Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 February 1894 — TOPICS OF THESE TIMES. [ARTICLE]

TOPICS OF THESE TIMES.

~ n THE RURAL EXODUS. - A noticeable characteristic of the alleged progress of our day and age Is the comparative ratio at which the population of the rural districts and of large cities throughout the world increase. It is a disportionate growth that has resu’ted in an actual decrease in the rural population in many parts of Europe which has been accompanied by a phenomenal increase of the population in the already overgrown cities of the continent and of England. This peculiar phase of modern life first became apparent in Wales in 1851. It did not attract attention in England till ten years later. In this country it has become a vital question within the past ten years, while iu the newest of all civilized countries, Australia, it is already giving economists much food for speculation. During the last twenty years eight counties in England and three in Wales have lost Jten per cent. of their rural population—that is the population of those counties 13 today ten per cent, less than it was twenty years ago. In some districts the decrease is as much as twenty percent. In Scotland the movement toward the towns began sixty years ago and the per centage of rural decrease has been greater in that country than elsewhere. The formation of deer forests, which dispossessed and drove away families by wholesale, is held to be responsible for the Scottish exodus, but this course has not operated in other parts of the world to produce similar results. The apparently inborn aversion of people born in rural communities to spend their lives amid the homely scenes of their early life must be held largely responsible for a condition that is more directly productive of the distress, suffering and privations today existing among the starving thousands in our overcrowded cities than any other cause. The only possible remedy for this unsatisfactory condition is in the hands of our farmers, and lies in the direction of making farm life progressive, attractive and pleasant—and if possible profitable —to the rising generation in whom should be instilled from early childhood a sentiment of love and admiration for the safe and peaceful paths of rural life and a thorough conception of the dangers, pitfalls and unceasing struggles that are the portion of the poor whose strange infatuation them to the streets and the great and wicked cities whose alluring charms are real only to the fortunate possessor of a well filled purse.