The Future of Rural New England (1897)
There are many wonderful passages, such as:<p>&quot; The same influences that caused the depletion and the decay of Dickerman — the rush to the gold-fields, the civil war, the emigration to the prairies, the large cities, and the manufacturing towns, and the feeling of isolation and lack of opportunity resulting from this emigration — have been operative throughout all rural New England with more or less disastrous results.<p>Another influence, just as generally operative, has been an exaggerated notion of the luxury and gentility of city life. To hail from Boston or from New York is to be both wealthy and aristocratic, according to the typical rural mind, which groups city people together in a single social stratum, without question as to where they live or how they live, and assigns farmers, whatever their individual qualities, to a social stratum lower by many degrees.<p>This absurd notion has not only driven country people away from the country, but has also demoralized those whom it has not driven away. Hence has come the pathetic desire of such as find themselves doomed to live elsewhere than in cities to imitate, as nearly as their imperfect knowledge permits, the manner of life of city folk. They endeavor to dress as city people dress, to furnish their rooms as city people do, even to readjust their houses to the city mode. They remodel a fine, sensible old homestead into something that is neither a farmhouse nor a town-house, but an ugly nondescript, with the disadvantages of both and the advantages of neither; or they demolish a house honestly built to stand for generations to make way for a gingerbread sham of a villa, as much out of place in the midst of farm surroundings as bric-àbrac would be in a stable. They discard their heirlooms — handsome, heavy, antique furniture, and rare china—for upto-date gewgaws, with neither durability, usefulness, nor beauty to recommend them.<p>The women waste no end of time and money, and fret and fuss their lives out into the bargain, in a vain and ludicrous attempt to keep pace, from season to season, with the changing fashions in dresses and hats. Furthermore, this grotesque exaltation of city conduct has bred a contempt not only for the healthy outdoor work that women formerly did, but also for menial labor of every sort even within doors.&quot;<p>And<p>&quot;
It is a trite saying, and only partially true, but true enough to bear repeating, that if the average farmer did his work with the same intelligence that the average business man uses, he would succeed as well as the latter. The farmer, instead of studying markets systematically, makes wild hits at them. Because peas brought a good price a previous season, owing to their scarcity, he plants ten times as many peas as usual; forgetting that everybody else has planted peas for the same reason. If he lives near enough to a city to make dairying and market-gardening profitable, he is likely to become possessed with the desire to raise only one or two vegetables ; or he ignores the proper rotation of crops; or he is constantly sacrificing permanent profit for ready cash, taking everything out of the land, and putting nothing into it. After leaving his wagons, tools, and machines exposed to all the elements, he is amazed and angry that he so often has to buy new ones, curses them for being poorly made, and inveighs boisterously against the dishonesty of the time.<p>Such a farmer seems never to learn that clubs and families in cities are willing to pay a high price for thoroughly honest products ; for when he finds persons who might easily be made permanent buyers from him, he estranges them by inflicting upon them dishonest things. Doing little to make his produce attractive, he nevertheless devotes a great deal of ingenunity to arranging it dishonestly, — “ deaconing it,” to use the significant country phrase. He &quot; deacons ” his fruit, his vegetables, everything in fact, even his eggs, — selling as fresh eggs that have been packed all winter, and taking it as a sort of personal affront that the men who stamp and guarantee their eggs can command a fancy price all the year. Although the farmer is perhaps not more dishonest than other men, it is probable that he suffers more from his dishonesty than most others : partly because he deals so largely with perishable materials, in which fraud is easily and quickly detected ; and partly because he is less subtle in his deceits, and less apt in defending himself against the consequences of detection. One year when the best apples were hard to dispose of, a certain district Grange offered its members a chance to send apples to Liverpool. Some took advantage of the situation to get rid of their poor fruit. The Liverpool agents very naturally felt aggrieved, and the Liverpool market was closed to the farmers of that district for the rest of the season, during which many barrels of good fruit rotted.
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