EDITOHIAL 
THE TRADITION Ob I HE FARM It is to be regretted 
that so many of the 
men who go back to the land to become farmers are looked upon 
by city dwellers as either physical wrecks or financial failures. 
The fault lies, possibly, with the back-to-the-lander. Take up 
the average experience story of the man who flees the madding 
throng to stake out a claim in an abandoned Vermont orchard 
or a stone-ribbed Connecticut valley, or a limitless Western plain, 
and in nine cases out of ten he prefaces the narrative with either 
an excuse of ill health or a diatribe against the unlivableness of 
the flat and the soul-blighting materialism of the city that threat¬ 
ened his peace of mind and pilfered his purse. In short, he 
apologizes for becoming a farmer. 
True, there is in the touch of the soil a tonic more potent than 
ever comes out of bottles, and many who retire to the farm know 
the reviving iron that only there can enter into their souls. But 
why in the name of sanity should the farm be considered a harbor 
for physical and financial down-and-outs? 
Living in the country is due to a state of mind inbred in a man, 
just as is living in a city. It is no more logical to say that country 
living is the natural state for all men than to say that matrimony 
is the natural state for all men. 
I here is a tradition of the city and a tradition of the country. 
Men are by nature gregarious, else there could be no political 
parties oi fashions of living and clothes. Wfi follow the leader — 
but we follow according to the tradition that has been born and 
bred in us. 
The tradition of the city is the crowd — the crowd buildings, the 
crowd streets, the crowd life, swayed by leaders, herded by police¬ 
men and penned in by walls and near horizons. 
The tradition of the country is the individual—the individual 
house, the individual life, made so by environment. Its tradition 
is the tradition of the farm. 
The farm has always represented' an independent unit. It was 
sufficient unto itself. I he timber and boards that framed and 
sheathed its house came from the woods nearby. Food was 
from the land thereabout. Water was drawn from a well in the 
dooryard. The farmer went to original sources; he had no deal- 
ings with the middleman, upon whom his urban brother must 
depend. 
The man who goes back to the land, the man who buys into 
bondage a ramshackle old farmhouse and restores it to a state 
of livableriess and revives the fallow fields is simply retiring 
from the crowd, where all things are clone for him, to the place 
where he must do for himself, where he is to be a separate unit, 
a pronounced individual. 
The crowd is not the sum of its parts. Its strength and in¬ 
spiration and patience are the strength and inspiration and patience 
a leader can instill into it. What the farmer is on his twenty 
acres, the leader is in his twenty thousand followers. Both are 
pronounced individuals. Nor can either be said to have chosen 
the easier part, for, whereas the farmer in his solitariness must 
reckon with the vagaries of a Nature at once benign and male¬ 
volent, the leader must reckon with the sudden and unaccountable 
vagaries of the mob. 
He who is born with the tradition of the crowd in his veins 
may as well stay with the'crowd, if he values his peace of mind; 
and in like manner should the man of the farm tradition return 
to the farm if he would know happiness. Questions of ill health 
or bad financial management do not enter into the matter. It is 
a problem of temperament. Some of us are born sons of Antaeus, 
and so long as we can touch Mother Earth we are invincible. 
Between the man who goes back to the farm merely to till its 
fields and he who goes back to restore its house to an olden 
seemliness lies a mighty distinction. The one is a workman, a 
holder of the plow handles from which he dare not look back; 
the other an artist, drawing on both past and present that he 
may consummate in his work the semblance of an ideal. And 
restoring a farmhouse is an ideal work. It brings into an old 
place a new order, it repeoples deserted rooms, sets the echoes 
of human voices ringing down drear halls, swarms time-chilled 
hearths, and gently imprisons in the staunch fabric of beams and 
boards the elusive spirit of the great out-of-doors. 
Now the great out-of-doors knows naught of fashion or con¬ 
venience ; it knows only certain fixed laws being relentlessly 
carried on to realization. Nature is inexorable, binding, in her 
arbitrariness. The wind bloweth where it listeth. In the country 
man is subject unto that tradition; in the city, quite the opposite. 
The city house keeps the mob out, its life changes with the 
whim of fashion. The chairs we love to-day our children will 
consider bad taste to-morrow. The spirit of the changing, shift¬ 
ing mob is the spirit of the cosmopolite. But he who lives in the 
country strives to maintain that which a previous generation 
found good. He follows the fixed law of the out-of-doors. If 
he chooses any other course, his house will look nothing more 
than an anomaly grafted onto an anachronism. He must, perforce, 
restore. 
It is perhaps because there is ultimate rest and satisfaction in 
the return to old ways and old laws that men find the country 
restorative to health and spirit. There is the sameness, the 
dependability, the regularity of crop growth and harvest. There 
is something rock-bottom about it all. Whereas even the most 
hardened man of the city streets recognizes the ephemerality of 
the life, the flow and flux that finds him here to-day and there 
to-morrow — one of a crowd. 
For the countryman there is, moreover, the openness, the big¬ 
ness, the space for him to roam about; horizons are far. The 
policeless roads carry his care-free feet whither they will and 
his mind roves luxuriantly through the kingdoms of the world. 
He becomes friend to the picaresque elements of Nature: comrade 
to the wastrel birds and all the untamed things that creep and 
run and fly. He is brother, as Mr. Petulengro of Lavengro would 
have it, to the day and night — both sweet things; to the sun, 
moon and stars—all sweet things; likewise, to the wind on the 
heath. 
44 
