284 HOW TO LIVE IN THE COUNTRY 



The commission reported, and the report should 

 be studied in our common schools and read in all 

 our families, that the improvement of farm life 

 should be pressed forward from both the sanitary 

 side and the esthetic side, making farm homes at- 

 tractive as well as economical. They would have 

 the telephone in every house, binding together the 

 community, without depending upon occasional trips 

 to the tavern, while rural free mail delivery gave a 

 daily zest to the isolated home. The commission 

 held that the city had had its full share of attention, 

 and that now the country fairly requires the interest 

 of government. The concentering social forces 

 should become distributive. The appointment of 

 this commission, which seemed to the independent 

 farmer impertinent, was welcomed finally as giving 

 strong propulsion to a new suburbanism and a 

 broader country life. 



Almost immediately a new phase and a most im- 

 portant one for country life came about in an alliance 

 of trade and transit with the farmer. J. J. Hill, 

 the genius of industrialism, president of the Great 

 Northern, first announced the doctrine that railroads 

 and farms were not in opposition, but the closest al- 

 lies. President Brown of the New York Central 

 suggested a syndicate, with sufficient capital to buy up 

 the sixteen thousand square miles of deserted farms 

 in New York and New England, put it in shape for 

 use, and then resell at cost. He would provide, he 

 said, capital for the purchasers until their first crops 



