228 



The Journal of Heredity 



Prophecy of Rural Civilization 



"The next great social change, as I 

 see it, is decentralization. Electricity 

 made the big city, now it may be ex- 

 pected to unmake it. It was necessary 

 that the city come into existence first. 

 Without cities we have found it im- 

 possible heretofore to attain a high 

 degree of human culture. But all the 

 advantages of the city will soon be 

 possible for the farm, without having 

 to put up with the unendurable iniqui- 

 ties of city life. Economy, efficiency 

 and culture may soon be broadcast. 

 When they are we won't have to suffer 

 from subway jams, freight congestion, 

 high prices, impossibly high rents for 

 impossibly cramped living quarters, 

 strikes, unemployment, crime waves 

 and a hundred other plagues of modern 

 times. 



"Electricity is not only the cleanest 

 and most efficient servant that man- 

 kind ever had, but it is also the cheap- 

 est. It works for less than a coolie's 

 wage, and its wages are going down 

 every day, while its efficiency is being 

 constantly increased. In addition to 

 this it does its own traveling, at the 

 rate of 186,000 miles a second, and 

 doesn't have to be transported. Here- 

 tofore we have been compelling it to 

 take us to the city, and it has done so 

 beautifully, more quickly and com- 

 fortably than we have ever been moved 

 about before. Hereafter we shall 

 simply touch a button and have it 

 bring the city out to us. 



"We have been mining coal and 

 carrying it across the country to be 

 turned into power. Soon we will be 

 sending the power across the country. 

 If we persist in getting the power from 

 coal, we shall at least burn the coal 

 where it is mined, converting it into 

 electricity, not use up a big portion of 

 the power, as we do today, in the 

 process of transporting it. 



"But there is every indication that 

 we shall go much further than that. 

 In the country where our food grows, 



is the best of all places to eat it. Send- 

 ing it to the city costs much more than 

 getting it out of the ground, and it 

 has lost a lot of its flavor by the time 

 it has reached the ultimate consumer. 

 Also, there isn't room to live in the 

 city, especially for children. They 

 can't have real homes; they can't 

 stretch and grow, physically and spirit- 

 ually, as human children should. The 

 city has almost destroyed the home, 

 but it has provided other advantages 

 which the modern man can hardly do 

 without. If only these advantages 

 could be brought to the country village 

 and the farm — ^well, watch what elec- 

 tricity is going to do next. 



"We have learned now that the small 

 industrial unit may be as efficient as 

 the gigantic one, or more so. The next 

 big step in industry, it appears, will 

 be on the development of the small 

 electrically driven factory in the places 

 where the raw materials are found. 

 This will save the transportation of 

 coal and raw materials. It will also 

 do away largely with seasonable em- 

 ployment, for manufacturing and agri- 

 culture can arrange winter and summer 

 schedules as conditions demand. 



"Cloth will more and more be manu- 

 factured where the cotton is grown. 

 The flour mills will leave the cities 

 and go back to the farm. Everybody 

 will be using machinery and learning 

 how to use it and because the popula- 

 tion will follow the machinery the 

 country districts will become inhabited 

 again. Work can then be more equit- 

 ably divided. It won't be necessary 

 to over-work half the year and vege- 

 tate the rest. There will be work 

 enough to go round and there will be 

 hands enough to do it, for the country 

 life of the future will not be the dull, 

 forbidding, solitary thing which the 

 concentration of industry has made it 

 now." — Charles A. Coffin, The Agri- 

 cultural Review, Vol. XV, No. 6, p. 5, 

 June 1922. 



