HUMAN EFFORT AS A FACTOR IN PRODUCTION 219 



other hand, in communities where people of a single nationality and 

 tongue are compactly settled, especially in the newer parts of the 

 state, families of 8 to 10 children are still common. These facts sug- 

 gest that the decrease of the birth-rate is due in the main to the spread 

 of education and a higher standard of living, which everywhere tend 

 to check child-bearing. Moreover, before the days of farm machinery 

 children were more useful and could begin to pay their way at an 

 earlier age. This is true on the whole in spite of an occasional task 

 which a child can perform with machinery. It follows that just as 

 laws raising the age of employment have been followed by a decline 

 of the birth-rate among factory populations, so the introduction of 

 machinery has tended to discourage large families on the farm, by 

 postponing the period when the children could become economically 

 useful. 



61. THE RURAL EXODUS 1 

 BY ROY HINMAN HOLMES 



The farmer class, which we have grown accustomed to consider 

 the permanent foundation of our society, is showing decided signs of 

 impermanence. The farmer is moving to town. It is not simply a 

 farmer here and a farmer there, each because of reasons of his own 

 who are leaving the land and entering other occupations. The move- 

 ment, instead, is general in extent. In a comparatively short time the 

 / typical farmer of today, who tills the land that he owns, with the help 

 ^ of his growing sons, will be but a national memory. 



Often it is charged that the rural schools of today are " educating 

 away from the farm," and it is urged that their influence should be 

 thrown against the cityward drift of the young. But a thought will 

 convince anyone that the schools are no more influential in causing 

 the sons of the farmer to leave the farm than they are in drawing 

 the sons of the merchant away from the store, or in determining 

 the lawyer's sons to turn from the occupation of their father. It 

 is, perhaps, one of the chief functions of the school to broaden 

 \/the vision of the student to give him a world-view. The young 

 man should be made to feel that the path his father chose, or was 

 forced into by circumstances, is but one of many, and the school 

 should aid the youth to determine what path he, individually, is best 

 fitted to follow. It should no more be taken for granted that the son 

 of the farmer should be a farmer than that the son of the physician 



1 Adapted from "The Passing of the Farmer," Atlantic Monthly, CX, 517-23. 



