352 PRINCIPLES OF RURAL ECONOMICS 



to future profit, nor that spirit of mutual helpfulness, all of which 

 are essential to any effective rural work. Again, a nation can- 

 not easily borrow a sane and sober reason, a willingness to trust 

 to its own care in preparing the soil rather than to the blessing 

 of the priest upon the fields ; nor can it borrow a general spirit 

 of enterprise which ventures out upon plans and projects which 

 approve themselves to the reason. And, finally, it cannot borrow 

 that love for the soil, and the great outdoors, and the growing 

 crops, and the domestic animals, which marks every successful 

 rural people. These things have to be developed on the soil, 

 to be bred into the bone and fiber of the people, and they are 

 the first requisites for good farming. After them comes scien- 

 tific knowledge. In the development of such moral qualities as 

 these the church has been, and may become again, the most 

 effective agency. 



Because of such moral qualities as these, the Puritans were 

 able to subdue the New England forest and to build up a great 

 rural civilization on the basis of a sterile soil and an inhospitable 

 climate, and without any great amount of scientific knowledge, 

 though as compared with other communities their knowledge 

 of agriculture was not inferior. They took their work seriously, 

 as befitted those who had such a task before them as the build- 

 ing of a wilderness empire. Their unbending sense of duty and 

 their thrift and foresight have become proverbial, as have their 

 keenness, their alertness, and their humor. But their mutual 

 helpfulness, though less proverbial, is attested by their logroll- 

 ings, their house raisings, their husking bees, and the like, 

 making even their pleasures bring them useful results, both 

 material and social, material in the sense of having some- 

 thing more substantial than headaches to show for their festiv- 

 ities, social in the sense of having the strongest of all bonds of 

 social sympathy, namely cooperative labor, as the basis of their 

 social enjoyment. 



