural produce, and in
obtaining proper credit facilities. Whatever the cause--and I have set
down those which I regard as the chief among them--American farmers have
still to learn that they are subject to a law of modern business which
governs all their country's industrial activities--the law that each
body of workers engaged in supplying the modern market must combine, or
be worsted at every turn in competition with those who do.
I do not much fear that this general principle, overlooked, perhaps,
because it was too obvious to be worth enforcing, will be disputed. I
hope I may gain acceptance for my further contention that the inability
of American farmers to sustain an effective business organisation has
been due simply to the fact that the not obvious distinction between the
capitalistic and the coöperative basis of combination suitable to town
and country respectively was missed. For it will then be clear why, in
the working out of Mr. Roosevelt's formula, better business must precede
and form the basis of better farming and better living. The conviction
that in this general procedure lies the one hope of solving the problem
under review accounts for the otherwise disproportionate space given to
that aspect of rural life which is of the least interest to the general
reader.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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