Cook: City and Country 



173 



city lives, as of country people to retire 

 to the city. Many families spend their 

 summers in the country, and maintain 

 their interest in out-door life and 

 farming. Families that break the 

 rural contacts are at a greater dis- 

 advantage in the city, and the sooner 

 obliged to choose between the suburbs 

 and the slums. The city does not fill 

 up and flow back to the country. The 

 current may slacken at times, but 

 never stops. As a net result of urban 

 striving the cities are richer but the 

 race poorer, and less able to maintain 

 the structure of civilization. It should 

 not surprise us that hygienic surveys 

 are showing larger percentages of 

 deformed or abnormal children in 

 country schools than in neighboring 

 cities. With the best blood sapped 

 away in each generation, it must be 

 expected that only a remnant of per- 

 sistently rural-minded people will be 

 found in the country, and a residue of 

 the inert, incapable or defective. After 

 the wheat is harvested, the weeds grow! 



OUR MOST FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM 



If the adverse selection of the city is 

 beginning to show definite lesions of 

 inferiority in the country, the problems 

 of urban parasitism may receive more 

 intensive study, and the ways of 

 reversing the present tendencies, so 

 that the more capable elements of each 

 generation may remain in the country 

 and raise families, instead of going to 

 the city to be eliminated. There is 

 no real competition or conflict of 

 interest, since the city also is menaced 

 if the rural population is impaired. 

 More fundamental than any other issue 

 is that of conserving superior race 



material for rural progress, instead of 

 having our best boys and girls drafted 

 into the city to be entangled and lost 

 in the "jungle" of urban exploitation, 

 industrial, commercial, and financial, 

 or even in "rescue work." Urban 

 misery cries from between the mill- 

 stones, but the grinding goes on, in 

 spite of philanthropy or revolt. Urban 

 interests have exploited each other and 

 scrambled for the fruits of agriculture 

 from the beginning of history. 



As long as we think of agriculture 

 merely as tributary to the city, neither 

 the farm problems nor the problems of 

 labor and capital are likely to be solved, 

 or even understood in their essential 

 relations. Work that is exploited is also 

 despised. Agriculture must be appre- 

 ciated and developed, not for urban 

 exploitation, but as the normal life of 

 civilized people. The first step is to 

 escape the urban prepossessions, by 

 seeing that agriculture is fundamental 

 and deserves primary consideration 

 for its own sake, because it has richer 

 rewards of satisfaction for the normal 

 human instincts, and a larger outlook 

 to the progress of civilization and the 

 welfare of the race. In the words of 

 Washington: "Agriculture is the most 

 healthful, most useful, and most noble 

 occupation of man." And this, we 

 need to see, is not an out-grown senti- 

 ment, but living wisdom, for the pre- 

 sent and the future. Leaving the land 

 for the city is turning away from life. 

 Education should teach us this, and 

 how to live in the country. Ideals 

 have first to be humanized, before the 

 problems can be studied with con- 

 structive insight. 



The Progress 



Those who sometimes feel impatient 

 at the apparent slowness of research 

 work should visit the fields and labora- 

 tories where the work itself is being 

 conducted, and they would appreciate 

 this reply which came to one of the 

 Journal's recent requests for a report 



of Research 



on a special investigation: "It is true 

 that I am collecting extensive material 



on , but I am not at this time 



ready to make even a preliminary re- 

 port on the subject. I may possibly 

 have something for you in this line 

 two or three years later." 



