Jean Burnet

Town-Country Relations and the Problem of Rural Leadership

The country town, like the country village, has usually been considered not only as a part of the rural community but as its centre. The existence of division and even antagonism between town and country has not been ignored, but it has been discussed as something which ought not to be. This has been the result of at least two errors into which sociology frequently falls. One of these is forgetting that many of its easy dichotomies, such as that beween rural and urban communities, are merely logical constructs. They are tools which are at times useful in the analysis and interpretation of data; they are not immutable truths. The second error is setting sociology up as a normative rather than a scientific discipline. General sociology is beginning to outgrow this, but rural sociology is still strongly disposed to describe the ideal rather than the actual. In point of fact, throughout the United States and Canada, especially in times of rapid social change, the town of a few thousand people and the farming district around it have not formed a single community; they have been distinct and often hostile social entities. The town-country rift is especially wide on the frontier because of the different speeds with which the two types of community respond to new social conditions. On the farming frontier the small town is the representative of the old order of things, the rural community the representative of the new. In the early Canadian settlements, this fact was made very evident by the gathering of British government and military officials in the towns. The farmers in a recently settled region are pressed toward radicalism by the demands of the new environment and by temporary necessities arising from frontier conditions; they are cramped by the old system, and begin to strive for reform. The townsmen are farther removed from the situation to which the old ways do not provide a tolerable mode of adjustment; they are, to a greater extent than the farmers, in the position which Veblen ascribed to the leisure class, a position “sheltered from the action of the environment.”