MENTAL AND MORAL ASPECTS 165 



A roaming child brought up on a farm, learns from nature what 

 it is almost impossible to impart to a city child. In city schools 

 we have been for twenty years past laboriously trying to provide 

 substitutes for this natural training in country life. The recent 

 natural history study from specimens used indoors, the manual 

 training given in carpentry, forging, filing and turning, the 

 garden plots and roof gardens, the vacation schools, and the 

 excursions to parks and museums, are all sincere efforts to replace 

 for urban children the lost training of eye and hand which 

 country life supplied. It is impossible to exaggerate the im- 

 portance of these substitutes ; but after all, these substitutes are 

 inferior to the spontaneous, unenforced results of living in con- 

 tact with nature, and of taking part with mother and father in 

 the productive labors of a farm, a market garden, a hennery, or 

 a dairy. What children acquire in the spontaneous, intense, self- 

 directed use of their faculties is always more valuable than the 

 results of a less eager though more prolonged attention to en- 

 forced tasks. 



AN APPRECIATION OF RURAL PEOPLE * 



T. N. CARVER 



NOTHING can give us a clearer idea of the failure of urban 

 people to appreciate rural people than the names which are 

 sometimes applied to the latter. Saying nothing of such recent 

 slang as "hayseed," "rube," "clod hopper," etc., we have such 

 ancient words as heathen, pagan, boor and villain, all of which 

 meant originally the same as these modern epithets. Even the 

 modern word peasant has come to have, in the ears of the typical 

 urbanite, a somewhat opprobrious sound. The reason is not 

 difficult to find. 



One characteristic difference between rural and urban industry 

 is that in the former, men get their living out of the soil and 

 in the latter, the dominant element gets its living out of other 

 men. They who coax their living out of the soil must become 

 expert in the knowledge of the soil and the things pertaining to 



i Adapted from Rural Manhood, March, IfllO, pp. 7-10. 



