Leaving the Farms by F. M. W.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Apr 27, 1911

Leaving the Farms

By F. M. W.

DURING the last few years, the tide of American population has set in strongly toward the great centers of population. It is claimed that in Virginia sixty per cent of the young men leave the farms, most of them before they are twenty years old. This perhaps is characteristic of many other States in the Union.

The same marked tendency is seen in the case of young women. The office, the shop, and the factory, with the social and educational advantages of the town, hold out inducements to both classes with which the country can not cope. But these advantages of city life are more than offset by its disadvantages. The dangers of city life, as compared with life in rural districts, are as ten to one. Many young men and women who have led, in their rural home surroundings, industrious, virtuous lives, have made shipwreck of their experience upon entrance into the larger sphere of city activity.

After all there is a beauty and sweetness in life in the country that is never found in the busy marts of trade and commerce. Where can one find sweeter communion with the great Creator than in the woods and fields, becoming acquainted with his visible forms of creative power! Here life can find free and full expression; here childhood can develop in simplicity and strength.

Unless drawn to the city by the direct leadings of duty, let every young man and woman consider if, after all, it would not be better to follow God's original plan in the peopling of the earth with the human family. Centralization had no part in this plan. The principle of heaven, as applied both to the population of the earth and to the spread of the gospel, is the principle of diffusion. Contravening this principle, the human family has placed itself in a position where it becomes more greatly the prey of Satan's wiles and temptations.

F. M. W.