Convince Young People to Remain In Country, Feb. 14, 1921

Nobody has as yet devised a program by which the young men and maidens born and bred in the countryside can be made to stay out in rural society. There are varied theories as to why they leave, but no formula to answer any of these theories has been adduced to remedy the situation. Someone, speaking facetiously of the reason that the boys desert the countryside in wich they grew up, suggests that it is because the boy’s calf always becomes the father’s cow, the boys shoat the father’s hog, the boys field of cotton the father’s bale, and this utter lack of proprietorship is largely responsible for the exodus of young manhood from the fields.

That, however, does not touch the bottom of the situation. It is only a superficial way of looking at the problem. In the late issue of The Saturday Evening Post, James H. Collins had a very sensible article on this subject and seems to have really reached to the core of the situation. “There are at least a half dozen basic factors in the lure of the city,” he says. “Money is usually placed first—opportunities to earn higher wages and what is even more potent, year-round work as against the seasonal occupations of the farms.” Then he places excitement next in order, which is the crowds, the contact with the masses,the thrills of the always-teeming urban society. The further fact that many boys are born with such tastes for occupations and pursuits which can not be satisfied in the constructed opportunities of the countryside life is set down as another one of these basic reasons. City opportunities for advancement, city comforts and the big-way scale of doing things—these constitute the fundamental reasons that the country boy comes to town.

Thus the situation is ably analyzed. Mr. Collins seems to have included in his category the complete list of the appeals of the city to the boy of the country. Every one of them is enwrapped with imagination and romance and adventure and these are God-given things in the soul of a boy that must not be denied.

Obviously, many of these city-appeals are so constituted that they will be permanent. There is no way under the sun of taking these things all out into the country where the boys is born and telling him that they will be found there in like abundance as they abound in the cities. It will never be possible, for instance, for the natural aptitudes and instincts of the country boy to be satisfied with the limited pursuits which are a part of rural life. The technical labors of the world are done in the crowded centers. Neither is there any way by which the more transient appeals to his imagination and spirit of adventure may be answered in the country. There is, however, ample reason to believe that country life can be made so attractive that the boy of 10 years from now will not be forced into the congested city to find the possessions which his romantic nature calls for.

Electric lines will be running as threads through the rural sections of this state and of this immediate country. Automobiles in the garages of the farmers, paved roads leading by their front doors, water systems by which the labor of the household is redeemed from drudgery—a thousand other comforts and conveniences which are so singularly the possessions of the city now will be the possession of the boy on the farm then. He, too, will be able to press a button and his home will spring into light, or touch a lever and the water which he formerly drew in laborious effort from the well will flow from the spigots, and thus country life will have been revolutionized even more completely than it has in the past few years since the telephone found its way into the remoter regions of the ruralside.

And that’s the only remedy for the increasing flow of the boys to the city. The only way to keep them away is to take the city to them.

From the editorial page of the Charlotte News and Evening Chronicle, Monday morning, Feb. 14, 1921