Village Improvements and Farm VillagesWaring, George E. (George Edwin)
Science
Village Improvements and Farm Villages
Waring, George E. (George Edwin)
Civic improvement; Farm life
There is another class, and a very large one, whose opinion concerning
the godlike character of the country it is our especial purpose to
consider here. The farmer and the farmer's family may or may not be
cultivated persons. Cultivation does not come by nature; and the
incessant and increasing duties of farm life leave one, however well
disposed, but little time and but scant strength for aesthetic study. The
farmhouse is the centre of the home life and of the homely thought and
feeling of its inmates. The farm on which one has been born and bred is
the centre and standpoint from which he regards the world without. All
those more tender emotions which are common to our nature, and which
attach themselves to the home, find their development on the farm as
well as in the town. Sentimentally considered, it matters little whether
the object of these emotions be on the farm, in the wilderness, in the
village, or in the city. Fortunately, man is by no means a creature of
emotion alone; and the satisfaction and good of living are less a matter
of feeling than of activity, industry, and intelligence. The place in
which one lives is more or less satisfactory in proportion as it
facilitates and encourages the better and more useful living.
Just as the citizen feels the attractions of the country, which are so
novel to his town-bred taste, so the countryman finds a charm in the
novelty of the town. As one is led toward the quiet and solitude of the
fields and woods, so the other is drawn by the life and interest of the
community.
As a rule, at least in America, where the facilities for pleasant
country living are far less than in England, the countryman who goes to
town is less likely to wish himself back on the farm than is the
town-bred farmer to long for the comforts and conveniences of his former
condition.
"Man is a social animal," and the aphorism is especially true of his
wife and daughter. As the lives of the wife and daughter are much more
confined to the immediate surroundings of the domicile than is that of
the man himself, so the question as between town and country should be
considered more especially with reference to them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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