82 BIOLOGICAL PROBLEMS 



in the minds of those who teach our little children in 

 our English village schools? No one who has studied 

 the agricultural problem, as well as that of education, 

 needs to be told what a handicap an absence of such 

 enthusiasm must be to the farmer who requires a 

 proper proportion of the village children to grow up 

 into a population that will supply good men to work 

 his land. 



Turn from the peasant to the proprietor, and realize 

 the lack of adequate instruction for the landlord class 

 at many of our universities. 



In England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, from 

 the hundred years succeeding the French Revolution, 

 our splendid class of young landlords, who have so 

 freely given of their best in this war, were taught, 

 with exceptions so small as to be negligible, every 

 business under the sun except their own. On the 

 other hand, Napoleon established at Versailles for 

 French agriculturists one of the finest agricultural 

 colleges the world has known, as soon as ever his 

 despotism created order out of the chaos the revolu- 

 tion had made. Even now one is constrained to be 

 thankful that the effort made to educate the landlord 

 is not so small as it was twenty years ago. 



There is also the question of local taxation to be 

 revised. It is hard on the agricultural community 

 that the holes in country roads torn up by motors 

 flying out from the towns should be repaired to some 

 extent at their expense. Our system of local taxation 

 not only inflicts such a hardship on the farmers them- 

 selves, but also imposes a greater handicap still on 

 home production: for if a man lets his farm go dere- 

 lict, his share of such a tax will be low; if he carries 

 on intensive cultivation, and induces his land to pro- 

 duce the utmost, his share will be high. 



In the days before the war a landlord might have 



