The Survey, Volume 30, Number 1, April 5, 1913Various
History
The Survey, Volume 30, Number 1, April 5, 1913
Various
Charities -- Periodicals; Social problems -- Periodicals; United States -- Social conditions -- Periodicals
The city churches, the city philanthropies, and the civic improvement
organizations all tell the same tale: the rich men, the special
executive men, the professional men, once their actual business
engagements are over, turn their backs on the city with a sigh of relief
and depart country-wards for rest and enjoyment for the night, for the
week-end, and for the summer vacation. The city loses them, and they
gain the country. But it must not be supposed that the country in any
vital sense gains them. A man who has professedly moved from the town to
the country for rest and pleasure, and who observably needs both, feels
as free as a debutante to enjoy what is set before him in the way of
diversion, with no moral obligation toward his neighbors but that of
paying with a wry grin the outrageous prices levied upon all outsiders
by the genial natives.
Without quite meaning to, without indeed quite realizing it, the richer
men and women of this country, especially in our eastern states, have so
shifted the obligation of neighborliness that they have the air of being
transients everywhere and neighbors nowhere. Even their country places
are not theirs year in and year out for as long as a single generation.
We Americans like to change our minds and there is no telling what kind
of scenery or what style of architecture we may fancy next.
One hears a great deal about the unfaithfulness of the Irish cook who
may "up and leave" any day that she hears of a chance of "bettering
herself" elsewhere; but the mistress's unrest is nothing to the plight
of the farmer when one considers the lottery of the city folks. The
gamble of his crops and the weather is nothing to this other gamble. For
the farmer knows that no power under heaven can keep the city man
satisfied with his site, his house with five bathrooms, his fancy
chicken run, and his concrete garage if the whim should take his wife
that the environment was no longer a suitable one for the children.
There is no romance, therefore, to the farmer about either his potato
crop or his city neighbor. He knows it is not philanthropy that led the
city man to buy five acres of poor farm land at the highest notch price,
and that no desire for his company has urged the new comer to plant his
house on the other side of the back pasture. Being a sensible farmer he
makes what profit he can out of his potatoes and his city neighbor
before either crop has time to depreciate in value.
[Illustration: QUARTERS OF VISITING NURSE]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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