Part 12

Equally notable successes have been attained by the Hood River apple growers and the citrus fruit growers of California. The organization of these growers has not only resulted in better prices to the growers, but in a standard quality of goods and less fluctuation of prices in the retail markets. Since California growers learned to market their oranges and lemons through organization, there has been brought about a uniformity of distribution which “has resulted in a lower retail price to the consumer and gives a larger proportion of the retail price to the producer.” These very successful organizations have one definite purpose—to sell the fruit their members grow. They are organized on strictly business principles. Each member’s crop virtually belongs to the association, and is picked, graded, packed, and sold as the association directs. Details of cultivation and spraying which may affect the quality of the fruit are also looked after by the association, and the grower has no right to sell his fruit except through the association. In the case of the California Fruit Growers’ Exchange this right to the privilege of handling the crop is claimed in the first place by the Local Exchange against the grower, next by the District Exchange against the Local Exchange, and finally by the General Exchange against the District Exchange. It is an up-to-date business organization these men have; the grower belongs to a Local Exchange, the Locals form District Exchanges, and these, in turn, the General Exchange. Each is independent in matters that concern it only, but all must submit to the general voice in matters which may be of concern to all.

Fruit and truck crops seem to be especially adapted to coöperative marketing; or possibly the uncertainty of profit in their production and the big share of the final price absorbed by the middlemen have forced fruit and truck growers to coöperate to a greater extent than farmers in most other lines. At any rate there are quite a few successful coöperative associations among these growers. In Texas such an association does a business of $1,500,000 annually. The Grand Junction Fruit Growers’ Association, of Colorado, is another notable success. California nut growers market their product through a coöperative organization. Florida citrus growers claim to have raised the net price received by growers for oranges from $1.15 in 1909-10 to $1.96 for the season 1912-13. Western North Carolina fruit growers have organized, as have Georgia peach growers, and fruit raisers in many other sections. In an Alabama town a truckers’ association with 190 members has standardized its products until it obtains prices considerably above those secured by individuals, and from a small beginning has grown to be the most important business concern of its town.

These stories might be duplicated many times; and it is not too much to say that the fruit growers and truckers are rapidly coming to realize the benefits of coöperative organization. I do not believe it any wild prophecy to say that within a dozen years the trucker seeking a location will inquire into the marketing organization conducted by his fellow truckers just as he now inquires into the locality’s shipping facilities. And some time all the local coöperative organizations marketing perishable truck and fruit will unite to conduct a great central marketing exchange. Then the present-day scarcities of certain fruits and vegetables at one town, while in another these same products are decaying and going to waste, will be avoided.

Coming back from the things that may be to the things that are, it is worth while to note that in 1911 2,120 out of a total of 6,284 creameries in the United States were conducted on coöperative lines, and that of 3,846 cheese factories, 349 were coöperative. In Minnesota 608 out of 838 creameries were coöperative. In Wisconsin 347 creameries out of 1,000 and 244 cheese factories out of 1,784.

In these as in other lines of business coöperative associations are largely localized. A successful coöperative creamery in a locality helps to organize other creameries near it on a coöperative basis, and so on. Similarly, the successful coöperative rural stores of the country are largely grouped in Minnesota and Wisconsin, having spread from one or two unusually successful ventures in small towns. The coöperative grain elevators of the country are mostly located in Iowa, the Dakotas, Minnesota and Illinois, although Nebraska and Kansas have over a hundred each. Where one farmers’ telephone line is organized another is likely to follow, and whole counties have been covered in this way.

In short, the coöperative spirit is like the little leaven which spreads and spreads until it leavens the whole lump.

It is not only that a successful coöperative enterprise leads to the establishment of similar enterprises in nearby communities. More notable and striking still is the fact that a successful coöperative enterprise in a rural community seems often to put new life into the whole community and to give the farmers entirely new conceptions of their own capacities and the possibilities of their vocation.

Take, for example, the story of Svea, Minnesota, as told by a recent visitor to that town—a visitor, by the way, who went to Svea simply to see how the farmers there were working together and what profits they had from so doing. I quote:

“In Svea they have established and operated thus far without one single failure, a coöperative creamery, a coöperative telephone company, a coöperative grain elevator, a coöperative stock-shipping association, a coöperative store, a coöperative insurance company, a coöperative bank (now forming). Moreover, they also have as a result of what we may term coöperative effort, a thoroughly equipped high school with agricultural and domestic science teaching, a consolidated church with a resident pastor, a school library and a State teaching library, neighborhood social meetings three times a month under church influences. They have made their neighborhood a reading neighborhood. Almost every farmer takes two to four farm papers and other reading matter in proportion.

“In other words, the Svea farmers have become ‘business men’ as surely as commercial men in the towns, and are doubling their profits as a result, while they are at the same time developing a high degree of culture and that satisfying social life, without which mere money is valueless, while also maintaining moral and spiritual influences which town life tends to destroy.”

The first enterprise was the creamery which was started in 1896. It paid so well that the coöperative telephone line came four years later; and, having once learned how much it helped them to work together, they have continued all along to find out new ways in which they could coöperate for the upbuilding of the community. The coöperative store, strictly on the Rochdale plan, was started in 1909, and to show how coöperation pays, the experience of the town pastor may be cited. He took $100 stock in the store, giving his note in payment. He then went on for a year buying goods from the store at the usual retail prices. When settlement was made, ten months later, it was found that the dividends due him—the rebate on his purchases—amounted to $150.60. He had, without spending a cent or paying any extra prices for merchandise, cancelled his note and the interest on it and acquired a balance of $44.60. In other words, if he had bought his goods from a regular merchant, he would have paid that merchant $150.60 in net profits, whereas by coöperating with his neighbors and trading with himself so to speak, he was enabled to return the whole sum to his own pocket. With such examples of the benefits of coöperation before their eyes, it seems but natural that the farmers of Svea should be the prosperous, progressive, broad-minded, hopeful folks they are said to be—the sort of folks who are able and willing to vote upon themselves a tax of $1.70 on the hundred dollars of property to build and equip the kind of high school they want.

Take, as another example of how the coöperative leaven works, Catawba County, North Carolina. The farmers and other business men of this county decided some five years ago that they needed a county fair. They got together and had it—a fair with liberal prizes but without entrance or admission fees. Everything was free to all who came, and the authorities saw to it that there was nothing to injure or deceive anyone who came. The fakers and cheap side shows which are the big end of some fairs were not allowed to stop in Hickory where the fair was held. The fair was a success, and has been a success since. Last year the townspeople did not feel inclined to contribute to it, but the farmers had learned how to work with each other in the meanwhile and they went ahead and had a fair just the same, out in an oak grove surrounding a rural high school. Fifty horses and mules on exhibition, 50 pure-bred cattle and other exhibits to match. Those who have attended Southern fairs will know at once from the livestock entries that this was truly a good county fair. I doubt if these farmers could have held this fair, however, if it had not been for the coöperative creamery. This institution, established in 1910, when the farmers found themselves developing a dairy industry without a convenient market, has been the coöperative leaven in Catawba County. It was started with a capital of $1,500, the money being borrowed and the machinery purchased from a creamery “promoted” somewhere in Georgia by the agent of a creamery-selling concern which persuaded the farmers that if they got a creamery outfit the cows would somehow come to it. The creamery was a success from the start; soon it began a new work of service by handling the farmers’ eggs on a coöperative basis, teaching them how to produce and market eggs of quality while securing more than the regular market price for these eggs. The lesson was quickly learned: it paid farmers to work together. Now they have a farmers’ building and loan association, a “Sweet Potato Growers’ Association,” rural school improvement associations, women’s clubs, and are preparing for a coöperative laundry. The women meet and discuss the needs of their schools—as many women do—and then lay out a plan of action and go to work to supply the needs—as too many women do not. The Farmers’ Union in one district recently made a complete survey of that district and can now tell just what each farmer reads, what he does for his neighborhood, almost what he thinks, in so far as thoughts may be determined by actions and conditions. In short, “Catawba is a live county,” as any North Carolinian will tell the inquirer, and coöperation among the farmers has made it live.

At first thought it may seem strange that the intellectual and moral progress of a rural community should be so quickened by business coöperation among the farmers, but a little thought will show why this must almost necessarily be so. It is beyond question that the lack of organization, of unity of purpose and concert of action, is as great a hindrance to rural progress and development as is the traditional conservatism and inertia of the individual farmer. The farmer has simply not learned how to use all the multitudinous committees and boards and sundry group organizations which the city dweller has found so effective in many ways. Once the farmer gets into the habit of working with his neighbor for a common end, he sees all sorts of desirable ends to be worked for, and if a “divine discontent” with existing evils or needs is present in the community—as it usually is—it is almost certain to be no longer hemmed up in the hearts of two or three persons but set free in the consciousness of the whole community. Then action follows.

The man who would improve social and moral conditions in the country districts can make no more effective start than to organize the farmers into coöperative business associations. The American farmer has, it seems to me, demonstrated himself an efficient and whole-hearted coöperator, when once he learns the trick and gets the habit.

And he is learning rapidly. Before me, as I write, are reports from various Southern States of coöperative tobacco and cotton warehouses, coöperative and semi-coöperative stores, produce-selling exchanges, fertilizer and supply buying associations, cotton marketing associations, coöperative buying of machinery and livestock, and so on. There is even an account of a coöperative church—a whole community uniting to make the church a social centre and a help to all. The work of rural organization, either for business purposes or for intellectual development and social improvement, has just begun; but it is something that a beginning has been made, and I, for one, am not yet willing to admit that the American farmer is inferior to the farmers of any other country in either common sense or neighborly feeling. Unless he is so deficient, he will become as good a coöperator as any of them, for both his business interests and his sense of neighborliness demand a new organization of country life to fit the new conditions of our time.

RELIGION IN THE MODERN NOVEL

LOUISE MAUNSELL FIELD

Of all the many accusations brought against our much abused young twentieth century, there is none more popular than that of materialism. For all its deficiencies, whether artistic, social or ethical, this parrot-cry furnishes a convenient explanation; but unfortunately for those who welcome such catch-phrases as a ready means of avoiding any necessity for trying to exercise their disused and rusty thinking apparatus, convenient and accurate are seldom—perhaps never—synonymous. If this age of ours really is what it has so frequently been called by capable judges, the Age of the Social Conscience, that fact is in itself ample disproof of materialism; for if conscience in its every manifestation be not spiritual, what is? True, we have done away with the old scorn of the body and of that generality once known as “the world,” but this is simply the natural result of an increased knowledge which has compelled an altered point of view, making such contempt appear rather childish. And because the new social conscience has developed so largely outside the orthodox church, it is not therefore any the less religious. Indeed, it is in very great measure the immediate cause of that re-awakened interest in what may for clearness’ sake be defined as strictly religious ideas which is now showing itself in so many ways and places, and especially in the modern novel.

That this new religious interest seldom takes a dogmatic form is probably one reason why the average reader has been and still is so slow to recognize it—of course we are in no way concerned here with those latter-day successors to the Elsie books which provide psychic water-gruel for the senile-minded of all ages—yet in the stirrings of a more or less vague discomfort he has become aware of those electric currents of spiritual unrest which are penetrating down even to the most respectable of the quarter-educated well-to-do. There is something more than a little pathetic in the way these latter welcome such an attempt to manipulate words, to stretch the ancient formulas and render them broad enough to contain modern ethics and modern knowledge, as was shown in Mr. Winston Churchill’s _The Inside of The Cup_—a novel whose popularity was due at least as much to its discussion of religious as to its treatment of social problems. For there is no class in the community whose size, the multiplicity of books and opportunities for learning taken into consideration, is so astonishingly great as is that of the half and quarter educated well-to-do.

The best of those modern novels in which the present-day religious interest reveals itself in its most significant aspect often treat it shyly, almost timidly. For with the crumbling of the ancient cosmogony and its dependent beliefs the old cock-sure attitude became obsolete. The writer no longer says, “This is the truth; no decent or sensible person will deny it”; but instead: “This is my opinion—what experience has given me; take it for what it is or may be worth.” Very frequently it is only the consciousness of things spiritual which is clearly shown; their nature, with a deeper reverence than that of yore, is left indeterminate. Here and there appears an author whose belief is as detailed as that of Will Levington Comfort: usually, however, it is rather a reaching out, a sense of things unseen, the mental attitude one of obedience to Abt Vogler’s advice: “Consider, and bow the head.”

In this as in so many other phases of our modern thought and experience H. G. Wells has succeeded in stating lucidly that of which the majority of people are but more or less dimly aware. It is indeed particularly interesting to note the growth of spiritual and religious interest in Mr. Wells. Decidedly materialistic in much of his earlier work, it is only when _Marriage_ is reached that we find the hero, Trafford, deploring the fact that his wife and himself have won “no religion to give them”—i. e. their children—“no sense of a general purpose.” And, though foreshadowed in other stories, not until _The Passionate Friends_ of last autumn does there come the description of a genuine religious experience, a description which is thoroughly characteristic of that sense of awe, of a greatness and power too vast to be expressed in faltering, merely human speech, which is often—it might be safe to say, always—the very crux of the religious spirit as it appears in the modern novel. Stephen Stratton, who relates the experience, has reached the crisis of his life and knows not where to go nor what to do when, as he phrases it: “The great stillness that is behind and above and around the world of sense did in some way communicate with me … commanding me to turn my face now to the great work that lies before mankind.” And having told him what his share in this work is to be, “the stillness” bids him: “Make use of that confusedly striving brain that I have lifted so painfully out of the deadness of matter.” And Stephen, though he cries out, “But who are you?” obeys.

Detailed at greater or less length, it is this occasional awareness of communication with the Power outside and beyond “the world of sense” which is the shape in which religion is most likely to appear in the modern novel. Sometimes, as in _John Ward, M. D._, this awareness, usually touched upon lightly, almost furtively, is clearly and strongly emphasized, but very seldom, and then under a slightly different aspect. The destruction of the old formulas has resulted in an instinctive distrust of creeds, an instinctive shrinking from anything which bears even the least appearance of an attempt to make new ones. The situation portrayed in William Arkwright’s able, yet curiously uneven book, _The Trend_, wherein he shows his mystic, purely spiritual singer as escaping, horror-stricken, from an orthodox church service and denouncing it as an insult to God, is typical, though extreme. For the revolt against the materialism of Haeckel and his followers—not of Darwin and Huxley, who were not materialists and repudiated the name with the utmost vigor—has been accompanied by a revolt against the materialism in religion which rendered it vulnerable to the onslaughts of historical and scientific criticism. “We claim and we shall wrest from theology,” said John Tyndall, “the entire domain of cosmological theory.” The event has proved him a true prophet—and helped men to disentangle religion from theology.

The whole movement of the modern novel, indeed, has been toward a spiritualization which embodies within itself an essentially religious feeling; only this spiritualization not being of the monastic and ascetic kind which so long swayed the imaginations of men, but of a social or humanistic order, has frequently been mistaken for other than its real self. It constitutes, too, a force active in all the affairs of life rather than one principally confined to certain of its details, and this fact can be glimpsed, sometimes from one angle, sometimes from another, in the more ephemeral as well as in the best examples of our twentieth century fiction. In an article published in the May issue of The Forum attention was called to the change which has taken place in the character of the fiction hero, who has lost his idle elegance and become a worker. That this work should so often be a part of the struggle for human betterment or a joining in the endeavor to right some especial wrong is both a portion of and a testimony to the idealistic spirit which quickens the modern novel, as is also the companion fact that its drama is in many notable instances mainly a psychic one. More and more is the inward effect thrusting the outward event into a position of subordinate interest; the story of a murder becomes an account not of the efforts to trace the slayer, but of the result of the deed upon his soul. The most interesting and important chapter of _The Devil’s Garden_ is that wherein William Dale reviews the inner life which has been so turbulent, while the outer was so calm; _The Debit Account_ has little to say of Jeffries’s career in the realm of finance but very much about his mental attitude toward himself and that “world without trifles” in which he lived; despite a charming heroine and an absorbing plot it is the influence of failure upon the character of Ralph Lingham which is the matter of supreme importance in _When Love Flies out o’ the Window_.

To call this confused mass of struggle and revolt and aspiration “religion” may seem to many persons unjust and perhaps even a trifle shocking; but that is because of the popular confounding of religions which are many with religion, which is one in essence, whether it be manifested under the Buddhistic form of quietism or the social service activities within and without the present-day church. Modern thought has made the old-time easy shifting of responsibility impossible, and the changed belief which this involves, enforcing the conviction that the world is to be saved and the Kingdom of God established on earth not by miraculous intervention but by the earnest labor in well-doing of many generations of devoted men and women, has had even among those who deny it an incalculably powerful effect. It may be too that the new humanitarianism which causes us to view with horror conditions which our forefathers regarded with more or less equanimity and makes reform one of the most familiar of words is to some extent due to the desire to escape from any effort to measure and explain the Infinite with mere finite instruments. Since the days when knowledge destroyed the foundations of that ancient stately tower of faith and authority which men had believed was based on truth’s very rock, this attempt to find a working theory of life which shall not imply any dogmatic response to the riddles of the universe has been made in directions innumerable, and is being so made to-day; only, the way of escape by “practical” social labor has become more popular than any other and is a road along which travel in divers manners all sorts and conditions of men—among them many who would vehemently and even indignantly deny that religious and spiritual problems had anything whatever to do with their chosen path.