March 18, 1911 



HORTICULTURE 



357 



THE OUTLOOK COUNTRYWARD. 



Professor L. H. Bailey, director of 

 the New York State College of Agri- 

 culture at Cornell University, Ithaca, 

 N. Y., was the speaker before the Mas- 

 sachusetts Horticultural Society Sat- 

 urday afternoon, March 11. 



Professor Bailey's subject was "The 

 Outlook Countryward," and he said in 

 part: 



"Two important movements are now 

 before the country — the country-lite 

 movement and the back-to-the-land 

 movement. The country-life movement 

 is the expression of the desire to make 

 the farming i-egions as satisfying and 

 effective socially and economically as 

 are the towns and the cities. The 

 movement is not only sound but is 

 fundamental, for the reason that an 

 effort to effectualize any necessary ex- 

 isting society is part of the progress 

 of civilization. 



"The present back-to-the-land agi- 

 tation is largely a city effort, express- 

 ing many motives and ideas. It is in 

 part an effort of the city to relieve its 

 congestion, in part a desire to find la- 

 bor for the unemployed, in part the re-- 

 suit of the doubtiul propoganda to de- 

 crease the cost of living by sending 

 more persons to the land, in part the 

 desire of certain persons to escape the 

 city, and in part the effort of real es- 

 tate dealers to sell land. There can be 

 no objection to properly qualified city 

 persons moving out to the open coun- 

 try, and many of them make good 

 farmers; but for the most part the 

 back-to-the-land movement is .socially 

 and economically unsound. 



"Something can be done, perhaps, to 

 relieve city congestion by finding op- 

 portunities for urban citizens in the 

 country, but the extent of relief that 

 really can be secured in this way is 

 very small and it does not reach the 

 core of the question; for the core of the 

 question is that the city must learn 

 to take care of its own and to solve its 

 inherent problems, and that the whole 

 interrelation of city and country must 

 be solved by fundamental processes. 

 Part of the congestion of cities is the 

 increase due to immigration. Undoubt- 

 edly much can be done properly to dis- 

 perse our aliens and to place them 

 where they will be of service to them- 

 selves and to employers without consti- 

 tuting a problem of congestion. This, 

 however, is a question of plain distri- 

 bution rather than of land settlement. 

 The real country-life movement itself 

 will do something directly to relieve 

 city congestion, because it will tend to 

 keep country people in the country; 

 and yet we must recognize the fact 

 that many country people are better 

 fitted by temperament for city life than 

 for agricultural life. 



"There seems to be much needless 

 alarm over the decline of rural popula- 

 tions. We must remember that we 

 have passed through the rural or agri- 

 cultural phase of our evolution. In 

 1790, about nine-tenths of all our peo- 

 ple were on the farms: a hundred 

 years later about one-third fcounting 

 men, women and children) were on the 

 land or very closely connected with it. 

 I expect that the present census will 

 show a smaller proportion, and possi- 



bly the census of 192U will show a 

 still smaller ratio, although the ratio 

 has already undoubtedly sunk too low 

 in some localities or regions. We shall 

 never again be a rural people. The 

 best society is neither exclusively rural 

 nor exclusively urban. What propor- 

 tion the rural population must hold to 

 the whole population, no one now 

 knows. The decline in rural popula- 

 tion is only one expression of the sort- 

 ing of our people into their groups; 

 and we have not yet struck bottom in 

 this process. 



"The powers of a single farmer are 

 being much augmented by the applica- 

 tion of knowledge, the development of 

 business management, the use of ma- 

 chinery, and by cooperative enter- 

 prises. Of course, the actual number 

 of farmers will immensely increase, 

 but the ratio cannot be expected to in- 

 crease. There will be a great increase 

 in demand for products of the farm as 

 civilization progresses and as tastes 

 become more complex, but the ex- 

 panding powers of individual lands- 

 men will be able to supplj^ these en- 

 larging demands. What will be the ra- 



Dr. Liberty H. Bailey 



tio of increase in demand for agricul- 

 tural products, no one yet can say. It 

 is true that the progress of civilization 

 does not greatly enlarge a man's eating 

 capacity, but it greatly increases the 

 variety of his food and improves its 

 quality, and this of itself, wholly aside 

 from the quantity of the demand, will 

 call for much greater activity and skill 

 on the part of the farmer. But- human 

 food crops are probably not one-half 

 the agricultural produce, and these 

 other products increase in intimate ra- 

 tio with the progress of civilization. 

 These other supplies are cotton, wool, 

 hemp and other fibres, timber and all 

 timber products, all paper materials, 

 the output of floriculture and other 

 special industries, leather, and practi- 

 call.y all other produce of the earth 

 with the exception of metals and min- 

 erals and coal. Very much is going to 

 be demanded of the farmer to supply 

 all this wealth and variety of material. 

 "There is probably sufficient ratio of 

 persons now living on the land, to 

 supply all this increasing demand for 

 the raw materials, if only these persons 

 were properly effective. To displace 



them or to augment them by city peo- 

 ple may provide a corrective here and 

 there, but it can be only an incidental 

 factor. The great question is how to 

 reach the people who live on the land, 

 how to sort out those who ought not to 

 live on the land, and how to direct our 

 economic and social growth so as to 

 make it profitable and attractive and 

 in every way worth while for a man to 

 live on the land throughout his life. 



"I do not think that the mere lessen- 

 ing of the numbers of rural people has 

 any very close relation to the cost-of- 

 living question. The great problem in 

 this regard is to improve our means of 

 distribution, so that the materials may 

 be taken from the producer to the con- 

 sumer with the least delay, the least 

 cost and the least waste. It is a shame- 

 ful commentary on our economic and 

 social system that in these days of 

 great production of agricultural pro- 

 duce in the fertile land of North 

 America, people still suffer for food 

 in the great cities. We need to give 

 much more attention to the distribu- 

 tion of our products than merely to 

 placing more persons on the land. 

 Persons will be satisfied to live on the 

 land just as rapidly and as far as it is 

 economically profitable and socially 

 pleasant for them to live there. 



"Our civilization is a system of eco- 

 nomic loss. Society is built on the 

 process of waste. The city drains the 

 goods from the open country, extracts 

 the kernel, and throws the husks into 

 the rivers and the sea. The cities are 

 half-way stations between the potash, 

 phosphoric acid and nitrogen of the 

 farms and the bottom of the ocean. 

 The city tends always to destroy its 

 province. It sits like a parasite, run- 

 ning its roots into all the surrounding 

 country and draining it of its life- 

 blood. Many a rural community is 

 already sucked dry. Our business or 

 commercial structure is responsible for 

 the wastes of distribution. That it 

 should require sixty-five cents out of 

 every hundred to remove a good part 

 of nur produce from the land to the 

 dinner table, is an indication that we 

 are living in a very imperfect and un- 

 developed economic era. 



"The organization of society does 

 not seem to have within itself the 

 means of its own correction or salva- 

 tion. We are obliged to apply correc- 

 tives by extraneous legislative and le- 

 gal processes in order to conti-ol the 

 streams of waste. Until we evolve a 

 structure in which economic waste is 

 inherently reduced to the minimum, 

 we cannot expect to make great prog- 

 ress toward a self-sustaining civiliza- 

 tion. We have yet no large permanent 

 agriculture; and this means that we 

 have yet no permanent civilization. 



"To find some real economic rela- 

 tionship between city and country 

 whereby the city will give back some- 

 thing to the country rather than to 

 take everything from it. and whereby 

 it will be as much interested in main- 

 taining the producing-power of land as 

 in developing art and literature and 

 municipal systems, is the fundamental 

 problem of civilization. City and coun- 

 try are coming together sympathetical- 

 ly, but this is largely a matter of ac- 

 quaintanceship. There is no real ade- 

 quate coordination between the two. 

 If the city is ever really to aid the 

 country, it must be mostly by the de- 

 velopment of this mutual coordination 

 and not by the city going into farming. 

 Farming is a business for farmers. 



