farmer owned his home. He built upon his farm a
homestead which in most cases represented his ideal of domestic and
family comfort. He built for permanence. So far as his means permitted
he provided for his children and for generations of descendants after
them. He consecrated the soil to his people and to his name by setting
apart a graveyard on his own land, and there he buried his dead.

Fourth, the land farmer had neighbors. His well-developed family group
would not have been possible without other groups in the same community
and the independence of the family group was relative, being perfected
by imitation and economic competition. The land-farmer type came to
maturity only when the whole of the land was possessed, when on every
side the family group was confronted with other family groups, and
neighborliness became universal. The family group is dependent through
intermarriage and relationship upon other groups in the community.
Family relationships thus came in the land-farmer communities to be very
general. Some rough and crude forms of economic co-operation also grew
up in this period, as modifications of the competition on which the
land-farmer type is based.

"The farmer type produced a definite social life," says Prof. Ross. "The
second period, extending from 1835 to 1890, had as its chief objective
the enrichment of the group life."

Fifth, the land farmer competed, by group conflict, with his neighbors.
Property was regarded by the land farmer as a family possession.
Competition was between group and group, between household and
household. The moral strength as well as the moral deficiencies of this
type of man flow from this competition. He considered himself
essentially bounden to the members of his own group by obligations and
free from moral obligations to others. The son received no wages from
his father for work on the farm and the daughter did not dream of pay or
of an allowance for her labor in the house. The land farmer conceived of
his estate as belonging to his family group and embodied in himself.
Therefore he had no wage obligations to son or daughter and he felt
himself obliged so to distribute his property as to care for all the
members of his household. This economic competition compacted the family
group and formed the basis for the social economy of the country
community. The land farmer had no ideal of community prosperity. His
thought for generations has been to make his own farm p