Society: Its Origin and Development Part 7

DEALEY: _The Family in Its Sociological Aspects_, pages 119-134.

POST: _Ethics of Marriage and Divorce_, pages 105-127.

HOWARD: _History of Matrimonial Inst.i.tutions_, III, pages 253-259.

THWING: _The Recovery of the Home._ A Pamphlet.

PART III--SOCIAL LIFE IN THE RURAL COMMUNITY

CHAPTER XIII

THE COMMUNITY AND ITS HISTORY

97. =Broadening the Horizon.=--Out of the kindergarten of the home the child graduates into the larger school of the community. Thus far through his early years the child's environment has been restricted almost entirely to the four walls of the home or the limits of the farm. His horizon has been bounded by garden, pasture, and orchard, except as he has enjoyed an occasional visit to the village centre or has found playmates on neighboring farms. He has shared in the isolation of the farm. The home of the nearest neighbor is very likely out of sight beyond the hill, or too far away for children's feet to travel the intervening distance; on the prairie the next door may be over the edge of the horizon. The home has been his social world. It has supplied for him a social group, persons to talk with, to play with, to work with. Inevitably he takes on their characteristics, and his life will continue to be narrow and to grow conservative and hard, unless he enlarges his experience, broadens his horizon, tries new activities, enjoys new a.s.sociations, tests new methods of social control, and lets the forces that produce social change play upon his own life.

Happy is he when he enters definitely into community life by taking his place in the district school. The schoolhouse may be at the village centre or it may stand aloof among the trees or stark on a barren hillside along the country road; physical environment is of small consequence as compared with the new social environment of the schoolroom itself. The child has come into contact with others of his kind in a permanent social inst.i.tution outside the home, and this social contact has become a daily experience. Every child that goes to school is one of many representatives from the homes of the neighborhood. He brings with him the habits and ideas that he has gathered from his own home, and he finds that they do not agree or fuse easily with the ideas and habits of the other children. In the schoolroom and on the playground he repeats the process of social adjustments which the race has pa.s.sed through. Conflicts for ascendancy are frequent. He must prove his physical prowess on the playground and his intellectual ability in the schoolroom. He must test his body of knowledge and the value of his mental processes by the mind of his teacher. He must have strength of conviction to defend his own opinions, but he must have an open mind to receive truths that are new to him. One of the great achievements of the school is to fuse dissimilar elements into common custom and opinion, and thus to socialize the independent units of community life.

98. =Learning Social Values in the Community.=--The school is the door to larger social opportunity than the home can provide, but it is not the only door. The child in pa.s.sing to and from school comes into touch with other inst.i.tutions and activities. He pa.s.ses other homes than his own. He sees each in the midst of its own peculiar surroundings, and he makes comparisons of one with another and of each with his own. He estimates more or less consciously the value of that which he sees, not so much in terms of economic as of social worth, and congratulates or pities himself or his schoolmates, according to the judgments that he has made. He stops at the store, the mill, or the blacksmith shop, through frequent contact becomes familiar with their functions, and thinks in turn that he would like to be storekeeper, miller, and blacksmith. He sees the farmer on other farms than his own gathering his harvest in the fall, hauling wood in the winter, or ploughing his field in the spring, and he becomes conscious of common habits and occupations in this rural community. He gets acquainted with the variety of activities that enter into life in the country district in which his home is located, and he learns to appreciate the importance of the instruments upon which such activity depends for travel from place to place. By all these means the child is learning social values.

After a little he comes to understand that the community, with its roads, its public buildings, and its established inst.i.tutions, exists to satisfy certain economic and social needs that the single family cannot supply. By and by he learns that, like the family, it has grown out of the experience of relations.h.i.+ps, and can be traced far back in history, and that as time pa.s.ses it is slowly changing to adapt itself to the changing wants and wishes of its inhabitants. He becomes aware of a present tendency for the community to imitate the larger social life outside, to make its village centre a reproduction in miniature of the urban centres; later he realizes that the introduction of foreign elements into the population is working for the destruction of the simple, unified life of former days, and is introducing a certain flavor of cosmopolitanism.

It is this growth of social consciousness in a single child, multiplied by the number of children in the community, that const.i.tutes the process of social education. A community with no dynamic influences impinging upon it reproduces itself in this way generation after generation, and at best seems to maintain but a static existence. In reality, few communities stand still. The principle of change that is characteristic of social life is continually working to build up or tear down the community structure and to modify community functioning. The causes of change and their methods of operation appear in the history of the rural community.

99. =Rural History.=--The history of the rural community falls into two periods--first, when the village was necessary to the life of the individual; second, when the individual pioneer pushed out into the forest or prairie, and the village followed as a convenient social inst.i.tution. The community came into existence through the bond of kins.h.i.+p. Every clan formed a village group with its own peculiar customs. These were primitive, even among semi-civilized peoples.

Among the ancient Hebrews the village elders sat by the gate to administer justice in the name of the clan; in China the old men still bask on a log in the sun and p.r.o.nounce judgment in neighborly gossip.

The village existed for sociability and safety. The mediaeval Germans left about each village a broad strip of waste land called the mark, and over this no stranger could come as a friend without sounding a trumpet. Later the village was surrounded by a wall called a tun, and by a transfer of terms the village frequently came to be called a mark, or tun, later changed to town. Place names even in the United States are often survivals of such a custom, as Charlestown or Chilmark. The Indian village in colonial America was similarly protected with a palisade, and village dogs heralded the approach of a stranger, as they do still in the East.

100. =The Mediaeval Village.=--The peasant village of the Middle Ages const.i.tutes a distinct type of rural community. A consciousness of mutual dependence between the owner of the land and the peasants who were his serfs produced a feudal system in which the landlord undertook to furnish protection and to permit the peasant to use portions of his land in exchange for service. Strips of fertile soil were allotted to the village families for cultivation, while pasture-land, meadow, and forest were kept for community use. Even in the heart of the city Boston Common remains as a relic of the old custom. On the mediaeval manor people lived and worked together, most of them on the same social level, the lord in his manor-house and the peasants in a hamlet or larger village on his land, huddling together in rude huts and in crude fas.h.i.+on performing the social and economic functions of a rural community. In the village church the miller or the blacksmith held his head a little higher than his neighbors, and sometimes the lord of the manor did not deign to wors.h.i.+p in the common parish church, but the ma.s.s of the people were fellow serfs, owning a common master, working at the same tasks, by custom sowing and reaping the same kind of grain on the same kind of land in the same week of the year. They attended the court of the master, who exercised the functions of government. They wors.h.i.+pped side by side in the church.

The same customs bound them and the same superst.i.tions worried their waking hours. There was thus a community solidarity that less commonly exists under modern conditions.

There was no stimulus to progress on the manor itself. There were no schools for the peasant's children, and there was little social intelligence. The finer side of life was undeveloped, except as the love of music was stirred by the travelling bard, or martial fervor or the love of movement aroused the dance. There was no desire for religious independence or understanding of religious experience. The ma.s.s in the village church satisfied the religious instinct. There was no dynamic factor in the community itself. Besides all this, the community lived a self-centred life, because the people manufactured their own cloth and leather garments and most of the necessary tools, and, except for a few commodities like iron and salt, they were independent of trade. The result was that every stimulus of social exchange between villages was lacking.

The broadening influence of the Crusades with their stimulus to thought, their creation of new economic wants, and their contact of races and nationalities, set in motion great changes. Out of the manorial villages went ambitious individuals, making their way as industrial pioneers to the opportunity of the larger towns, as now young people push out from the country to the city. New towns were founded and new enterprises were begun. Trade routes were opened up.

The feudal princ.i.p.ality grew into the modern state. Cultural interests demanded their share of attention. Schools were founded, and art and literature began again to develop. Even law and religion, most conservative among social inst.i.tutions, underwent change.

101. =The Village in American History.=--The spirit of enterprise and the disturbed political and religious conditions impelled many groups in western Europe to emigrate to new lands after the geographical discoveries that ushered in the sixteenth century. They were free to go, for serfdom was disappearing from most of the European countries.

The village life of Europe was transplanted to America. In the South the mediaeval feudal village became the agricultural plantation, where the planter lived on his own estate surrounded by the rude cabins of his dusky peasantry. The more democratic, h.o.m.ogeneous village life of middle-cla.s.s Englishmen reproduced itself in New England, where the houses of the settlers cl.u.s.tered about the village meeting-house and schoolhouse, and where habits of industry, frugality, and sobriety characterized every local group. In this new village life there came to be a stronger feeling of self-respect, and under the hard conditions of life in a new continent there developed a self-reliance that was destined to work wonders in days to come. The New World bred a spirit of independence that suited well the individualistic philosophy and religion of the modern Englishman. All these qualities prophesied much of individual achievement. Yet this tendency toward individualism threatened the former social solidarity, though there was a recognition of mutual interests and a readiness to show neighborly kindness in time of stress, and a perception of the social value of democracy in church and state.

102. =Individual Pioneering.=--The pioneer American colonies were group settlements, but they produced a new race of individual pioneers for the West. Occasionally a whole community emigrated, but usually hardy, venturesome individuals pushed out into the wilderness, opening up the frontier continually farther toward the setting sun. By the brookside the pioneer made a clearing and erected his log house; later on the unbroken prairie he built a rude hut of sod. On the land that was his by squatter's right or government claim he planted and reaped his crops. About him grew up a brood of children, and as the years pa.s.sed, others like himself followed in the path that he had made, single men to work for a time as hired laborers, families to break new ground, until the countryside became spa.r.s.ely settled and the nucleus of a village was made.

Such pioneers were hard-working people, lonely and introspective.

They knew little of the comforts and none of the refinements of life.

They prescribed order and administered justice at the weapon's point.

They were emotional in religion. They required the stimulus of abundant food and often of strong drink to goad them to their various tasks. Frontier pioneering in America reproduced many of the features of former ages of primitive life and compressed centuries into the s.p.a.ce of a generation. It was distinctly individualistic, and needed socializing. The large farm or cattle-range kept men apart, the freedom of the open country attracted an unruly population, and in consequence frontier life tended to rough manners and lawlessness.

Isolation and loneliness produced despondency and inertia, and tended to individual and group degeneration.

Even in a growing village men and women of this type had few social inst.i.tutions. There was little time for schooling or recreation. A circuit-riding preacher held religious services once or twice a month, and in certain regions at a certain season religious enthusiasm found vent in a camp-meeting, but religion often had little effect on habits and morals. Local government and industry were home-made. The settlers brought with them customs and traditions which they cherished, but in the mingling of pioneers from different districts there was continual change and fusion, until the West became the most enterprising and progressive part of the nation, continually open to new ideas and new methods. There was a wholesome respect for church and school, and as villages grew the settlers did not neglect the organization and housing of such inst.i.tutions; store, mill, and smithy found their place as farther east, and later the lawyer and physician came, but the pioneer could do without them for a time. Inventiveness and individual initiative were characteristics of the rural people, made necessary by their remoteness and isolation.

103. =The Development of the West.=--With increasing settlement the rural pioneer gave place to the farmer. It was no longer necessary for him to break new ground, for arable acres could be purchased; neither was it necessary to turn from one occupation to another to satisfy personal or household needs, for division of labor provided specialists. Hards.h.i.+p gave way to comfort, for the land was fertile and experience had taught its values for the cultivation of particular crops. Loneliness and isolation were felt less severely as neighbors became more frequent and travelled roads made communication easier.

Group life expanded and inst.i.tutions became fixed. Every neighborhood had its school-teacher, and even the academy and college began to dot the land. Churches of various denominations found root in rural soil, and a settled minister became more common. A general store and post-office found place at the cross-roads, and the permanent machinery of local government was set up. Out of the forest clearings and prairie settlements evolved the prosperous farm life that has been so characteristic of the Middle West.

But the prosperous life of these rural communities has not remained unchanged. Speculation in land has been creating a cla.s.s of non-resident agricultural capitalists and tenant cultivators, and has been transforming the type of agricultural population over large sections of country. Soil exhaustion is leading to abandonment of the poorest land and is compelling methods of scientific agriculture on the remainder. These conditions are producing their own social problems for the rural community.

READING REFERENCES

SMALL AND VINCENT: _Introduction to the Study of Society_, pages 112-126.

CHEYNEY: _Industrial and Social History of England_, pages 31-56.

CUBBERLEY: _Rural Life and Education_, pages 1-62.

WILSON: _Evolution of the Country Community_, pages 1-61.

CARVER: _Principles of Rural Economics_, pages 74-116.

ROSS: "The Agrarian Revolution in the Middle West," _North American Review_, September, 1909.

GILLETTE: "The Drift to the City in Relation to the Rural Problem," _American Journal of Sociology_, March, 1911.

CHAPTER XIV

THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE

104. =Physical Types.=--To understand the continually changing rural life of the present, it is necessary to examine into the physical characteristics of the country districts, the elements of the population, the functions of the rural community, and its social inst.i.tutions.

The physical characteristics have a large part in determining occupations and in fas.h.i.+oning social life. A natural harbor, especially if it is at the mouth of a river, seems destined by nature for a centre of commerce, as the falls of a swift-flowing stream indicate the location of a manufacturing plant. A mineral-bearing mountain invites to mining, and miles of forest land summon the lumberman. Broad and well-watered plains seem designed for agriculture, and on them acres of grain slowly mature through the summer months to turn into golden harvests in the fall. The Mississippi valley and the Western plain into which it blends have become the granary of the American nation. The railroad-train that rushes day and night from the Great Lakes toward the setting sun moves hour after hour through the extensive rural districts that characterize the great West. There are the mammoth farms that are given to the one enormous crop of wheat or corn. Alongside the railroad loom the immense elevators where the grain is stored to be s.h.i.+pped to market. Here and there are the farm-buildings where the owner or tenant lives, but villages are small and scattered and community activity is slight.

Similarly, in the South before the Civil War there were large plantations of cotton and tobacco, dotted only here and there with the planter's mansion and clumps of negro cabins. Village life was not a characteristic of Southern society. The old South had its picturesque plantation life, and the aristocracy made its sociable visits from family to family, but that rural type disappeared with the war. With the breaking up of the old plantations there came a greater diversification of agriculture, which is going on at an accelerated pace, and social centres are increasing, but there is still much rural isolation. Among the remoter mountains lingers the most conservative American type of citizens in the arrested development of a century ago, with antique tools and ancient methods, scratching a few acres for a garden and corn-field, and living their backward, isolated life, without comfort or even peace, and almost without social inst.i.tutions.

In the East the country is more broken. Large farms are few, and agriculture is carried on intensively as a business, or is united with another occupation or as a diversion from the cares and tasks of the town. Farms of a score to a few hundred acres, only part of which are cultivated, form rural communities among the hills or along a river valley. Here and there a few houses cl.u.s.ter in village or hamlet, where each house yard has its garden patch, but the inhabitants of the village depend on other means than agriculture for a living. On the farms dairy and poultry products share with agriculture in rural importance, and no one crop const.i.tutes an agricultural staple. In New England the villages are comparatively near together, and social life needs only prodding to produce a healthy development.

105. =Characteristics of Population.=--Rural life feels in each region the reactions of nature. The narrow life of the hills, the open life of the plains, the peaceful life of the comfortable plantation with its lazy river and its delightful climate, each has its peculiar characteristics that are due in part at least to nature. But these features are complicated by social elements of population. The American rural community of to-day is composed of individuals who differ in age and fortune and kins.h.i.+p, and who vary in qualities and resemblances. There are old and young and middle-aged persons, men and women, married and single, persons with many relatives and others with few, native and foreign born, strong and weak, well and ill, good and bad, educated and illiterate. Yet there are certain characteristics that are typical.

In the first place, for example, there is a considerable uniformity of age in the population of a certain type of community. In those agricultural districts where individuals own their own homes, the number of elderly people is larger than it is in the city, and the young people are comparatively few, for the reason that their ambitions carry them to the city for its larger opportunities, and in the older States many a farm becomes abandoned on the death of the old people. In districts where tenant-farming is largely in vogue, gray hairs are much fewer. The tendency is for the original farmers who have been successful to sell or rent their property and move to town to enjoy its comforts and attractions, leaving the tenants and their families of children.

In the second place, it is characteristic of long-settled rural communities that there is an interlocking of family relations.h.i.+p, with a number of prevailing family names and a great preponderance of native Americans; but in portions of the West and in rural districts not very remote from the large cities of the East there is a large mixture, and in spots a predominance of the foreign element. In the third place, small means rather than wealth and a sluggish contentment rather than ambition is characteristic of the older rural sections; in newer districts ambition to push ahead is more common, and prosperity and an air of opulence are not unusual.

106. =The Composition of Rural Communities.=--In an a.n.a.lysis of population it is proper to consider its composition and its manner of growth. In making a survey or taking a census of a community there are included at least statistics as to age, s.e.x, number and size of families, degree of kins.h.i.+p, race parentage, and occupations. Records of age, s.e.x, and size of family show the tendencies of a community as to growth or race suicide; kins.h.i.+p and race parentage indicate whether population is h.o.m.ogeneous; and occupations indicate the place that agriculture holds in a particular section of country. By a comparative study of statistics it is easy to determine whether a community is advancing, retrograding, or standing still, and what its position is relative to its neighbors; also to find out whether or not its occupations and characteristics are changing.

107. =Manner of Growth.=--The manner of growth of a community is by natural excess of births over deaths, and by immigration of persons from outside. As long as the former condition obtains, population is h.o.m.ogeneous, and the community is conservative in customs and beliefs; when immigration is extensive, and more especially when it goes on at the same time with a declining birth-rate and a considerable emigration of the native element, the population is becoming heterogeneous, and the customs and interests of the people are growing continually more divergent. The immigration of an earlier day was from one American community to another, or from northern Europe, but rural communities East and West are feeling the effects of the large foreign immigration of the last decade from southern and eastern Europe and from Asia.