The Country Man Thinks for Himself, Doesn't Follow the Crowd, Says Editor, July 12, 1922

The Country Boy a Winner

Every now and then some highly successful man rises to remark, with a certain degree of apparent condescension, that after all the country boy need not be without hope. He will suggest by implication that everything is in favor of the city boy to start with, but that the country boy need not despair. Most of that is very solemn bunk.

If the city boys has such a great advantage of the country boy, then the New York boy has the greatest advantage of all. Well, a few years ago a resident of a small city in the South was dining with a number of rich New Yorkers. After they all got a bit mellow, several of the New York men began to twit the small town man with being a “rube”. At the suggestion of the small town man, a poll was taken, and the result showed that of the entire group of some 10 or 12 men, just one had been born in New York, and that one was—the small town man from the South!

This is not to say that if the country boy contents himself with working on a farm as one of the “hands” he will ever be successful in material things. But it is to say that if he is ambitious and if he applies himself, he has innumerable opportunities to advance himself and, moreover, will probably be happier in the end than the city boy.

If he applied himself to politics with the sincere hope and determination of becoming something more than a politician, he has a better chance of winning, by sheer reason of his environment, than the city boy has. For there is more independence of thought, more demand upon resourcefulness, more opportunity for uninterrupted study, on the ordinary small farm than there is in four times the same space in the average city. This has no special reference to the difference between the habits of country boys and those of city boys, or country men and city men, but to the difference in the atmosphere that surrounds them.

Even in this day of telephones, automobiles and rapid transportation, the upstanding land owner in the country is very much more of what we like to call a “sovereign” than is a man of anything like equal financial standing in the city. He does his own thinking and gives his own orders to his family and the people on his property. Therefore he develops himself; and when he applies his thought to the solution of national and international problems, it is his own thought—not that of spellbinders and not that of the crowd. His fellow of the city, however, has neither the time nor the opportunity for reflection, generally not for study that he has; the city man is inclined to follow the crowd. In short, the city man is far more apt than the country man to be a unit or an atom in the mass. The country man, to repeat, thinks for himself and does not react so readily to mass thought.

When the number of country men who took part in the drafting of the Declaration of Independence of the United States is recalled, the toploftiness of the modern city man in speaking of the country boy is more than mildly amusing.

From the editorial page of The New Bernian, Wednesday morning, July 12, 1922