PROBLEMS OF RURAL SOCIAL LIFE 



377 



our esteem for the farmer ceases to be merely an approval 

 of farming in the abstract, and begins to show itself in the 

 form of an appreciation of the individual farmer and his par- 

 ticular achievement, we shall not accomplish very much in the 

 way of checking the movement of the more ambitious youths 

 toward the city. 



Absentee landlordism. Next to war, pestilence, and famine, 

 the worst thing that can happen to a rural community is absentee 

 landlordism. In the first place, the rent is all collected and sent 

 out of the neighborhood to be spent somewhere else ; but that 

 is the least of the evils. In the second place, there is no one in 

 the neighborhood who has any permanent interest in it except 

 as a source of income. The tenants do not feel like spending 

 any time or money in beautification, or in improving the moral 

 or social surroundings. Their one interest is to get as large an 

 income from the land as they can in the immediate present. 

 Because they do not live there, the landlords care nothing for 

 the community, except as a source of rent, and they will not 

 spend anything in local improvements unless they see that it 

 will increase rent. Therefore such a community looks bad, and 

 possesses the legal minimum in the way of schools, churches, 

 and other agencies for social improvement. In the third place, 

 and worst of all, the landlords and tenants live so far apart and 

 see one another so infrequently as to furnish very little oppor- 

 tunity for mutual acquaintance and understanding. Therefore 

 class antagonism arises, and bitterness of feeling shows itself in 

 a variety of ways. Where the whole neighborhood is made up 

 of a tenant class which feels hostile toward the absent-landlord 

 class, evasions of all kinds are resorted to in order to beat the 

 haU'd landlords. On the other hand, the landlords are goaded 

 to retaliation, and the rack-rent system prevails. Sometimes the 

 community feeling among tenants becomes so strong as to de- 

 velop a kind of artificial "tenant right," which is in opposition 



