1 Taylor, Carl C., Rural Life in Argentina (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1948), p. 219.Google Scholar

2 The twelve may be designated as follows: (1) the size of the land holdings and, what frequently is synonymous with it, the size of farms, or the institutionalized arrangement that is designated by such names as “the plantation system,” the “hacienda system,” “a system of family-sized farms,” “a system of peasant proprietorships,” “a minifundia system,” and so on; (2) the tenure system; (3) the systems of agriculture, or the highly standardized manner in which the people of a given area go about extracting a living from the soil; (4) the type of farming; (5) the family and kinship system; (6) the religious system; (7) the educational system; (8) the class system; (9) the system of communication and transportation; (10) the credit system; (11) the marketing system; and (12) the system, ecological and highly symbiotic, of locality groups ranging from the single farmstead (through neighborhoods, several larger and as yet nameless entities, groupings properly designated as rural communities, those entitled to be called “rurban” communities, and urban communities of various sizes and widely different zones of influence) to great metropolitan communities. For the results of some of my own endeavors to determine, analyze, and describe the nature and characteristics of all of these sociocultural systems except numbers 4, 9, 10, and 11 as they function in certain Latin American countries, see T. Lynn Smith, Brazil: People and Institutions, third edition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1963); T. Lynn Smith, The Process of Rural Development in Latin America, University of Florida Social Science Monograph No. 33 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1967); and T. Lynn Smith, Colombia: Social Structure and the Process of Development (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1967).

3 For many additional interesting details see William Frederic Badè, The Old Testament in the Light of To-day: A Study in Moral Development (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1915), passim.

4 Cf. Don Martindale, The Nature and Types of Sociological Theory (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1960), p. 309.

5 Le Bon, Gustave, La civilización de los Árabes, translated by Luis Carreras (Barcelona: Montaner y Simon, 1886), pp. 181-82Google Scholar.

6 Foot, Hugh, A Start in Freedom (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1964), pp. 145-46.Google Scholar

7 Townsend, Joseph, A Journey through Spain in the Years 1786 and 1787.… (London: C. Dilly, 1791), Vol. II, pp. 61–63, 64,227, and 284-85Google Scholar.

8 Informe de la Sociedad Económica de Madrid al Real y Supremo Consejo de Castilla en el Expediente de Ley Agraria, Nueva Edición (Madrid: Imprenta de I. Sancha, 1820), p. 77. For a lengthy study of the Mesta see Julius Klein, The Mesta (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1920).

9 Cf. William H. Dusenberry, The Mexican Mesta (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963), passim.

10 An analysis and description of the transformation of Spain from a country of agriculturists to one dominated by sheep and cattle interests is given in T. Lynn Smith, “Some Neglected Spanish Social Thinkers,” The Americas, XVII, No. 1 (July, 1960), pp. 37-52; see also Smith, Colombia, pp. 189-95.

11 Ancízar, Manuel, Peregrinación de Alpha (Bogotá: Arboleda y Valencia, 1914), pp. 12–13.Google Scholar

12 Ibid., p. 276.

13 For further information about agrarian reform in many of the countries, see T. Lynn Smith, ed., Agrarian Reform in Latin America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1965). There are some exceptions to the rule that agrarian reform endeavors in Latin America are part and parcel of the conflict between pastoral and agricultural interests. In Cuba and El Salvador, specifically, the unfulfilled hopes of the peasants to acquire the ownership of the land necessarily had to be directed toward the subdivision of great sugarcane plantations and large coffee plantations, respectively.

14 Owsley, Frank L., Plain Folks of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1949), p. 34.Google Scholar

15 Ibid., p. 51.

16 Moe, Edward O. and Taylor, Carl C., Culture of a Contemporary Community: Irwin, Iowa, Rural Life Studies, No. 5 (Washington: U. S. Department of Agriculture, 1942), pp. 5–6.Google Scholar

17 Ibid., p. 20.

18 Some very readable observations about this are to be found in Branson, E. C., Farm Life Abroad: Field Letters from Germany, Denmark and France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1924), pp. 84–255 Google Scholar; and Haggard, H. Rider, Rural Denmark and Its Lessons (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1917)Google Scholar.

19 The term satisfactory is used deliberately. I maintain that the corn-hog-beef cattle type of farming characteristic of the midwestern part of the United States is most satisfactory because: (1) through it farmers attain the greatest average production per man year that has been achieved; (2) the fact that the system is one involving middle-class operators of family-sized farms almost exclusively, so that families headed by farm laborers are conspicuous by their absence, secures a highly equitable distribution of the benefits of the production among all those who have a share in the productive process; (3) as a result of this, and also because of the inclusion within the system of production for home use of substantial amounts of dairy, poultry, garden, and fruit products, the average level of living of the families involved reaches the maximum ever achieved by an agricultural population; (4) all of this contributes heavily to a high type of community life; and (5) the individuals born and reared within the system taken as a whole come nearer to attaining the potentials of the human personality than is true of any other large agricultural population.

20 Carver, Thomas Nixon, Principles of Rural Economics (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1911), p. 104 Google Scholar (italics are mine). The last two sentences of this paragraph are also used almost verbatim by Jennings, Walter W., in his History of Economic Progress in the United States (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1926), p. 399 Google Scholar.

21 Taylor, Carl C. and Associates, Rural Life in the United States (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1949), pp. 366-67Google Scholar.

22 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1947.)

23 Ibid., pp. 285-287.

24 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950.)

25 Ibid., facing p. 10.

26 Ibid., pp. 210-11.

27 Cf. Samuel Deane, The New England Farmer (Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1822), p. 447; and The Farmers’ Cabinet; Devoted to Agriculture, Horticulture, and RuralEconomy, Vol. II (Philadelphia, 1838), p. 268.

28 See the Report of the Commissioner of Patents, for the Year 1949, Part II, “Agriculture” (Washington: Office of Printers to the Senate, 1950), pp. 87, 101, 102,105,112,148,151,185,225, 227, 228, and 240-41.

29 See John Filson's “Map of Kentucke” drawn in 1784, dedicated to George Washington, which was reproduced in Willard Rouse Jillson, The Kentucky Country (Washington: H. L. and J. B. McQueen, 1931). On this the designations of “Fine Cane,” “Fine Cane Land,” and “Abundance of Cane” are by far the most prominent indications of the resources of the territory.

30 Plain Folks of the Old South, pp. 63-64.

31 This important contribution appeared in the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Publications, Vol. XXII (Columbus: Published for the Society, 1913), p. 188. I am indebted to Mr. Charleton Myers of Morral, Ohio, for directing me to this source.

32 Op. cit., pp. 298-99. See also E. W. Sheets, O. E. Baker, C. E. Gobbons, O. C. Stine, and R. H. Wilcox, “Our Beef Supply,” in United States Department of Agriculture Yearbook 1921 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1922), p. 233.

33 The Farmers’ Cabinet, Vol. I, pp. 154-155.

34 See the excellent discussion of the importations of cattle of various types by Charles L. Flint, “Progress in Agriculture,” in One Hundred Years’ Progress of the UnitedStates (Hartford, Conn.: L. Stebbins, 1870), especially pp. 47-8.

35 If the reader will keep in mind the types of hogs then prevailing on the frontier, and even running wild in large numbers in the woods and on the prairies in Ohio, Kentucky, and the states and territories to the west of them, it will not seem so strange that tens of thousands of big “ pigs went to market” under their own power. The swine brought to what is now by DeSoto, those imported by the settlers at Jamestown, and those introduced into New England were all of the Sus scrofa group, whose general characteristics were those of the wild boar from which they descended. Only later did crosses with varieties of the Sus indicus (the lard type of hog from southeastern Asia) such as the Berkshires (from England) and the Poland China (developed in Ohio itself) come to be of importance. For the essential facts about the two great groups of swine that were crossed to develop the highly efficient modern breeds, see Charles Darwin, The Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1899), Vol. I, pp. 66-80.

Flint, op. cit., p. 64, has given us the following descriptions of the types of hogs then prevailing in the United States: “Previous to the introduction of the Woburn hog ['a fortunate cross of the Chinese and the large English hog’ brought to the United States near the close of the eighteenth century], the classes of swine that had prevailed in the eastern and middle states were coarse, long-legged, large-boned, slab-sided, and flab-eared, an unprofitable and unsightly beast, better calculated for subsoiling than for filling a pork barrel… . The native hogs of the west—that is, the descendants of those taken there by earlier settlers, and common there till within a very recent period—were admirably calculated for the primitive condition of civilization in which they were placed. They were well calculated to shirk [sic] for themselves, as they had to do, and became as fleet as the deer, while their strength of head, neck, and tusks enabled them to fight any wild beast of the forest, and withstand any extent of exposure to the weather.” And Frederick Law Olmstead, whose descriptions of life and labor in the area to the south of the Ohio River on the eve of the Civil War are unrivaled, has given us the following word picture of these swine in action: “Of living creatures, for miles, not one was to be seen … except hogs. These—long, lank, bony, snake-headed, hairy, wild beasts—would come dashing across our path, in packs of from three to a dozen, with short, hasty grunts, almost always at a gallop, and looking neither to right nor left, as if they were in pursuit of a fox, and were quite certain to catch him in the next hundred yards.” Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, with Remarks on Their Economy (New York: Dix & Edwards, 1856), pp. 65-6.

38 Buley, R. Carlyle, The Old Northwest (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1951), Vol. I, p. 480.Google Scholar

37 (New York: C. M. Saxton.)

38 Ibid., pp. 265-267.

38 Consider in this connection the comments of one visitor who appraised the potentials of Illinois with the eye of an experienced farmer in 1834. “Peoria is about the geographical centre of Illinois, though by no means as yet the centre of population, which is still far to the south-east The adjacent country is very fertile. The soil, like that of Illinois generally, is better suited to the grazier than the agriculturist. It is composed of a black and rich mould, with a small admixture of fine silicious sand, and rests on soft and permeable clay without being interspersed with stone or gravel. This formation, while it is unfavourable to the existence of perennial streams and fountains, and impedes the plough of the agriculturist, and endangers his health by the creation of miasma, yet in the vicinity of the middle lands furnishes inexhaustible meadows to the grazier, and every facility for canals and railroads.” C. F. Hoffman, A Winter in the Far West (London: Richard Bentley, 1835), Vol. II, p. 58. [Italics added.] As a sidelight it seems worth mentioning that at almost exactly the time of Hoffman's visit to this section of Illinois, and in the same general area, Abraham Lincoln, while tending store, in the hours when trade was slack established his reputation as a rail splitter by cutting enough rails to make a pen for 1,000 hogs. (Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, 1926, Vol. I, p. 138.) Sandburg also mentions the wild hogs that ranged over the prairies in 1830 when Lincoln moved from Indiana to Illinois. Ibid., pp. 106, 133.

40 Cf. Smith, The Process of Rural Development in Latin America, pp. 38-39.

41 Cf. Pedro de Aguado, Primera Parte de la Recopilación Historial Resolutoria de Sancta Marta y Nuevo Reino de Granada de las Indias del Mar Océano (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, S. A., 1930), Tomo I, pp. 250, 253.

42 Inter-American Committee on Agricultural Development, Ecuador: Study of Agricultural Education, Investigation and Extension, 1965 (Washington: Pan American Union [1968?]), pp. 8-11.

43 Cf. Joseph Cannon Bailey, Seaman A. Knapp (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), pp. 55-63, 110-123, and passim.