MORALS IN THE RURAL COMMUNITY
Social Disease and Its Causes.—Rural morals are a phase of the public health of the community. Immorality is a kind of social disease, for which the community needs to find a remedy. The amount of moral ill varies widely, but it can be increased by neglect or lessened by effort, as surely as can the amount of physical disease. Moral ill is due to the individual and to the community. The judgment of the individual may be warped, his moral consciousness defective, or his will weak. He may have low standards and ill-adjusted relationships. Selfishness may have blunted his sympathy. All these conditions contribute to the common vices of community life. But the individual is sometimes less to blame than the community. Much moral ill is a consequence of the imperfect functioning of the community. A man steals because he is hungry or cold, and the motive to escape pain is stronger than the motive to deal lawfully with his neighbor; but if the community saw to it that adequate provision was made for all economic need, and if moral instruction was not lacking, it would be unlikely to happen. Similar reasons may be found for other evils. It is as much the business of the community to keep the social atmosphere wholesome as it is to keep the air and water of its farms pure. It should provide moral training and moral exercise.
How Morals Develop.—Without attempting a thoroughly scientific definition of morals, we may call good morals those habitual acts which are in harmony with the best individual and social interests of the people of the community, and bad morals the absence of such habits. Of course the acts are the consequence of motives, and in the last analysis the question of morals is rooted in the field of psychology or religion; but the inner motive is revealed in the outward act, and it is customary to speak of the act as moral or immoral. Moral standards are not unvarying. One race differs from another and one period of history differs from another. Primitive custom was the first standard, and was determined by what was good for the group, and the individual conformed to it from force of circumstances. If he was to remain a member of the group and enjoy its benefits he must be willing to sacrifice his selfish desires. His consciousness of the solidarity of the group deepens with experience, and his feelings of sympathy grow stronger, until impulsive altruism becomes a habit and eventually a fixed and purposeful patriotism. By and by religion throws about conduct its sanctions and interprets the meaning of morality. However imperfect may be the relations between good morals and pagan religions, Judaism and Christianity have combined religion with high moral ideals. The Hebrew prophets declared that God demanded justice, kindness, and mercy in human relations rather than acts of ceremony and sacrifice to himself, and Jesus made love to neighbor as fundamental to holiness as love to God. Such a religion becomes dynamic in producing moral deeds.
The Social Stimulus to Morality.—It is customary to think of the homely virtues of truthfulness, sobriety, thrift, and kindliness as individual obligations, but they are not wrought out in isolation. Isolation is never complete, and virtue is a social product. The farmer makes occasional visits to the country store, where he experiences social contacts; there is habitual association with individual workers on the farm or traders with whom the farmer carries on a business transaction. His personal contacts may not be helpful, and his wife may lack them almost altogether outside of the home; the result is often a tendency toward vice or degeneration, sometimes to insanity or suicide, but it is seldom that there are not helpful influences and relations available if the individual will put himself in the way of enjoying them. Good morals are dependent on right associations. Human beings need the stimulus of good society, otherwise the mind vegetates or broods upon real or fancied wrongs until the moral nature is in danger of atrophy or warping. Family feuds develop, as among the Scotch highlanders or the mountain people in certain parts of the South. Lack of social sympathy increases as the interests become self-centred; out of this characteristic grow directly such evils as petty lawlessness, rowdyism, and crime. The country districts need the help of high-grade schools and proper places of recreation, of the Young Men's Christian Association or an association of like principles, and most of all of a virile church that will interpret moral obligation and furnish the power that is needed to move the will to right action.
Rural Vices.—The moral problems of the rural community do not differ greatly from those of the town. The most common rural vices are profanity, drunkenness, and sexual immorality. Profanity is often a habit rather than a defect in moral character, and is due sometimes to a narrow vocabulary. It is a mark of ignorance and boorishness. In many localities it is less common than it used to be. The average community life is wholesome. Not more than twenty per cent of American rural communities have really bad conditions in any way, according to the investigations made by the United States Rural Life Commission in 1908. Considering the monotony and hardships of rural life, it is much to the credit of the people that most communities are temperate and law-abiding. Intemperance is one of the most common evils; there is a longing for the stimulant of liquor, which appears in some cases in moderate drinking and in other cases in the habit of an occasional spree in a near-by town, when reason abdicates to appetite. Lumbermen and miners, whose work is especially hard and isolation from good society complete, have been notorious for their lapses into intemperance, but it is not a serious problem in three out of four communities the country over, and a wave of temperance sentiment has swept strongly over rural districts. Gambling is a diversion that appeals to those who have few mental and pecuniary resources as an offset to the daily monotony, but this habit is not typical of rural communities.
Investigations of the Rural Life Commission showed that sexual immorality prevails in ten to fifteen per cent of the rural communities, and they trace much of it to late evening drives and dances and unchaperoned calls, but on the whole the perversion of the sex instinct is less common than in the cities. The young are generally trained in moral principles, the religious sanctions are more strongly operative, and the conduct and character of every individual is constantly under the public eye. Young people in the country marry at an earlier age than in the city, and husband and wife are normally faithful. Crime in the country is peculiar to degenerate communities, elsewhere it is rare. Juvenile delinquency occurs, and there are not such helpful influences as the juvenile court of the city; on the other hand, most boys are in touch with home influences, feel the restraint of a law-abiding community, and know that lawbreaking is almost certain to be found out and punished.
Community Obligation.—Moral delinquency in the rural community lies in the failure to provide social stimulus to individual members. The farmer has as good reason to be ambitious for success and to feel pride in it as has the city merchant, but he has small local encouragement to develop better agriculture on his own farm. He has as much right to the benefits of association in toil and co-operation in effecting economies and disposing of his products as the employer or working man in town. He is equally entitled to good government, to wholesome recreation, to a suitable and efficient education, and to the spiritual leadership of a progressive church. Without the spur of community fellowship his life narrows and his abilities are not developed. With the help of community stimulus the individual may develop capacity for individual achievement and social leadership of as fine a quality as any urban centre can supply. It is well known that the strong men of the cities in business and the professions have come in large proportion from the country. If such qualities developed in the comparative isolation and discomfort of the past, it is a moral obligation of rural communities of the future to do even more to produce the brawn and brain of city leaders in days to come.
READING REFERENCES
Wilson: The Evolution of the Country Community, pages 171-188.
Anderson: The Country Town, pages 95-106.
Dealey: Sociology, pages 146-165.
Hart: Educational Resources of Village and Rural Communities, pages 166-175.
Hobhouse: Morals in Evolution, I, pages 364-375.
Spencer: Data of Ethics, chapter 8.
Report of Committee on Morals and Rural Conditions of the General Association of Congregational Churches of Massachusetts, 1908.