The public was startled to learn that the army tests showed that country youth, on the average, were not as healthy as city youth. Here, again, the progress of the cities in sani tation, medical inspection in schools, care of teeth and of the eyes of school children, gymnasia, organized and directed physical recreation, etc., has left the country homes and the country children at a relative disadvantage. The natural advantages of country life (sunshine, healthy exercise in the open, freedom from noise and strain) cannot always com pensate for the poorer water supply, defective sanitation, and lack of medical and surgical care for the growing child. Here is a field for future reform.
§ 10. The farmer's income in monetary terms. Census figures and some additional investigations led to the estimate of the average real income of the farmers of the United States in 1909, expressed in monetary terms, as $724. This was after some twelve years of slowly rising agricultural prices and improving conditions. The estimated value of all products, whether sold or used by the farmer, plus the value of his house rent and fuel consumed by family, was $1236, from which expenditures of $512 are deducted for outside labor and for materials used for operating and main taining the farm. Of the $724 the sum of $402 is estimated to be the labor income of the family and $322 is estimated to be the wealth income (at 5 per cent of the capitalization of the farm). This was in a period of rising values in farm lands, averaging about $323 per farm annually, and this to most farmers was equivalent to so much monetary savings.
It would be difficult, even if the available statistics were much more exact than they are, to compare exactly the farm er's income with those of urban classes. Averages of such large numbers and over such a wide area have a limited sig nificance in the specific case; and living conditions and the purchasing power of money are very different in country and city and in different parts of the § 11. Compensations of the farmer's life. In bare mone• tary terms the average farmer's family gets a labor income less than that of the ordinary wage-earner in a factory, and it is only when the value of the wealth income is added that it is as great. Even the few largest incomes made in farming are small in comparison with many of those made in commerce, transportation, and manufacturing. The great mass of farmers of the nation are hard-laboring men, poor in the eyes of the city dwellers.? But this much is certain: the farmer's income in monetary terms has, on the average, much larger power to purchase the main goods of life (material and psychic goods) than it would have in town. Equally good house usance would cost more in nearly all towns, and much more in larger cities. Retail prices of the same food and fuel even in small towns would be much greater. The necessary outlay for clothes to main tain the class standard is much less for farmers than for city dwellers. Moreover, in the use of horses and carriages, and
now of automobiles, and in the free control of his own time —in many elements of psychic income—the farmer is on a parity with men in other occupations of double or quadruple his income expressed in monetary terms.
Though the farmer's working-day in the busiest season of • See Vol. I, p. 206.
7 See Vol. I, p. 227, note, for figures on owners and farm laborers.
summer is very long compared with that of factory or office workers, his working day at other seasons is usually much shorter than the average urban worker's day. The farmer's life is nearly always free from the excessive pressure, haste, and competition of city life, and the value, to many a man, of the more natural and wholesome conditions of outdoor life and outdoor work are hardly to be measured in terms of even the most untainted dollars. The joy and pride of possession that goes with even a little plot of ground and a house that is one's own, the satisfaction of "being one's own boss," the very real and deep sense of workmanship and of independ ence that comes from planning and carrying through even simple tasks, rather than in acting under the orders of others —these are motives, not easily measurable in money, which keep many men on farms despite the temptations of higher financial rewards in cities.
Many mistaken ideas are current among city folk in re spect to country life, and much mistaken sympathy is wasted. The city man, living on external excitements, speaks with dread of the solitude of the country life, with no "movies" just around the corner and no Coney Island near. But he forgets that the people living in the country as real farmers were, with few exceptions, born and reared in the country. Families in the country average larger than in the cities, and the country has a rate of natural increase greater than the city. Persons raised in the country prefer to stay there, if they can make a living, a preference that tends to depress labor incomes in the country. The interests that fill the lives of country people are not the same as those of city people, but they are often far more real. I know a farmer boy who when ten years old refused a ticket to the circus because he preferred to help on threshing day; and he and his brother probably have had more pleasure breaking and driving a yoke of calves to a homemade cart than any family of city boys ever got riding the elephant at the zoo. The non-pecuniary compensations in farm life help to outweigh larger pecuniary rewards in manufacturing, transportation, mining, and trade, and prevents the rural exodus from being as great as it would otherwise be. In consequence the price of food is kept at relatively low levels, giving to the farmer and his family lower average monetary labor incomes than those earned in city occupations (organized or unorganized).