MENTAL AND MORAL ASPECTS 175 



visitors from the city return summer after summer, appear to 

 indicate that this condition does encourage young people in going 

 to the city to live. 



THE MIND OF THE FARMER 1 



ERNEST R. GROVES 



THE difficulty is to find the typical farmer's mind that in the 

 South, in the East, and in the West will be accepted as standard. 

 In our science there is perhaps at present no place where general- 

 ization needs to move with greater caution than in the statement 

 of the farmer's psychic characteristics. It is human to crave 

 simplicity, and we are never free from the danger of forcing con- 

 crete facts into general statements that do violence to the op- 

 posing obstacles. 



The mind of the farmer is as varied as the members of the 

 agricultural class are significantly different. And how great 

 are these differences! The wheat farmer of Washington State 

 who receives for his year's crop $106,000 has little understanding 

 of the life outlook of the New Englander who cultivates his 

 small, rocky hillside farm. The difference is not that one does 

 on a small scale what the other does in an immense way. He who 

 knows both men will hardly question that the difference in 

 quantity leads also to differences in quality, and in no respect 

 are the two men more certainly distinguishable than in their 

 mental characteristics. 



It appears useless, therefore, to attempt to procure for dis- 

 section a typical rural mind. In this country at present there is 

 no mind that can be fairly said to represent a group so lacking in 

 substantial unity as the farming class, and any attempt to con- 

 struct such a mind is bound to fail. This is less true when the 

 class is separated into sections, for the differences between 

 farmers is in no small measure geographical. Indeed, is it not 

 a happy fact that the American farmer is not merely a farmer? 

 Although it complicates a rural problem such as ours, it is 

 fortunate that the individual farmer shares the larger social mind 



i Adapted from Publications of the American Sociological Society, Vol. 

 XI, 47-53. 



