BULLETIN 984, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



"/^AN country life be dug into so as to reveal important social facts 



^ and relations?" 



I asked an American sociologist this question several years ago and 

 he replied: 



"No. Country life — farm life and all that goes with it — is too thin." 



"You see," be continued presently, "it is all on the surface. Ride 

 through the country, see the farmhouses, notice the workers in the fields — 

 and you have the whole of it. There is nothing deeper to dig up." 



This view — this shallow view of country life and rural society — could 

 be brushed aside and let slip into oblivion if it were not for the fact that 

 it is a view too commonly held in high quarters. The brutal verdict, 

 "Nothing in it; nothing interesting in the life side of farming," is con- 

 vincingly reversed by the results of the following study. Facts and rela- 

 tions of a highly social character have been "dug up." These facts 

 prove not only interesting, 'but significant, not to say startling and sen- 

 sational. Farm life is discovered to lie deep, and not "all on the surface." 

 The farm community is bound up with the Nation at large. Romance 

 links the farm to American history and American social development. 

 Justifiable pride, the farmer's pride in his farm life, pride in his farm 

 community, is the outcome. 



Searching out the defects of country life has already gone far beyond 

 the point of usefulness. The mounting mass of petty frailties and pecca- 

 dillos, accumulated by shortsighted methods of country-life exploration, has 

 obscured the bbdy of excellencies native to farm populations. The 

 chronic publicity of rural shortcomings has created a psychological situa- 

 tion fostering widespread pessimism about farm life. This cloud of doubt, 

 far from remedying the defects, has tended to cast upon country life 

 itself a shadow for which no legitimate cause exists. 



The cure for this unfortunate situation is a policy of inventorying 

 the better things in country life and spreading their story far and wide. 

 These better things, like seeds, will take root and displace the worse things. 

 Hope and contentment will revive, and pride in the part which farm 

 communities play in national life will stop the unreasonable panic over 

 the status of farm life. 



C. J. Galpin. 



